God, Is It Okay For Us To Have Children? (Part 1)

What I found when I read the Bible looking for an answer

God, is this okay?

It’s a question I know well. I’ve spent most of my life navigating the tension between earnestly wanting to do the right thing and being someone whose life doesn’t fit the mold of what the right thing is supposed to look like.

I grew up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where family wasn’t just important, it was everything. Woven into every lesson, every talk, every conversation about what a meaningful life looked like. There was always a plan: you grow up, you get married in the temple as husband and wife, and you have children in a family that will last forever…

But when you’re gay, that plan doesn’t quite account for you.

I’m used to taking hard questions to God. Coming out, getting married, staying in the Church — I’ve brought all of it to Him, and I’ve found my way through. But this felt different. Because for the first time, my decision wasn’t just about me. It would have a direct impact on someone else — a child who would come into the world because of the choices Ryan and I make. And no matter how settled I feel in who I am, there is always something quietly terrifying about deviating from the plan. Especially when the stakes are this high.

So before Ryan and I moved forward, I needed to know what God thought about this for us, for our family, for our specific situation.

I decided to read through the scriptures — the entire Standard Works — looking for an answer. I wanted to go in with real intent, which for me meant being genuinely open to whatever the answer turned out to be. If God said no, I was willing to be okay with that. I didn’t want to search for permission, or read in a way that justified something I had already decided. I just needed to hear what direction He had for my life, for me.

In the Beginning…

I started at the beginning. With Adam and Eve.

Their story, in Genesis, is the one people most often point to when making the case that a family can only be formed by a man and a woman. The design was laid out plainly, male and female, along with the commandment to multiply and fill the earth. And honestly, reading it through the lens of my question freaked me out a little. There was a divine order for bringing children into the world, established by God, and that order was a man and a woman.

Was that my answer?

As I sat with that, I found myself cross-referencing with The Family: A Proclamation to the World — a document I was raised on and know well. It teaches that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, that children are entitled to be reared by a father and a mother, and that these roles and relationships are central to God’s plan for His children. And I know this might surprise some people, but I believe those teachings are important. They have meant a great deal to my family and to me.

But there is one line that has always jumped out at me. “…other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.” I had turned that phrase over so many times over the years — not as a loophole, just as a quiet acknowledgment that life is complicated, and that faithful people sometimes have to navigate things no one could ever fully anticipate. I have always kinda felt like an “other circumstance” within the Church. And sitting there with my question about whether or not it was okay for us to have kids, I found myself wondering if God’s ancient covenant people ever had other circumstances too…

Did they ever have to find a different way?

Wait, They Did WHAT?

I kept reading, and what I soon noticed — and what genuinely surprised me — was how quickly the scriptures move away from the ideal and into something far more complicated. The families that God worked through to carry His covenant people forward across generations were messy and nonlinear in ways I had always glossed over. Reading them now, through the lens of my question, they landed completely differently.

In Genesis 19, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s daughters believed the world had ended and there were no men left. Desperate to preserve their family line, they made a choice that was — to put it gently — HIGHLY unconventional. On consecutive nights, they each got their father drunk and slept with him to conceive.

I’ve known this story basically my whole life, but what struck me reading it now was that the Bible doesn’t hide it. It’s right there, in the middle of the sacred record, unflinchingly included. And God still showed up in it. Those sons became the fathers of entire nations. The circumstances were deeply flawed, but the desire to carry something forward — to not let the line end — that resonated with me in a way I wasn’t expecting.

This was especially surprising because, like the Adam and Eve story, I expected the whole “Sodom and Gomorrah” part of the Bible to make me feel the most wrong/guilty about the life I’m building. These chapters have always been wielded as evidence that homosexuality is a sin. But as I read them carefully this time, consulting the Joseph Smith Translation, something caught my attention. The text was not focused on homosexuality at all, but rather on the violence and cruelty of the city’s residents, and the way they treated the vulnerable and the stranger. Using footnotes I cross-referenced to Ezekiel 16:49, where the sins of Sodom are named plainly: pride, excess, idleness, and a failure to care for the poor and vulnerable. Not a word about homosexuality.

A Biblical Pattern

As I continued reading, I kept noticing the same pattern: that continuing the family line mattered deeply to God, and that His covenant people found all kinds of ways to make it happen.

In Genesis 16, Sarah couldn’t have children, so she told Abraham to sleep with her servant Hagar and conceive a child on her behalf. The arrangement created real, lasting pain for everyone involved and the text doesn’t soften that at all. But Ishmael was still blessed. God was still present.

In Genesis 29 and 30, Rachel was infertile and gave her servant Bilhah to Jacob to bear children for her, and Leah did the same with her servant Zilpah — what essentially became a competition to produce sons through other women. One man. Four women. Twelve sons. Those twelve sons became the twelve tribes of Israel.

And then there was Tamar in Genesis 38, who disguised herself and slept with her father-in-law Judah because he had failed to provide for her as was his obligation. She gave birth to Perez, who ended up in the direct lineage of Jesus.

Honestly? Pretty Tame By Biblical Standards

By the time I got to Exodus and had read countless other examples, I was sitting there thinking — Ryan and I are wanting to do IVF with a consenting egg donor and an ethically compensated gestational carrier. Legal paperwork… Medical appointments… A very professional fertility clinic… Honestly, pretty tame by biblical standards!

But beyond the humor of it, I kept feeling something I hadn’t expected. A growing sense that God has always shown up in the middle of complicated, nonlinear, deeply human family situations — working through people who were doing the best they could with the circumstances they had.

It seemed like the answer so far was that carrying the family line forward mattered deeply to God, even when the way it happened looked nothing like the ideal.

But That Was Just the Old Testament

Now, I’ll be honest with you — the Old Testament is kind of famously wild. These stories are ancient, cultural, complicated. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find messiness there. What I was expecting, as I moved into The New Testament, The Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants, was a course correction.

What would the more “normal” scriptures say?

Continue reading in Part 2.

Scripture References & Sources

• Genesis 1:27–28; 2:18–24 — The creation of man and woman and the commandment to multiply and fill the earth

• Genesis 16:1–16 — Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar

• Genesis 19:1–38 — Sodom and Gomorrah; Lot’s daughters

• Genesis 29:1–30:24 — Jacob, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah

• Genesis 38:1–30 — Tamar and Judah

• Matthew 1:3 — Perez in the lineage of Jesus

• Ezekiel 16:49 (KJV) — The sins of Sodom named as pride, excess, idleness, and neglect of the poor

• The Family: A Proclamation to the World — The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, September 23, 1995

• Joseph Smith Translation, Genesis 19 — Found in the LDS Bible appendix