One of the more crazy-making claims coming in the wake of Prop. 8 is that the Mormon Church did nothing to encourage (or coerce) church members into giving the 25 million dollars donated by Mormons to Yes on 8, which spent millions disseminating duplicitous ads about what Prop 8 was fighting and what it would accomplish. "The church didn't order anyone to do anything!" an LDS troll wrote me yesterday. Maybe socults often depend on subtler devices than direct orders.
But here's the thing: I have the firsthand testimony of a California Mormonmy sister-in-law Anawho told Jake and me that she donated $100 to Yes on 8 specifcally to "obey the prophet." From her letter:
You already know we believe in the Churchand, by corollary, the importance of thoughtful and considered obedience to divinely called leaders, and have made our decision to stand in that place. We both know our leaders can sometimes make mistakes, and we make our choices in that knowledge. Sometimes it feels like being a politician who votes for a bill with one horrendous clause added by an opponent, because the bill has other, more important content that must be implemented. It's not clean or easy. It's very hard to decide what is right when there are so many components both good and bad.But when we look back at polygamy or the "Negro question" for example, we feel like as awful as those things are, we wouldn't have wanted to give up on our most important feelings and beliefs because of them. I guess I feel like we were not so much supporting Prop 8 as making this small signal that we believe in a prophet. If it were just me, I'd probably be firmly on the other side. But I feel like "just me" is not the supreme authority and I have to acknowledge that I might be wrong. I know this probably will not sit well with you, but if we are wrong we are wrong with the best organization we can find, and if (I hope when) it someday changes for the better we will rejoice with the body of the Saints in that change - not look at them as outsiders wondering why it took so long.
Additional facts about Ana: She and her husband are the parents of four children, all adopted, all brown (two African-American, one Latina, one biracial). Here's what she blogged on election night:
Tuesday, November 04, 2008How a couple of black kids feel tonight
A lot of my friends might not have immediate access to the responses of the elementary-school-age African American demographic without me, so I thought I'd help you out tonight.
A, biracial, age 7, praying: "Thank you for giving us a good blessing and letting Barack Obama be the president. Bless John McCain that he won't feel too bad, because he's a good man and he tried really hard."
S, full African-American, age 9, listening to the victory speech: "Martin Luther King is alive again."
I've kept quiet throughout the hubbub surrounding the discovery of Ana's donation to Yes on 8 (a discovery made extra galling by her family's financial dependence on her parents/my father- and mother-in-law, whose feelings about Prop 8 couldn't be clearer). But I can't help wondering how the kids of the 20,000 same-sex couples that Proposition 8 turned into bastards feel.
I'm not sure gay marriage is a great social ill. I understand that it wouldn't work in the Church. But I think there could be solutions that wouldn't require the Church to perform such marriages. And I think there are rights we often associate with marriage (like health insurance or being with a dying loved one in the hospital) that are basic human needs or rights having nothing to do with sexual orientation. Without direction from the Church I would probably campaign for legal domestic partnerships with the same rights as marriage. With direction from the Church ...A friend replies...
Personally, I am completely and wholly against gay marriage with or without the Church. I'm all for civil unions and giving them the same rights that married couples and enjoy, but marriage is sacred. It was designed with the idea in mind that a man and a woman would marry and create children (a family), something that homosexual relations cannot accomplish. The family, as designed by God, is eternal.Ana responds, and I was right about one thing...
Get the government out of the marriage business altogether. Legal unions should be only civil, and the same for everyone. Then whoever wanted to have a church-sanctified marriage could do so within the church of their choice. Inevitably there would be churches willing to sanctify gay marriage. But each church would be able to set its own limits. So that's just another way of making gay marriage legal, but I think it would protect the freedom of individual churches to preserve their doctrinal preferences. And BTW, my marriage cannot create children, either. Pull on that thread and see what happens to the cloth. That's why to me no solution seems cut and dry.Oh snap. (The person never responds.) Ana seems to occasionally have her head in one area, but the split-second thought of the Church seems to gear her away, even blindly. The blog teeters back and forth and back and forth. One of the first "gay" issues in the blog involved a Style Guide to a University she was writing. Or her husband was writing. In the earlier posts, it's really hard to tell who is writing what. All of the posts are listed under her handle, yet some of them appear to be her husband, and some of them appear to be both, talking about each other as if they were both at the computer taking turns writing every two or three paragraphs but forgot to tell us when they would switch off. This was one of them. I think it's the husband. Aaaaanyway...
It's been interesting for me to write some things I'm not sure I agree with 100%. One suggestion is not to refer to "the gay lifestyle, because there is no one gay lifestyle." I believe there is a difference between gay and lesbian people who are sexually active with members of the same sex, and gay and lesbian people who by their own choice are not. And I believe that's a lifestyle difference, in fact I think it's the lifestyle difference I think most social conservatives are referring to when they say "gay lifestyle." But that definition isn't accepted by most gay and lesbian people or by social liberals. And as a general principle I do believe in people's right to define the language used to speak about them. So that suggestion stands in my style guide. I want respect for my self-definition and my definition for my family. So of course I have to give it to others.These moments are where it's hard to be open minded about their inevitable idiocy given that they're Mormons. This reads to me as: "Fuckin' sucks when I can't randomly tell some homo that if they're having homo sex, they're living a different lifestyle than the A+ certified one where they aren't having homo sex, duh, and, like, if I'm going to be talking about anything gay I'm going to want to address this." I can give you a decision and a lifestyle right now: being a fucking Mormon. Anyway, if there's anything I can do after wasting an hour and a half jumping around that blog, well...I can tell you three things: Ana is a genuinely nice person with a good heart. Ana seems to be on the better end of the Mormon cult. Ana also definitely maybe has a brain tumor and will probably die in a year or so.
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