anti-mormons

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Mormon Church Responds to the passage of Proposition 8.  It covers defending the integrity of marriage, church involvement in politics, bigotry on both sides, and members who opposed the Church’s position.

We hope that now and in the future all parties involved in this issue will be well informed and act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility toward those with a different position.   No one on any side of the question should be vilified, intimidated, harassed or subject to erroneous information.

It is important to understand that this issue for the Church has always been about the sacred and divine institution of marriage — a union between a man and a woman.

Allegations of bigotry or persecution made against the Church were and are simply wrong.  The Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage neither constitutes nor condones any kind of hostility toward gays and lesbians.  Even more, the Church does not object to rights for same-sex couples regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights, so long as these do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family or the constitutional rights of churches.

Some, however, have mistakenly asserted that churches should not ever be involved in politics when moral issues are involved.  In fact, churches and religious organizations are well within their constitutional rights to speak out and be engaged in the many moral and ethical problems facing society.  While the Church does not endorse candidates or platforms, it does reserve the right to speak out on important issues.

Before it accepted the invitation to join broad-based coalitions for the amendments, the Church knew that some of its members would choose not to support its position.   Voting choices by Latter-day Saints, like all other people, are influenced by their own unique experiences and circumstances.  As we move forward from the election, Church members need to be understanding and accepting of each other and work together for a better society.

As politically cliched as it sounds, there will have to be a lot of healing after this.  Although Prop 8 passed, there’s not a lot to celebrate.  I feel like the Church and supporters of traditional marriage were forced to enter into a tough fight and everybody got badly bruised.

Some emails circulated last week reporting ugly incidents at the Oakland Temple. But I haven’t seen any corroboration of the incident(s).

Sunday morning, however, there was a protest at the Oakland California LDS temple. From the news account, it sounds like it was peaceful.

About 50 protesters came to the Mormon Temple in Oakland this morning to speak out against the religious group’s support for an anti-gay marriage ballot measure.

“I can’t believe that a religious group that preaches truth and love is asking their members to campaign and donate to take away my civil rights,” said Jill Shearer, 40, of Oakland. Shearer grew up in San Ramon and was raised Mormon. When she came out as a lesbian, she said her family still kept her close . . .

“They have their right to make their cause known, just like the Yes on 8 folks do,” said Rand King, 60, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is a member of the Protect Marriage Coalition. “They obviously want to portray us as haters of them. We’re not at all. We just want to protect traditional marriage.”

Fortunately, as the temple was closed, patrons didn’t have to face the protestors but I wonder how the Visitor Center handled the situation.

You can see more photos of the protest at this Flickr stream. Of note are the Osama would vote for Prop 8 sign and the “Latter-day Bigots” sign.

The Daily Kos does not appear to be a champion of free speech.

Last week Daily Kos removed a post criticizing the site for its anti-Mormon bigotry.

Now it is rallying its followers to target Mormons who have donated to the Proposition 8 campaign. Once identified, the plan is to dig into their backgrounds, with the hopes of harassing and discrediting their efforts.

As a matter of fact, the No on Prop 8 folks told me recently that the “Protect Marriage” campaign has raised $30 million dollars–over half of it from the Mormon Church. Now, I have nothing personally against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They most certainly have the constitutional right to worship in their own way. They have the right to minister in whatever way they see fit and to marry whomever they see fit in their churches based on any qualifications they choose. And they will be well within their rights.

But when the church and its members invest millions of dollars in an attempt to write discrimination into my state’s constitution and divorce my friend Brian against his will, there will be hell to pay.

So what am I asking you to do?

Some distributed research.

There is a list of a bunch of Mormon donors to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign (in case that one goes down, here’s a mirror with slightly worse formatting.

Here’s what I’m asking for:

This list contains information about those who are big donors to the Yes on 8 campaign–donors to the tune of at least $1,000 dollars. And, as you can see, there are a lot of them. It also indicates if they’re Mormon or not.

If you’re interested in defeating the religious right and preserving marriage equality, here’s how you can help:

Find us some ammo.

Use any LEGAL tool at your disposal. Use OpenSecrets to see if these donors have contributed to…shall we say…less than honorable causes, or if any one of these big donors has done something otherwise egregious. If so, we have a legitimate case to make the Yes on 8 campaign return their contributions, or face a bunch of negative publicity . . .

