When the LDS Church finally comprehends the concept that we are not like alcoholics and our sexual orientation is nowhere close to being a “temptation” will I stand up and shake their hand in any demonstration of fellowship.

Meanwhile, the Genesis story does support a gay exegesis. I should mention it, because it’s not like a challenge, in terms of Tim’s ‘conundrum’/'paradox’ to the “received” interpretation stands alone.

“Gay love can and will be, someday, blessed as Christlike.” Probably. Or one could “dare to dream”, as you put it, that someday people would find it irrelevant what is and is not supposedly Christlike.

Feeling content or loving when pursuing some other mode of sexual expression doesn’t change the moral status of that expression.

Yes, it does. Because morality is about happiness and suffering. This is why our morality is directed primarily toward our fellow humans and secondarily toward animals. We do not have moral obligations toward rocks.

Nor do we have moral obligations toward fairies in the sky, and religions which teach we do (that’s most of them) are guilty of perverting morality.

Your moral reasoning is wonky.

TRiG.

First, we clearly concur the Christians scriptures are not like older, law-based religions, not Leviticus, not Hamurabi, not Zarathustra, etc. So, before entering into a general discussion about the ‘moral dictates’, one has to have the orientation that the basis of the authority and insight in most of the scripture is not “dictated”. Compare: “Blessed are the meek”. This is not a dictate, per se, at least in the sense of say-do.

Now, ‘the law’ is NOT external to man. The Kingdom of heaven is within you. The law is an epistemic and pedagogical tool to help you discover that, to guide and center a spiritual journey, an understanding of it that is consistent with a broad range of similar ‘wisdom books’. Thus, to put the law against ‘nature’ or ‘man’ is to confuse things (I think). And, in general, the law was ‘made’ to serve mankind, men were not made to serve the law. Subtle, but important difference.

Now, when Paul is struggling, it is not against his “nature” as a heterosexual, against all physical attraction. (I would say God-given nature.) He does talk about wishing others were like him (celibate for reasons unknown to us), but that is not because their impulses are immoral. So, I would say, that Paul would no sooner tell a homosexual to struggle against their gay nature as he would tell a heterosexual to struggle against theirs. For either, his message might be, abstinence makes the heart grow fonder (of God).

The rest might involve a more lengthy understanding about the various ways in which Paul writes and thinks about “sin”.

And this is no small task. Lumping things into “sinful nature” and “struggle against” might be useful shorthand for catechism, but hardly is the full picture.

For instance, Paul (and James) point out that sin begets sin, without repentance – it’s not my experience that homosexuality, per se, is a moral slippery slope. However, murder …

Feeling content or loving when pursuing some other mode of sexual expression doesn’t change the moral status of that expression.

But, of course it does. Certainly not on its own, but along with discernment and testament and so forth.

Let me dramatize it this way. If one – anyone – has a poorly constructed moral ethic, it will be challenged. So, if you have a poorly abstracted moral imperative (claimed God-given) from the Genesis allegory, then … someone is going to hang “95 thesis” on the door and reform the church.

The question, in time, is not whether, but how, that reform takes place.

There are some that claim that reform would be to surrender a fundamental Christian “grounding”/distinction, let’s put it that way, but I think not so. Gay love can and will be, someday, blessed as Christlike.

In Romans 7, Paul does write that “I would not know what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was had not the law said ‘Do not covet.” Without getting into the complexities of which parts of the law were abrogated by the coming Christ, I don’t think it non-typical for Christian theologians to claim that we have the duty to follow the moral dictates of God.

You state that “It’s a false teaching to demand a struggle against their god-given nature.” Romans 7 states that “I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin… Who will rescue me from this nature?” It seems entirely Pauline to suggest that some part of a “sinful nature” remains and it must be struggled with, and that further more it will remain until Christians gain their non-earthly bodies. I never suggested that the nature was “God-given” per se, however, He allowed that nature to exist for His own purposes.

You state that “Of the closest things to non-consequential harms that I can think of are sins against the spirit (broadly and perhaps imprecisely put). There is NO WAY that love, gay love, is a sin of this type.” and “If you teach that hugging puppies is an immoral act, the weakness of that teaching soon becomes plain.” There’s nothing in the structure of humans and dogs to suggest that the former ought not to hug the latter. But to the Christian who believes that God’s plan, even before the Fall, was that man and woman become “one flesh”, then the God-made structures of men and women could suggest what God’s plan is for human sexuality. Feeling content or loving when pursuing some other mode of sexual expression doesn’t change the moral status of that expression.

Just as an aside, consider just how very far from the scripture this teaching/understanding really is, in terms of the conceptual edifice that is constructed that is completely missing if you turn to Mark 10, alone, say.

In that chapter, the Pharisee’s bring a controversial issue to Jesus to tempt him. Why tempt? I think we can doubt that the controversy had to do with a theoretical debate raging about whether men should resist their carnal desires, no?

It seems more likely that people – women – were questioning the consequential aspects of Mosaic law, that they could be set aside, put away, no?

So, we have a spiritual teaching about responsible relationships grounded in the controversy about a social harm.

God’s plan for human sexuality, conservatives might protest, has been made clear in the OT, NT and in the design of human anatomy, ….
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without attacking the authority of the scriptures of the role that authority should in people’s lives, it would be possible to borrow your phrase from below and use it here: “no amount of feeling good about asserting certainty/clarity, no matter what the harm, doesn’t make a willful ‘conservative exegesis’ of a parable/allegory story like genesis not a sin”

Thus, the question is not the authority of the scripture, but our poor abilities to discern God’s full purpose. And the law-giver Himself gave instruction on what to do when faced with such uncertainty…

and the fact that members of society feel good about committing (and cause no other harm while committing) this sin, doesn’t make it not a sin.
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The no other harm part of this strikes me. Of the closest things to non-consequential harms that I can think of are sins against the spirit (broadly and perhaps imprecisely put). There is NO WAY that love, gay love, is a sin of this type.

Therefore, this is too strong a conclusion, given the premises, and should be rejected.