After being ordained earlier this summer, I was added to my home congregation’s preaching rotation. Today was supposed to be the day that I gave my first sermon there, but once I started to make plans to attend a family funeral, I reached out to ask if someone could sub for me. Before getting the bad news, though, I’d already written most of the sermon, and so I figured I should post the text here so that I get some use out of it. That said, I don’t want to post the text as my last draft had it—while reading the news today, I came across a story about the 2024 U.S. presidential race that would have made a better addition to my sermon than what I had written at the time, and I want to think about that connection.

This volume emphasized some of the parts of the series that don’t hold up, like casual schoolyard homophobia and damseling Mary Jane. Without dismissing those problems, though, there’s still a lot to like here. I have no recollection of this volume, and it’s interesting to get into new territory for the series.

I’ll admit that I’ve been wary of Masnick’s hostility to KOSA, but Blackburn’s comments justify his stance. This ought to kill support for KOSA.

Late last year, I announced the publication of a study I participated in with Dr. Evan Brody and UK PhD student Mehroz Sajjad where we examined LGBTQ+-friendly spaces on the Gab social media platform. Although that was the main focus of our research project, we also found as we were completing it that there were a number of LGBTQ+-friendly spaces that had been overrun by queerphobic activity and discourses. I’m happy to announce that our second paper, focusing on those specific spaces, has just been published in the Journal of Homosexuality. Here’s the abstract:

Growing up Latter-day Saint, I knew that polygamy was part of our past, but I was so defensive about it not being part of our present that I often failed to understand just how important it was to my ancestors (both literal and figurative). About a month ago, I stumbled on a passage in RLDS missionary Charles Derry’s autobiography (which I recently finished) that reminded me that polygamy was a huge prority for 19th century Latter-day Saints:

Even if the Kentucky GOP is right and this is what loses Beshear the election, it it was clearly the right thing to do. I want Beshear to stay in office, but I don’t know if I could vote for him if he didn’t resist the queerphobia coming out of the General Assembly. Shame on our legislature for passing this bill—and for so clearly acknowledging here that it’s to score political points at the expense of Kentucky children.

Good for Andy. One thing I personally appreciate about Governor Beshear is that he so often invokes his faith as a Democrat. Granted, it’s probably a calculated decision in such a red state, and I’m still uncomfortable with how faith and politics are intertwined in the U.S., but it shows that faith doesn’t have to be queerphobic.

Thanks to a recommendation from BoingBoing, I just finished reading a Business Insider article describing a recent video in which Marjorie Taylor Greene:

predicted that identifying as heterosexual will be a thing of the past within a period of less than 200 years thanks to LGBTQ-inclusive sex educators, who she called “trans terrorists.”

More specifically, Greene was quoted as saying that heterosexual extinction would come about “probably in about four or five generations.” Referrring to “generations” in the context of a purported heterosexual extinction felt familiar to me. In fact, as horribly queerphobic as Greene’s message was, she was actually more optimistic than Latter-day Saint General Authorities have been in the past.