Feel free to use Lexis-Nexis searches as well for anything useful, especially given that these people are using “morality” as their primary motivation to support Prop 8…if you find anything that belies that in any way…well, you know what to do . . .

Here’s the bottom line for me: if someone is willing to contribute thousands of dollars to a campaign to take away legal rights from some very dear friends of mine, they had damn well make sure their lives are beyond scrutiny–because I, for one, won’t take it lying down.

Unfortunately, the media has played along with this emphasis by making Mormon donations to support Proposition 8 a major issue (never mind the millions big celebrities and others have given to opppose it).

I thought it was odd that the Associated Press included a link in this story to a site called Mormons for Proposition 8, which at first blush would appear to be a pro-Mormon site in the church’s efforts to preserve traditional marriage. However, it’s a ruse to “out” all Mormon donors and its purported benign motives have been betrayed by the Daily Kos.

Forget debating on the merits. When your personal politics is on the line, “by any means necessary” is an acceptable tactic. Personally attacking people and making their lives miserable is acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of your idea of “fairness.”

P.S. Besides this coordinated harassment campaign, here’s an isolated but a very disturbing incident of violence against a Prop 8 supporter.

P.P.S. How are donors being identified as Mormon?

[via The Corner]

I thought Utah Democrats didn’t like the exploitation of the Mormon Church for politics.

The Utah Democratic Party charged this week that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is a “devout member of an anti-Mormon denomination” and questioned whether LDS faithful should vote for her.

But Palin is not a member of the church the Democrats are referencing, that church denies it is anti-Mormon and there’s no evidence of any anti-Mormon rhetoric from its pulpit.

Now, Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Holland is backing off the statement.

“We do not plan on making her religion an issue,” Holland said Wednesday afternoon, adding he had not seen the news release, which includes a quote by him along with several questions.

The pertinent one: “Will Republicans of the LDS faith vote for Sarah Palin, a devout member of an anti-Mormon denomination?”

It now seems clear that the recent McCain VP buzz was just supposed to keep the senator on the front page rather than actually crash Obama’s world parade. However, as the Romney name keeps getting mentioned, some interesting people are starting to push back on a Romney VP pick.

Speaking as a Mormon, Orson Scott Card “begs” McCain to not commit political suicide by picking a Mormon as his VP.

What is he going to bring you? Utah? You have Utah already.

What Mitt Romney would do, as your vice presidential candidate, is weaken you in areas that you absolutely must carry: The South and the Bible Belt.

You cannot afford to underestimate the number of people who will never vote for a ticket that includes a Mormon. . .

When you consider that in the South, the black vote will — understandably! — be energized and turn out in record numbers, the last thing you need is for the Evangelical Christian vote to be unenthusiastic, with large numbers of them sitting it out.

And from Romney’s home state, Michigan Democrats have actually produced a web ad as a preemptive strike against Romney on his biggest strength, his business experience.

I think Romney would make the best VP, but he may not be the best political choice. So OSC’s point is legitimate and pragmatic but a total concession to the crudest of identity politics.

And if the Michigan Democrats really think Romney is such a bad pick, why are they running ads discouraging McCain to NOT pick him? Somehow I don’t think they have McCain’s best interests in mind.

Yesterday, John Podhoretz made this bizarre statement on Gov. Romney’s “Faith in America” speech:

For those who don’t know Romney is a Mormon, well, they sure will now. For the next two or three days, it’s all anybody will know about him. Chances are it is the word that people will most associate with him from here on out. I don’t think that’s a good direction for a campaign that finds itself in the fight of its life in Iowa against the most explicitly Christian candidate in the field.

Huh!?!? If anyone who didn’t know until yesterday that Romney was a Mormon, they weren’t paying attention to the campaign and won’t start now.  Forget the next few days, for the past year the media’s portrayal of Gov. Romney has been relentless reporting that Romney’s biggest challenge is that he’s a Mormon which could only be removed by making some JFK-type speech. 

(I actually believe that the Governor’s biggest problem is his perceived “inaunthenticity” and supposed flip-flopping, which he hasn’t been able to deal with very well due to the oppressive religious coverage.  The Evangelical acceptance of a Mormon candidate is overplayed by a media herd-mentality eager to pick a fight.)

Romney didn’t add anything new yesterday that he hasn’t said in countless interviews before.  However, instead of speaking to one reporter, Romney spoke on a national platform.  Now when some lazy reporter decides to recycle the Mormon Question, the Romney campaign can at least point back to yesterday and say “been there, done that.” 

