Why is everyone looking at the Mormons?

Mainly because the hierarchy of the LDS Church has been actively working against marriage equality for 11 years, exposes the Bay Area Reporter:

The March 4, 1997 memo from Loren C. Dunn to church Elder M. Russell Ballard, describes an insidious “go ahead” HLM (homosexual legalized marriage) strategy of the late Mormon Church president, Gordon B. Hinckley. The memo appears to be tangible proof that Mormon leaders had been working to prevent marriage equality in California and Hawaii at least for the last 11 years while actively working to recruit the support of local California Catholic bishops…

A Conservative Case for Marriage Equality

Rev. Mark Worth makes some great “conservative” points arguing for marriage equality in a piece  published in the Bangor (Maine) Daily News:

Good marriages benefit the entire community. The legal institution of marriage promotes family stability and cohesiveness. Marriage promotes financial security, long-term commitment and faithfulness. I believe these are good things. They are good for straight families and they are good for gay families….And so this is a very conservative case for marriage equality. Marriage promotes family values that should be available to all families, not just straight families….

Maine’s Catholic bishop and an opponent of marriage equality, declared that “the ability and obligation to procreate” is an essential part of marriage, and without this component marriage is “meaningless.” ….My wife and I have been married for 29 years. Our marriage has produced no children, and we are now beyond our child-bearing years. Yet our marriage is not meaningless….And hundreds of other childless couples in Maine have meaningful marriages, too….

Ignorance + Discrimination = MassResistance!

Jesse Sparks is a Mormon wordpress user who has so interestingly engaged us in the comment section of the “Traditional Marriage?” posting. In our back and forth on the comment section of one of his blog postings, he guided me to the MassResistance! website, which he claims shows that “many of these consequences [of same-gender marriage], however, have started to become visible in Massachusetts.” To be fair, he did link to this section of the MassResistance! website, which contains simple, blatant homophobia as ‘reasons’ that marriage equality should be denied. MassResistance! is also classified as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nonetheless, the real gems are on the MassResistance! mainpage:

1) Hideous gay fascist-like Prop-8 “protests” across USA. Phony attempt to replicate Civil Rights movement.
2) Homosexual activists hold angry anti-marriage rally at Boston City Hall.

Need we even deal with the tone and factual incorrectness of these misstatements? “Hideous gay fascist-like protests?” A bit exaggerated, no? Aren’t we having more ‘fabulous communist-like protests?’

Andrew Sullivan: “No On 8: Worse Than We Thought”

Sullivan points out an interview with Latrice Johnson of the group United Lesbians of African Heritage. She is an African-American gay rights activist who approached the No on 8 Campaign to help to sway African-American votes. She reports that she was roundly dismissed:

Did anyone come and say, “Hey, we need to do outreach in the African-American community together?”

Absolutely not, in fact the message I got from a key person in the No on 8 campaign was that the black vote was really going to be insignificant. It’s not enough, that it wasn’t going to be an issue because we are not a majority of the vote, even though they knew that a large number was going to come out to vote for Obama. It wasn’t a fear because they didn’t feel like the numbers were going to affect (Prop 8 ) either way.

Read the full interview at Two Down, 48 to Go.

Legislating Immorality, eh?

In a wonderfully offensive piece, The National Review refers to the concept of same-gender marriage as ‘immorality.’ Who’s immorality? Both the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalists have for years been marrying same-gender couples. Is the morality of Catholicism or Mormonisms somehow more valid, even if they are a majority? Then on to a wonderful use of an isolated incident to conjure up fear:

Last week in a Denver suburb, someone lit a Book of Mormon on fire and dropped it on the doorstep of a Mormon temple…. In a move that may make gay-rights supporters’ heads spin, the incident is being investigated as a hate crime.

My head does not spin. If the motives of that crime were hate-based, it should be prosecuted as such. Do they think gay rights supporters condone hate crimes and violence? Anyways, ‘Editors,’ tell me, are there more hate crimes every year against gay people or Mormons? I don’t think the numbers would surprise anyone.

Traditional Marriage?

After the passage of Prop. 8 , I received a message from a girl I knew in high school who is now studying to be a Marriage and Family Therapist. Her message was an attempt to comfort me by offering her explanation for why it passed:

“Most people don’t support traditional marriage because they HATE gay people- but that they LOVE traditional marriage and all it represents in our society.”

So what does ‘traditional marriage’ represent in our society? Proponents of Prop. 8 vehemently argued that marriage between a man and a woman, ‘traditional marriage,’ is the very fabric of our society. Like my former classmate so astutely pointed out, spouses in a ‘traditional marriages’ “both bring different aspects to a relationship and many of these differences are based on the differences between males and females.” Unfortunately, that answer is not good enough.

Same-Sex Marriage and Gay Marriage: A Bad Phraseology

Leading LGBT-rights groups keep referring to this issue as “same-sex marriage,” again playing the game in terms of the opposition. Both same-sex and gay marriage add unnecessary qualifiers to the word ‘marriage.’ Slightly reminiscent of colored bathrooms and white-only counters, no?

Opponents of marriage equality most often use the term same-sex marriage. It conjures up thoughts of homosexual bedroom antics. This is the way homosexuals have been defined for decades, and some would continue to have us be defined as such. So we have to phrase our battle in terms of our ownership of the struggle, and not let the opposition write any more rules.

One of Human Rights Campaign’s Facebook causes is called Legalize Same-Sex Marriage. This phrasing asks that they, whoever they are, legalize something for us, as the other. One better name would be “Enforce Marriage Equality,” i.e. our rights are protected by s/he above (the government), and they have no say in it.

This struggle has gone on for far too long in the wrong direction with the same people running it, and the onus is on us to re-define the rules and plays of the game…if we are to succeed.

Newt, your sister wrote….

Candace Gingrich wrote a very warm public letter to her brother today and published it on HuffPo.

Dear Newt,

I recently had the displeasure of watching you bash the protestors of the Prop 8 marriage ban to Bill O’Reilly on FOX News. I must say, after years of watching you build your career by stirring up the fears and prejudices of the far right, I feel compelled to use the words of your idol, Ronald Reagan, “There you go, again.”

However, I realize that you may have been a little preoccupied lately with planning your resurrection as the savior of your party, so I thought I would fill you in on a few important developments you might have overlooked….

Read about the developments he overlooked here.