Answer

How Do I Speak Up for Marriage and Family Without Being Afraid?

The conversation happens in a class, a group chat or a break room, and everyone assumes you agree. You do not, and you say nothing, and afterwards it sits badly with you. The fear is not irrational. In some rooms there really is a cost to being the one who disagrees.

Start much smaller than you are imagining. The picture in your head is a confrontation with everyone watching. Almost none of it is that. Speaking up is usually one calm sentence that declines to agree: “I actually see that differently.” You do not have to win the room. You have to decline to be counted in a consensus you do not hold.

Eternal Truths

The Proclamation itself asks for this, in public. Its final paragraph calls upon “responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere” to promote measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family (The Family: A Proclamation to the World). That is an unusual thing for a doctrinal statement to do. It addresses people outside the Church and asks for public action rather than private belief.

Discipleship is expected to cost something. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland described in “The Cost-and Blessings-of Discipleship” the painfully high price paid by prophets, apostles, missionaries and members in every generation, and opened with the counsel to be strong and live the gospel faithfully even if others around you do not. Naming the cost honestly matters, because courage that depends on there being no cost collapses the first time there is one.

How you say it is part of what you are saying. The Lord’s description of real influence is persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness and love unfeigned (Doctrine and Covenants 121:41-43). What makes an exchange unpleasant is almost never the content. It is the sense that one person is trying to defeat the other.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Staying quiet works. Every time, immediately. Nothing bad happens and the moment passes, and that is exactly what turns it from a decision into a habit. After enough of them you find you hold views you never say out loud, which is most of the way to not really holding them at all.

Questions to Think About

• What is the actual worst outcome here, and how likely is it?
• Have I confused being disagreeable with being clear?
• What did I let pass this week that I wish I had answered?

What You Can Do

Pick your one sentence in advance and practise it, so it is ready when a conversation moves faster than you do. Then use it once this week on something small. The usual effect is not that anyone changes their mind on the spot. It is that the next person discovers they were not the only one. The essay behind this Answer goes further into speaking up without turning it into an argument.

Jesus Christ can give you courage that does not depend on the room being friendly, and He can keep you kind in the moment you are least inclined to be.