Conventional wisdom has it that yesterday’s speech was an appeal to Evangelicals to accept a Mormon candidate.  But most Evangelicals who weren’t willing to accept Romney before, probably aren’t willing to today.   Romney’s biggest accomplishment was telling the media to back off and drop the daily coverage of his faith.

Yesterday, Romney Campaign 2.0 was launched.  He may not have added anything new of substance to his campaign, but he sounded presidential, perhaps authentic.  And instead of becoming the “Mormon” candidate like Podhoretz suggests, he’s done his best to level the playing field and leave the “Mormon” tag behind.

Charles Krauthammer outdoes even himself on Gov. Huckabee’s shameless and devious exploitation of religion in Iowa.  (emphasis added)

Just imagine that Huckabee were running one-on-one in Iowa against Joe Lieberman. (It’s a thought experiment. Stay with me.) If he had run the same ad in those circumstances, it would have raised an outcry. The subtext — who’s the Christian in this race? — would have been too obvious to ignore, the appeal to bigotry too clear . . .

Huckabee has been asked about this view that Mormonism is a cult. He dodges and dances. “If I’m invited to be the president of a theological school, that’ll be a perfectly appropriate question,” he says, “but to be the president of the United States, I don’t know that that’s going to be the most important issue that I’ll be facing when I’m sworn in” . . .

And by Huckabee’s own logic, since he is not running for head of a theological college, what is he doing proclaiming himself a “Christian leader” in an ad promoting himself for president?

Answer: Having the issue every which way. Seeming to take the high road of tolerance by refusing to declare Mormonism a cult, indeed declaring himself above the issue — yet clearly playing to that prejudice by leaving the question ambiguous, while making sure everyone knows that he, for one, is a “Christian leader.”

While I don’t expect Gov. Huckabee to meet Pres. Harrison’s fate, his campaign won’t make it out of Iowa unless it changes it’s tone quick.

Every mention of God in every inaugural address in American history refers to the deity in this kind of all-embracing, universal, nondenominational way. (The one exception: William Henry Harrison. He caught cold delivering that inaugural address. Thirty-one days later, he was dead. Draw your own conclusion.)

It’s been interesting this year to watch the Church and Mitt Romney reach out to Christians for their own reasons and in their own ways.

Gov. Romney has been actively courting GOP-influential evangelicals as a key to his nomination.  Rather than directly speaking on his religion (as so many pundits are demanding he do), he has continuously emphasized that it has informed his “values” which are similar to the rest of religious conservatives.

“The values of my faith are much like, or are identical to, the values of other faiths that have a Judeo-Christian philosophical background,” he said at a campaign event in New Hampshire this month. “They’re American values, if you will.”

In contrast, the Church has renewed its efforts to define itself as a Christian church while emphasizing its peculiar differences.  President Hinckley and Elder Holland’s General Conference talks rejected the creedal beliefs of mainstream Christianity based on what Holland called “post–New Testament Christian history”:

So any criticism that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not hold the contemporary Christian view of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost is not a comment about our commitment to Christ but rather a recognition (accurate, I might add) that our view of the Godhead breaks with post–New Testament Christian history and returns to the doctrine taught by Jesus Himself.

Last week the Church followed up these talks with a press release emphasizing that “As people learn more about Latter-day Saint beliefs, they may see some distinct differences and yet find some unexpected common ground.”

Governor Romney glosses over his religious differences (smartly I think) while the Church unapologetically emphasizes its differences, and yet they are both seeking to establish that Mormonism (or at least a Mormon) has a place in the public square.  (Just to keep piling on, Harry Reid’s comments last week were not helpful in this effort)

There will always be evangelical clods who will feel they have a divine mandate to harass the Church and protest General Conference, but politically, I think there has been evidence that progress has been made.

• President Hinckley met with the late Jerry Falwell earlier this year where they discussed opposing against same-sex marriage efforts in California.
• Evangelical leaders seem to be reluctantly realizing that Romney is their best hope for representing their values and some have started to endorse him (whether he should accept some of them is another matter).

The Church has made it clear we don’t want to agree on everything theologically.  Or politically.  Just some respect and an acknowledgement that Mormons don’t have horns would be nice.  When Bob Jones University can join the 21st century and endorse a Mormon for president, I think there’s reason for hope.