"Mormons have ten wives--why can't I have one?"
--Sign held by female protester outside Los Angeles LDS temple during Prop 8 protest.
"Hi, we're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We're here to take away your rights."
--LDS missionaries to lesbian couple as portrayed in the anti-Prop 8 movie Home Invasion.
All right, ladies and gentlemen. I used to favor gay marriage. Then I came to law school and I was on the fence. I was content to just sit back, hold my tongue except for personal conversations in my own living room and engage in reasoned, open-minded discussion. Maybe gay marriage was all right, I mean, just another societal shift that wouldn't affect me that much. I was willing to accept and deal with this for a while, no matter my moral stance on the issue.
Now Prop 8 has passed, effectively banning gay marriage in California. And the rainbow crowd and the intellectual liberals have trained their sights on the LDS church for actively campaigning for the proposition (as is their Constitutional right to do--see: U.S. Constitution, 1st Amendment). Confrontational protests outside the L.A. temple. Another one planned in Salt Lake for tonight. But why us? Last I checked, the Catholics and the Evangelicals were in on this too. And if this past election has shown us anything, it's the surprising power of Evangelicals voting in blocks (see: Hucakbee, Mike).
Why are my people made out to be the lone bad guy, the target of such acrimony and revulsion? The anti-Prop 8 crowd has built their campaign on freedom of action and the right to exercise Constitutional privileges. How terribly hypocritical it is, then, for a group of supposed "progressives" and "intellectuals" to engage in a wholesale abandon of those bedrock principles to sanctimoniously attack my people for doing precisely that--using their Constitutional privilege to fight for that which they believe to be right!
I'm done being nice. I've had it with pantywaist pundits and ignorant lay people bandying about the Constitution as some sort of trump card, a shield that magically validates their every whim. I'm sick of the blind bigotry displayed by progressives who accuse their conservative brethren (often rightly) of the same. You have navigated a sea of pop culture and waves of twisted logic to become what you profess to hate, and I mock you for it. Let it be known that I am now firmly and avowedly anti-gay marriage, not just morally, but socially, politically, intellectually, and legally. Not because I'm morally opposed to it (I always was); not because it's as legally defensible as it is indefensible (which I'm finding out); but because you have made me this way. Your raving, your hatred, your bigotry, your indescribable hypocrisy is the straw that broke this camel's back. You've attacked my people out of your blind hatred, and your huffing and puffing has blown me off of the fence on to the other side.
To the lady with the sign I mentioned at the outset: Climb out from under that pretentious little rock you apparently live under and get your facts straight. There is not a single Mormon man who has more than one wife, and it has been that way for almost 150 years now. Those who engage in bigamy are summarily excommunicated. We have tried for decades to make this clear, sending this message across the globe through every available medium. You apparently did not get this message for all your supposed "open-mindedness." So allow me to tell you myself: Mormons do not engage in, nor condone, polygamous marriage. End of story. Nothing makes you look more ignorant than using falsehoods as a logical pretense upon which to build your protest. Your argument is fatally flawed and I mock it. You're an unmitigated embarrassment to your cause.
To the writers, producers, directors, and associates of Home Invasion: You assail to protect the fundamental rights of a minority from bigotry and ignorance. Yet, never in my life have I seen such blatantly false, hateful, pretentious, regressive campaigning for a cause in my life. What you have done borders on the hate speech typical of Hitler's rhetoric and Stalin's rule. You have willingly spread slanderous lies and planted seeds of misinformation and ignorance in the minds of those who may otherwise come to know the truth for themselves, only to be blinded by your unabashed lust to satisfy your political appetite. You have slashed and razed the innocent minds of those you have encountered, leaving a black, desolate, smoldering landscape of lies and ignorance in your wake, while that which is most dear to me (my religion) hangs from a tree, choked by your hypocrisy and mutilated by your bloody hands. I sincerely hope you pay for setting my people (a religious minority, might I add) back in this manner.
Finally, to all those who would point their dirty fingers at my church and say our actions have unfairly deprived a minority of a fundamental right; to all those who say the Mormon church is an old, stodgy bully that just doesn't get it; to all those who say we do not know whereof we speak: Need I remind you all that this nation's government undertook to regulate the way in which a religious minority married over a century ago when it threatened to breach the bounds of the church-state relationship and end my people if they continued polygamous marriage? Did we fight? No, we could not. Did we protest? No, we obeyed and submitted under commandment from God to the dictates of the government, believing it to be for the greater good. And why was our right to practice our religion as we saw fit (a clear, fundamental First Amendment right) so egregiously infringed upon? Not on legal grounds, and certainly not on Constitutional grounds, but solely because our practice was seen as morally reprehensible, incompatible with the mores upon which American society was based. Yet we carried on, indeed we thrived.
This premise, may I point out, is your argument. Moral repudiation is no excuse for infringing on the rights of a minority to marry as they see fit, you say. Nobody has a right to tell another how to marry or who they can marry. You trumpet this banner about proudly on your high horses while approving of other laws and practices based upon the same premises. Where are your protests about bigamy laws, marital licensing laws, bestiality laws? You cannot simultaneously applaud gay marriage and condemn polygamy (or polyandry, for that matter). It is logically and legally impossible. Your ignorance is mind-blowing; words have not been written that would adequately describe the breadth and width of your intolerance. Are we intolerant for denying gay marriage? Perhaps in a way we are. But you are equally so, you see. Get off your high horse and don't you dare thumb your noses at us, you hypocrites.
Furthermore, you rail against my people, saying they have denied a minority the right of freedom of expression. Yet you rail against them because they exercise this same right. We are a church, a society based upon a moral code that we enforce upon none outside of our faith. We have just as much a right to speak up, campaign, and persuade as you do. You would force us, however, to change our ways, to abrogate our moral basis to accommodate your desires. We have forced nothing on you, yet you seek to destroy the very basis upon which we are built because a compromise (civil union) is not enough for you. We merely voice our opinions. You would annihilate our beliefs to conform to your personal moral code. Who is really being attacked?
You say Prop 8 violates the separation of church and state. Yet marriage was a religious institution long before a civil one. In fact, the Constitution does not mention marriage at all! If anything violates the separation of church and state, it's your attempt to use the legal system to override and dictate our religious beliefs. If the concept of the separation of church and state is valid, the corollary separating religion and popular opinion must be equally valid if the First Amendment is to have any meaning at all.
And finally, may a lay out a legal principle, although I imagine it will not register with the more bigoted among you: gay marriage is not a fundamental Constitutional right. Loving v. Virginia is celebrated for recognizing a fundamental right to marry, not a right to marry whoever you want. This right, moreover, is not found in any text of the Constitution, but in the minds of Supreme Court justices who looked at the penumbra of individual rights to confer legal legitimacy upon a mainstay institution of society. Loving attached legal significance to what had existed since before the birth of this nation. It did not give you a means to change it to fit your desires.
You lost Prop 8. Get over it and leave us in peace.
Posts
