I want to talk a little bit about "being gay isn't a choice or a sin, but 'acting on it' is."

NB: This is broadly applicable to "flavors" of queer in which the "issue" isn't attraction to one's own gender, but may not be fully so. I'm also speaking about this from an LDS perspective, so it may not be fully applicable outside of that context.

First, let's define the terms: "acting on it" should mean quite a bit more (I technically "act on" being gay just by saying I'm gay, for example), but in practice, this means sex with someone of your gender, and *maybe* getting married to someone of the same gender.

This isn't an abstraction: I know of two LDS lesbians who live together and do everything a married couple would do but 1) be legally married, and 2) have sex. They lived in rural Utah, and maintained their temple recommends. I think this would work most places.

But this begs interesting questions, since they have a relationship that the community recognizes, and their relationship looks exactly as mine (I'm gay, married to a man, and non-celibate) and man-woman marriages do 95% (or more) of the time.

Namely, as we move toward "immoral conduct in heterosexual or homosexual relationships will be treated in the same way," and it's clear there are really only two things in the context of homosexual relationships that they mean by "immoral", it's worth interrogating that a bit.

Acknowledging the developing consensus that the only thing sinful about a lifelong romantic partnership between, say, two men, is if they have sex or get legally married, we start by recognizing *at least* the non-sinfullness of such an relationship without those two elements.

Once there, we see how similar this relationship looks and functions to religiously privileged different-gender relationships. We also recognize that infertility, lack of sex, or even lack of formal marriage wouldn't "invalidate" long-term, romantic man-woman pairings.

We note that physical intimacy is something we spend comparatively very little time on in a long-term romantic pairing, and even with fertile couples, much less is with the intent to produce children, and so a non-procreative purpose for sex in such a relationship is the default.

We are reminded that we don't discipline married man-woman LDS (or mixed-membership) pairs who never pursue a temple marriage, so *just* having a civil marriage wouldn't be much of an issue, either.

So, here's what I'm left with: if two men live together just as a married couple would, and co-parented children for the rest of their lives, but never married or had sex, they'd both be in good standing with the LDS church, absent other issues.

(and it's worth pointing out that it's not "gay sex" that's the issue; the same sex "acts" are done between men and women married to each other that are in good standing with the church all the time).

In that scenario, the picture visible to everyone but the two people themselves is EXACTLY the same as with a man-woman married couple.

Given that, if I want to accept the church's stance, I must find some reason why these two should be sanctioned by the church *just* for going to a courthouse and gaining legal recognition of their union that we all *actually* recognize.

If I can't do that (I don't think a reasonable person can), I have to further hold that this married couple should be excommunicated for being physically intimate with each other behind closed doors a few times a week to express love to each other and strengthen their marriage.

I have to somehow find that "acting" on being heterosexual in an LDS context is mostly the parts of a marriage that I can also do with a man without issue, but "acting" on being gay in the same context is just down to sex and getting a marriage certificate with two men's names.

We'd never tell an LDS man romantically committed to a woman to avoid marrying her, and if he married her, to scrupulously avoid having sex with her. The thought of telling an LDS man romantically committed to a man in the same way to do these things makes reason stare, y'all.