June 24, 2008

Mormons Launch Full-Scale Attack on Marriage Equality (Like They Have Room to Talk?)

Oh, this is rich: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. the Mormons) is throwing its weight behind the November ballot initiative to strip gay and lesbian Californians of marriage equality.

How about taking the big, fat log out of thine own eye first, LDS? I’m not even talking about the way the church, with all its power and superiority, can’t even manage to rein in its own modern-day rogue polygamists — the FLDS sickos (can you say “Warren Jeffs“?) who keep “marrying” their 12-year-old girl-cousins and throwing their own teenage boys out on the street before they can become a threat to the Elder Daddies (who want to keep “marrying” their 12-year-old girl-cousins without any virile young bucks getting in the way).

No, I’m talking about the way the LDS church redefined marriage when “prophet” Wilford Woodruff (”the only man on the earth at the present time who holds the keys of the sealing ordinances”) had a “divine revelation” and declared that plural marriage was no longer a “divine principle,” and was now prohibited.

Funny how Woodruff’s “divine revelation” coincided with the campaign for Utah’s statehood (1896), eh? Ya think Utah would have attained statehood at all if its men remained free to marry little girls (and lots of little girls) under the gossamer-thin pretense of “religious freedom”?

The Mormons, as the PBS documentary of the same name noted, paid “a high price politically for their embrace of polygamy. For 47 years, Utah was denied admission as a state. The United States government insisted that the Mormon church must completely renounce polygamy.”

It finally took an act of Congress — literally — to force the Mormons to obey the law, via the Edmonds-Tucker Act: “Now we will target the church itself. We will seek to prohibit immigration of people to the United States who are Mormon. We will disfranchise members of the Mormon Church. They will not be allowed to sit on juries. They will not have the right to hold office, they will not have the right to vote. And we will seize the property of the Mormon church.”

“In 1890, under enormous pressure, the new leader, Prophet Wilford Woodruff, issued a manifesto that he would only years later describe as a revelation. In it, he announced that from this time forward, the LDS church renounced polygamy. … The church’s official renunciation of polygamy and other political concessions finally led to statehood for Utah in 1896.”

In other words, the redefinition of marriage by the LDS church was about nothing but politics and money. And you can better your buttons that polygamy would still be condoned by the Mormon church today if it could get away with it.

And these holier-than-thou hypocrites — whose forebears settled in Utah to escape interference by the government in their religious activity — have the audacity to insinuate their ever-changing belief system into the public square to influence what they perceive as a redefinition of marriage? And in another state?

Polygamy, of course, is hardly the first or the last seemingly iron-clad law the LDS church has switched gears on by way of these so-called “divine revelations” — which usually, ever-so-conveniently come along just as the church is undergoing intense pressure from the reality-based world to jerk itself out of the Dark Ages on a given issue. Ever hear how God “placed the Negroes originally in darkest Africa” to keep them from intermarrying with whites? How God “placed a dark skin upon them as a curse — as a punishment and as a sign to all others,” forbidding “intermarriage with them under threat of extension of the curse”? And then how, ever so suddenly, “God changed His/Her/Its mind in 1978 about how cursed and lowly the black race was“?

Don’t believe me? Go study up on the “Curse of Ham” yourself. (But don’t blame me if you end up punching out the next Mormon missionary who shows up on your doorstep.)

That, folks, that is the Mormon church for you.

(Don’t even get me started on the Mormons’ shocking — I mean literally shocking, as in penile electrodes — history of torture to “cure” homosexuality.)

Of course, the Mormons’ oh-so-proud history of white supremacism all but disappeared in 1978, when LDS Grand Poobah Spencer Kimball had a “divine revelation” that God suddenly changed his mind and decided that black people weren’t — literally — the scum of the earth after all.

Do you think the LDS’s backpedal on the status of African-Americans was really the result of some “divine revelation”? We don’t — any more than we believe Uri Geller’s spoon-bending is the result of “divine” telekinesis.

We predict that something, someday, will come along to convince some future head of the LDS church to suddenly have a “divine revelation” about gay people (and women, too, who in the church still “enjoy” a status barely half a notch above where African-Americans were 30 years ago). We can’t imagine what will inspire that “divine revelation,” but we expect that it will be something along the lines of the LDS President being caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

No issue is too big or too small for the LDS to reverse its set-in-stone position after its Big Kahuna experiences a “divine revelation” — even magic underwear. (Why did the church really decide to alter its “sacred” undie design? We’re guessing ’cause the old design created unsightly lumps under the costumes Bob Mackie was designing for Donny and Marie.)

Now, with all that hypocrisy in mind, let’s get back to the issue at hand. From today’s Salt Lake Tribune:

LDS Church backs proposed California ‘one man-one woman’ marriage amendment

On the 39th anniversary of New York City’s Stonewall Riots, which arguably launched the gay rights movement…

Oh, yeah, if I forget (the anniversary is actually the 27th): Happy Stonewall Day, everyone!

…the LDS Church is asking California Mormons to support a proposed constitutional amendment that would recognize only marriages between a man and a woman.

In a statement to be read in California churches Sunday, LDS President Thomas S. Monson, with his counselors in the governing First Presidency, Henry B. Eyring and Dieter F. Uchtdorf, say Mormon teachings on the issue “are unequivocal.”

