Commenting on evolution and homosexuality (two hot button topics!), the late Latter-day Saint psychologist and stake president, Carlfred Broderick offered the following insightful thoughts:
EVOLUTION
From my youth forward, it has been clear to me that a Latter-day Saint is required to believe that Adam and Eve were real people from whom we are all descended. Beyond that I have felt that we know next to nothing about the creation of the earth or its calendar. I think it presumptuous for someone who could not repair his own TV set to think that he understands how the universe was put into operation. As I understand it, the Lord has promised to reveal more about this at time future time (see D&C 121:28-31). In the meantime I am content to have geologists and biologists put together the information available to them according to the best models they can devise. When the full truth is revealed it will encompass all that is real, not merely all that is in the understanding of a particular person or group of persons. If dinosaurs were some cruel hoax, would God have buried so many in Utah?
HOMOSEXUALITY
I think that I am as knowledgeable about the condition we call homosexuality as any heterosexual in the Church. My life has brought me into close association with many fine people whom, fortunately, I had the privilege of knowing well before I knew of their sexual orientation. My professional activities have led me to be a student of the research on this condition. As a priesthood leader and as a therapist I have worked with many people over the years as they have struggled with difficulties they face in resolving the tensions between the homosexual lifestyle and the gospel path. No one knows that determines that one individual will be drawn toward members of his own sex and another to the opposite sex. There is beginning to be some evidence that there may be a biochemical factor. Perhaps certain life experiences make the opposite sex seem more dangerous and less attractive to some than to others. Whatever the origins, I have never met a homosexual who remembered choosing to be so orientated. Each experiences it as an unbidden affliction.
Given that premise, it has nevertheless been my observation that those who act on those unbidden feelings lose the Spirit and before they know it are pulled step by step into a world at complete odds with the Kingdom. Those who earnestly seek to conform to the Plan are provided small miracle after small miracle until they are able to experience every blessing of the gospel. I have yet to find an exception to this rule. This puts me at odds with both those who treat men and women with homosexual feelings as though they were voluntary perverts and also with those who insist that there can be no genuine reconciliation between such persons and the highest standards of the Kingdom. (Carlfred Broderick, My Parents Married on a Dare and Other Favorite Essays on Life [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996], 46-47, emphasis in bold added)
