But I have hope… hope in Christ, hope that there will be an inspired change, hope that I’ll find respite in dating.

Read the other threads, Sarjex… I’d love to hear what you have to say!

While single, straight people at least are encouraged to date and to try and at least have the HOPE that someone is out there.

When you are gay, that is stripped away and you are advised to stay very much alone.

It is a hard thing to take away someone’s HOPE of companionship.

I did nothing of the sort. Since when does exagerating one case over another necessarily dismiss the other?

Ed,

I married late (>30) and had plenty of opportunities to form relationships and commit selfless service in the Church in both singles wards and family wards. Any singleton in the Church does.

Merde alors! There wouldn’t be any human race to do the imagining.

I’m still waiting to see some gay PDA in church. Now that would be interesting.

Silus, however, has suggested that he does not agree with this. I’m not sure everyone in his situation would agree with Silus, but I’ll bow to his superior knowledge.

The comment by Kurt that I found dismissive was that he said gay mormons have “plenty of opportunities” for non-sexual loving relationships. I don’t think this is an apt description of the difficulties faced by mormon singles of whatever sexual preference, who I think suffer precisely from a lack of such opportunities (that’s one reason we try so hard to get singles to marry).

Whatever.

You most certainly did suggest that by “exaggerating” the hopelessness of gays in the Church I was dismissing the apparently similar challenges of singles, and was doing so unfairly.

But I frankly have no interest in engaging with you further on this particular point. You say I’m exaggerating the plight of gays. I say you’re minimizing it. We’ll disagree.

Are you backpedaling from your earlier post, which exagerates the entirely hopeless condition of gay Mormons as being hopelessly lonely, whereas straight Mormons are hopefully lonely? That you would explicitly and qualitatively cast the gay Mormon’s position as “hopeless” and the straight’s as “hopefull” necesarily positions them as experiencing more suffering, since they are also suffering hopelessness.

I never said you were unfairly dismissing the challenges of single Mormons, I said you were unfairly exagerating the challenges of gay Mormons to make them seem worse off, and therefore minimizing others. Which is what you did by classifying straights as “hopeful” and gays as “hopeless”. And DFletcher echoed your sentiment.

Show me where anyone said that gay Mormons suffer most. No one did. In fact, several have commented that single Mormons suffer as well. That there is a qualitative difference in the suffering of the gay Mormon and the single straight Mormon shouldn’t be understood to mean that we are unfairly dismissing the challenges of the journey of the single Mormon.