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…

In addition to revealing a long-standing Mormon strategy designed to recruit Catholic bishops to their cause three years before the state’s first political fight, Proposition 22, the memo also lists one of the Mormon’s key strategists as Richard “Dick” Wirthlin, a relative of Joseph Robb and Robin Wirthlin, the Massachusetts couple who were featured in Proposition 8 campaign ads this fall as the parents of a boy who was read a book about a same-sex couple in his second grade class….

Parents in the Lexington School District in Massachusetts disputed many of the Wirthlins claims to the B.A.R., pointing out that when the Wirthlins moved into the district they were already involved with two groups seeking to ban same-sex marriage. One of those groups, MassResistance, run by Brian Camenker, has been called an “anti-gay hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Read the internal Mormon memo discussed in the article.

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….

There are those who say we should not redefine marriage. But we have redefined marriage before…According to the Bible, King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. That was a traditional marriage, but we don’t do that anymore. Not so long ago it was legal for a man to beat his wife. That was traditional marriage, too….

There will be some who say the Bible condemns homosexuality. There are 35,526 verses in the Bible. By my count only eight are about homosexuality, making this one of the very smallest issues in the Bible. So if you are prejudiced against lesbians and gays and go looking for Bible verses that, when taken out of context, con-firm your prejudice, you will be able to find a few…But according to the biblical record, Jesus himself never criticized homosexuals. He did, however, criticize self-righteous religious people who judged and condemned others. He said, “Judge not, so you will not be judged.” He said, “He that is without sin should cast the first stone.” And he said, “Remove the log from your own eye before you try to remove the speck from your neighbor’s eye.”

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?’

Jesse, why didn’t you approve my comments on your blog that pointed to these repugnant, factually skewed statements on this ‘organizations’ main page? I’m guessing approving and having to respond to my comments wouldn’t have done much to help your argument.

Finally, I must pass on this important news page from MassResistance! to concerned heterosexuals: “The homosexual movement cannot achieve their goals without eventually resorting to brutal tactics of intimidation and even terror. After lying and personal demonization, this is always the next logical step.And it will continue — and escalate — as long as the population is unwilling to fight back.”

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.

Tagged: African-American, black vote, Latrice Johnson, No on 8, Prop 8, Sullivan ]]> http://enddiscrimination.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/andrew-sullivan-no-on-8-worse-than-we-thought/feed/ 0 michael http://enddiscrimination.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/oh-national-review/ http://enddiscrimination.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/oh-national-review/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:28:36 +0000 Michael http://enddiscrimination.wordpress.com/?p=39 ]]> 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.

“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.

That a marriage must be one-half man and one-half woman to succeed is ludicrous. Even the most staunch traditionalist cannot refute the fact that more than half of (first) ‘traditional marriages’ end in divorce, with divorce rates for second and third marriages even higher. Obviously, marriage between a male and a female is not necessarily the recipe for success — an important element is missing.

Traditional marriage represents little more than failure in our society. One cannot, in good faith, make the argument that traditional marriage is so fundamental to our society that it trumps the rights of gays and lesbians to be granted equal protection under the law. Marriage is, as the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld, a fundamental right — a right that must be applied in concert with the Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. and California Constitutions.

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.

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.