“Unequivocal”? “Unequivocal”?! Just like Mormon teachings on the “Curse of Ham” were “unequivocal”?

“Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for his children,” the statement says.

What about marriage between a man and a whole bunch of women (or young girls)? That was “unequivocal” at one time, too.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will participate with a “broad-based coalition of churches and other organizations” to promote the amendment, which will be on the Nov. 8 ballot.

“Do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time,” the statement says.

Church spokesman Scott Trotter confirmed the authenticity of the statement published Saturday on the Internet, but declined to comment further.

“We are disappointed,” said Dave Melson, assistant executive director of Affirmation, a support and advocacy group for Mormon gays, lesbians and their families that has about 2,000 members.

“We had hoped the church would back off and stay on the sidelines of this one.”

I feel ya, Dave — when I was still a Catholic, I used to hope the Vatican would stay out of the business of making everybody else’s life miserable, too. But, come on, Dave, don’t tell me you’re actually surprised by this… are you?

Current California law deals only with civil marriage. It does not affect religious rites or institutions.

Ohhhh noes!!!11!1 You can’t tell people that, Tribune, or they’ll understand that in no way will any church be forced to marry anybody it doesn’t want to! You’ll have eliminated one of the biggest lies the anti-gay crusaders use to scare the schnitzel out of the general public!

(Never mind, of course, that while the anti-gay crusaders outright lie about the state interfering with their freedom of religion, they sidestep the fact that they’re trying to impose their religious beliefs on the state.)

The LDS Church has been involved in the California effort to promote traditional marriage since 1998, when it spent $1.1 million to defeat proposals in Hawaii and Alaska. At the same time, LDS leaders in California urged members to support Proposition 22, a law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

Yeah, they did — and we know why they did it in Hawaii: they own half the bloody state. (I hope everyone realizes that the very lucrative Polynesian Cultural Center on Oahu is nothing but a big, fat cash cow — and recruitment center — for the Mormon church.)

“We were asked to canvass neighbors, go door to door with the petition and ask for support,” Russell Frandsen, a Latter-day Saint in southern California, told The Salt Lake Tribune in March. “A large number of us volunteered to do that. I suppose most of us did it out of a sense of responsibility.”

So the Mormon church is telling its members what to do in order to promote a specific state ballot initiative. I so wish the IRS would strip the LDS (and every other church) of its tax-exempt status for politicking from the pulpit, but, sadly: “Clergy can and do address public policy concerns, ranging from abortion, gay rights and gun control to poverty, civil rights and the death penalty. They may support legislation pending in Congress or the state legislatures, or call for its defeat. They may endorse or oppose ballot referenda. Indeed, discussion of public issues is a common practice in religious institutions all over America. The only thing houses of worship may not do is endorse or oppose candidates for public office or use their resources in partisan campaigns.” [”Religion, Partisan Politics And Tax Exemption: What Federal Law Requires And Why,” Americans United for Separation of Church and State]

Earlier this year, the LDS Church joined with several California religious groups, including the California Catholic Conference, National Association of Evangelicals, and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, to file a friend-of-the-court brief in defense of Proposition 22…

Politics… strange bedfellows… “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”… What a pack of shameless hypocrites, the lot of them. (Hey, Mormons, Catholics, evangelicals, Orthodix Jews: When this is all over — and you’ve lost — you’ll still wake up the next morning, each of you thinking the other is condemned to hell for beliefs that don’t coincide with yours. I guarantee it.)

In 2006, the LDS Church joined a national religious coalition to push an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. LDS Apostle Russell M. Nelson was among 50 prominent Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish leaders who signed a petition explaining why they see a need for such a constitutional amendment.

“We are convinced that this is the only measure that will adequately protect marriage from those who would circumvent the legislative process and force a redefinition of it on the whole of our society,” reads the petition. …

Oh, go redefine your own marriages, you sad old busybodies — or, better yet, go invent some magical panties of your own. I hear they keep evil spirits away.

Here’s the thing, folks: I don’t give a rat’s patoot what anybody practices, religion-wise, as long as nobody else (like children, animals, or people who don’t follow that religion) gets hurt.

I don’t care if you want to believe (as Mormons do) that God lives somewhere in outer space near a star nobody’s ever heard of called Kolob, and that Mormons who do everything right will “literally become gods, get to have their own spirit children, and create their own planets to populate them with.”

I don’t care if you want to believe (as Scientologists do) that you’re full of body thetans as the result of 178 billion people being blown up by a 75-million-year-old volcano.

I don’t care if you want to believe that God is going to appear on cable TV and then rescue his people from the Tribulation by swooping down in a flying saucer (Chen Tao).

I don’t care if you want to believe that Benny Hinn can raise your grandma from the dead if you prop her corpse up in front of the TV.

I don’t even care if you want to kill yourself so you can take a ride on a spaceship behind a comet (Heaven’s Gate).

But when your beliefs interfere with my life, or anyone else’s, that’s where my tolerance ends. The right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

Listen up, Latter-day “Saints”: Get your fist away from my nose. Now.

And stay the hell off my porch, too.