Gay Man Who Married Straight Woman To Uphold Mormon Values Getting Divorced

A gay man and a straight woman, who made headlines in 2012, for their mixed orientation marriage in order to prove their commitment to the Mormon Church and their "dedication to God" announced they are divorcing, reports said Monday.

Josh and Laurel Weed from Utah gained popularity and attention in 2012 when they revealed in a joint blog post that Weed identified as gay, which he claimed his wife was aware of long before their marriage.

Now, in another blog post dated Jan. 25, Josh explained that despite having different sexual orientations, they enjoyed an "extremely healthy and robust sex life" and they decided to get married because it helped in keeping with what God expected of them.

After over a decade of their marriage and nearly six years since their story went viral, the couple wrote about getting divorced in the blog post and also issued an apology to the LGBT community.

"We’re sorry for any degree that our existence, and the publicity of our supposedly successful marriage made you feel 'less than' as you made your own terribly difficult choices. And we’re sorry if our story made it easier for people in your life to reject you and your difficult path as being wrong," the Jan. 25 blog post read. "If this is you, we want you to know: you were right."

The couple, who have four daughters together, explained that the reasons behind their divorce included their love for the LGBT community, Josh's acceptance of himself as a gay man and also the death of his mother a year and a half earlier.

"Our marriage was absolutely beautiful but it contained an undercurrent of pain that we were not able to see clearly or acknowledge for many years, which made continuing it impossible," Josh wrote in the blog post.

"I have spent my entire life conforming to every standard of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (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 it was the only way I could return to live with God," he added.

"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," he explained.

In the post, Laurel wrote explaining about how being married to her husband had brought her both joy and pain. There was a "void" in their connection, and it was not just about sex, she wrote.

"Platonic love is simply not enough, no matter how much we hoped it was," she said. "God designed us to need and want romantic attachment."

The official stance of the LDS faith states that there is a difference between same-sex attraction and homosexual behavior, thus just having bisexual or homosexual urges is not considered a sin and does not stop a person from participating in the Mormon Church.

However, Mormons are taught that sexual purity is a part of god's plan, which states that sexual relationships are reserved for only a man and woman who are bound in marriage and thus have promised loyalty to one another.