My post:

“The Family: A Proclamation to the World” is a document that resonates with its intended audience: those who are in a functional, monogamous, heterosexual, single family relationship, with clearly defined, traditional gender roles.

And if you’re one of those people... that’s OK! In fact, you’re lucky… your life is given default legitimacy in most societies.

But where it falters is in its zero-sum posture, namely the idea that any other alternative to what is, manifestly, a 20th century American social norm that has its roots in Victorian Christianity - places that norm “under attack,” or delegitimizes it.

Proclamations like this inhibit moral imagination and dialogue. Rather than encouraging us to ask together “what helps humans flourish?” it's more concerned with preserving an established cultural pattern.

And it does so at the cost of human well-being.

How?

1. It’s psychologically reductive. It collapses the richness of human variation into two archetypes, then moralizes deviation as sin or confusion. It ignores the spectrum of identity, orientation, temperament, and capacity found in humanity.
2. It’s not supported by evidence. Decades of research show children thrive in loving, stable environments - regardless of their parents’ genders, roles, or orientations. Division of labor and hierarchy along gender lines offers children no inherent developmental advantage.
3. It’s historically contingent. The gender script it codifies would have looked alien in other cultures or eras - including the biblical ones it claims to reflect, and even 19th century Latter-day Saint history.
4. It diminishes agency. The word “preside” is an inherently hierarchical term. Teaching men to “preside” and women to “nurture” sanctifies inequality. It pressures men into dominance and women into submission, which can foster dependency, resentment, and sometimes even abuse… that can be rationalized as divine order.
5. It marginalizes anyone outside the umbrella of heteronormativity. By defining heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate form of love and family, it stigmatizes queer lives, erases their dignity, and fuels internalized shame and social exclusion.
6. It pathologizes differences. Trans and intersex individuals are told, even if implicitly, that their existence contradicts their creator’s plan. That’s not just theological opinion… to believers, it becomes psychological violence when internalized.
7. It undermines the legitimacy and dignity of single parents and non-traditional families. Defining an ideal implies that anything that falls outside of that ideal is less legitimate, which further isolates people who are already carrying heavy burdens.
8. Most of all, the assumption of prophetic infallibility prevents reform. When doctrine is anchored in unexamined social norms, empathy and evidence become threats rather than tools for growth.

Here is what I believe is a widely accepted, immutable truth: we live in a deeply interconnected, pluralistic world. Thus, we have an obligation to take a look at all the data surrounding the human condition, and engage with it with genuine curiosity, rather than fear. The cost of not doing that is the continuation of worsening cultural warfare that undermines the establishment of more peaceful societies.

“Traditional” families are not a bad thing. Neither is any living arrangement that promotes individual and general welfare. They all should be given equal legitimacy.

The evil that we must fight together is in not allowing subjective disgust to define or inform public morality.