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I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better.

Andrew Solomon

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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Thinking
Gay
People
Members
Greater
Church
Lives
Better
Way
Exposure
Think
Tolerance

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons.
Andrew Solomon
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If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious.
Andrew Solomon
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I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.
Andrew Solomon
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I grew up feeling that to be gay was a tragedy. I didn't grow up thinking that it was morally wrong, but I grew up thinking that it would make me marginal, prevent me from having children, and quite possibly prevent me from having a meaningful long relationship. It seemed that this condition would leave me with a vastly reduced life.
Andrew Solomon
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A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it.
Andrew Solomon
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I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.
Andrew Solomon
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I have found that the greatest stories of acceptance and love and the ugliest stories of hideous cruelty and abuse have equally been perpetrated in the name of Christian faith.
Andrew Solomon
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The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married.
Andrew Solomon
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I'm sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.
Andrew Solomon
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Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.
Andrew Solomon
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I have two nexuses of sadness about the Mormon Church. The first is the effect the Church's position on homosexuality has on Mormons.
Andrew Solomon
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If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.
Andrew Solomon
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I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
Andrew Solomon
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There is a false moral imperative that seems to be all-around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.
Andrew Solomon
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I think it's up to the parents to determine whether what they're doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It's not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.
Andrew Solomon
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I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.
Andrew Solomon
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I don't understand what the nature of God is. But I do have the feeling that I'm at some feet, and lucky to be there.
Andrew Solomon
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The idea of anyone contemplating our family and witnessing the affection that we all have for one another and seeing evil in it is deeply hurtful and sad and also deeply bewildering.
Andrew Solomon
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Penalizing homosexuals does not save any innocent victims. The idea that God and the Church accept these people while they are celibate and then if they go off and do something with someone else and both derive joy from it without any apparent harm to anyone else, the Church excommunicates them - that, to me, is bizarre.
Andrew Solomon
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The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.
Andrew Solomon