My Follow Up (This is number 3 in the series, start 2 down and read upwards)

It is hugely interesting that you mentioned the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says
"You heard them say of old, 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery'. But I say unto, that whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her, the same has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:27-28)
Like all of Jesus' words, this has so many meanings and is really complex. But I take the following
1- The outward visible rule-keeping is not as important as what is in your heart
2- It is an obvious implication that we cannot judge to hell and back people who commit adultery when we realize that the roots of the same sin are in our own hearts anytime we look a little too long and hard at an attractive girl
I don't do what you did, which is a typical Mormon thing to do, and just add Commandment 11- Thou Shalt Not Lust. But you are probably right... and incomplete, just as I am probably right... and incomplete.
OK, so, given that verse that says that what is in the heart matters more to Jesus than outward action (and certainly appearance, let me send a cough south towards Provo)... How can we say that it is okay to have homosexual attraction in your heart but not to act on it?
It was something that immediately struck me as a big step, with real implications. I am struggling with how to put this into words.
The basic idea with most things is that you have some natural desire for something good, God-given- and then evil comes in and twists and perverts it in some way. We have to keep things within proper boundaries. That is life in a nutshell.
But if a substantial fraction (even if it is 1%, a low estimate, that means there are 5 times as many gay people on Earth than there are Mormons) of God's children are born within their nature to be a certain way, then what does that say? If they are as sick and revolted at the thought of straight sex and we are of gay sex?
That homosexuality is biologically determined- and not something that most people get to from... you know, having orgies and being hedonistic Dennis Rodman freaks- is an enormous potential concession and change in church doctrine. People are to fulfill the measure of their creation- and yet if they are created in a way that we don't like.
The Church has found, as it has quietly tried to run these go out into nature type camps to reform gay people and what not, that it is running usually up against something that can't be reformed. We used to say "You aren't gay. You are a straight person, made straight just like God is straight, and you have a disease, so to speak, of same-gender attraction, and you can be cured. Pray for it."
They have started to counsel gay people not to get married, because marriage isn't a cure. The line now is that people like that have to just live celibate for their whole lives. There is now this sense that a gay person is a gay person and not a straight person underneath something (like abuse as a kid) that messed them up.
But that is a shift- after all, 'get married and have kids' is the 1st commandment (Proclamation on the Family, Genesis, etc.) and yet now we are recognizing in some way that some people outside the usual paradigm creates a different category... it is a big shift.
Churches are the ultimate anchors of conservative values, they move and change at glacial pace, but they do change. They can withstand hurricane winds of political stuff for a while, but if they start to pull up roots to shift- they can get blown over. Once they start to move a little, big changes can happen relatively quickly. There becomes this sense, like on race, that we were acting out of our own cultural and political heritage more than we realized, and less out of inspiration from God.
Anyway, I don't mean to offend anyone, but that is what I'm thinking. My thoughts are always (I'd like to think) a work in progress, and that is why I bounce some complicated things- often in a purposely provoking way- off people whose opinions I respect.