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Josh and Lolly Weed announced their divorce in a blog post in which they wrote of the love they have developed for LGBT people.Â
Six years ago, Josh Weed and his wife Lolly Weed, who are Mormon, made national news when he announced in a blog post that despite the fact that he was gay, they had made marriage between a gay man and a straight woman work. This week, he and Lolly wrote in a blog post that they could no longer substitute platonic love for romantic love and that they were divorcing, KUTV in Salt Lake City reported.
Josh and Lolly, friends since childhood, married even though Josh came out to her when he was 16.
"We are going to do our level best to explain how a marriage as beautiful and sweet and loving as ours has been can also be a marriage that--for very legitimate, important reasons, and what we feel is the urging of God himself--needs to end," the Weeds wrote in a lengthy post on JoshWeed.com.
The Weeds cowrote the post in which they named three catalysts for why they decided to split despite loving each other platonically as companions and as the parents of their three daughters. The broad strokes of why they split include that they began interacting with more LGBT people and developed a love for them, Josh came to the realization that he needed to love himself as he is, and he was moved by the death of his mother to live more authentically.
Following their instant notoriety in 2012 after writing the blog post in which they claimed to have a "robust" sex life despite Josh confirming that he had zero sexual attraction to women--the couple and their children were even the subjects of a Nightline special--Josh, a therapist, was accused of practicing ex-gay therapy, which he denied.
"I don't believe that a gay person can or even should change their sexual attraction." Weed told Gay.com in 2012. "I do not practice, nor do I believe in, reparative therapy or change therapy. Quite the opposite, my therapeutic stance is one that favors (but does not depend on) the idea that sexual orientation is immutable."
In their blog post announcing their divorce, Josh wrote that he has broken with the Jesus Christ Church of Latter Day Saints regarding its stance on homosexuality:
"I have spent my entire life conforming to every standard of the LDS faith because I believed it was what God wanted me to do. I believed this because every mentor, every exemplar, every religious teacher, every therapist, every leader I ever grew up listening to and trusting told me that that was the only way I could return to live with God. There was an emphasis on 'perfect obedience' and yet, over the course of my lifetime, the list of things said by these trusted leaders about my sexual orientation was profoundly inconsistent and confusing."
In their detailed blog post the Weeds emphasized the dangers of the closet and of the need to embrace LGBT people.
"We got to know many, many people. We heard their stories. We met children, youths as young as 13 years old, so heartbroken by what they were feeling and what they were being told by their faith community--kids with no hope for love in the future if they wanted to be acceptable to their church and family," the Weeds wrote. "Young bright faces who were being told not to love who they fell in love with, looking up to us as some kind of beacon of hope. Our understanding of this issue changed with every person we met, with every single story we heard."
