Alone and Unobserved

The Colbert Coalition’s Anti-Gay Marriage Ad

A few days ago, the Yes on 8 campaign sent out letters to businesses that had donated to Equality California, implying that their business’s name was being tarnished by association, and basically threatening to “out” them as gay-rights supporters if they didn’t donate an equal amount to Yes on 8.

You can read the entire text of one of the letters on the No on 8 website. Notice that Yes on 8 obtained these business’s names directly from the donor page on the Equality Utah site, which makes their threat to “publish” a list of “companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California” an empty one. Also note the infelicitous phrasing. Can no one at Yes on 8 write a reasonable business letter?

Further note the signatures at the end of the letter: Ron Prentice, Yes on 8 campaign chair; Edward Dolesji, executive director of the California Catholic Conference; Andrew Pugno, attorney for the Yes on 8 campaign . . . and Mark Janssen, who is identified in several news articles, including this Associate Press article, as a member of the Mormon church.

This is the same Mormon church that has poured millions of dollars into the Yes on 8 campaign, pressured its members to donate their time and energy to the cause, and openly spread lies and half-truths in an attempt to win support for the proposition.

For shame, Mark Janssen. For shame, Mormon president Thomas Monson. If your cause really were just, if your motives really were pure, if your god really were behind you, you would not need to stoop to lying and intimidation to convince people to join you. Give up these tactics and follow the tenets of your own religion, or everyone will know what a bunch of hating hypocrites you are. And that’s not a threat, it’s simply a fact.

Check out the Mormon church’s August 13 press release on “The Divine Institution of Marriage“—i.e., on all the reasons for that church’s bigoted all-out war on marriage equality. Pay especial attention to the footnotes:

• To support their claim for the need for “gender-differentiated parenting,” the best they can do is cite two books from 1996 (which were really about single-parent homes), before any of the research on same-sex parenting came in.
• At one point they cite conservative hack Maggie Gallagher’s ridiculous sky-is-falling piece, “Banned in Boston: The Coming Conflict Between Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty” from 2006.
• They never even glance at the actual evidence out of Europe, which indicates that same-sex unions have not had any negative effect on society or marriage, and, if anything, have been of benefit.

Best of all: the majority of the quotes come from Mormon religious leaders, doctrines and scriptures. This is not the kind of press release anyone should be paying attention to—not Mormons, not gays, not anyone—except to recognize it for what it is: a pathetic, bigoted diatribe, cloaked in warm, cloying, condescending language.

A great deal has been said by many people on the subject of the letter the Mormon leaders wrote urging Mormon faithful to “[d]o all [they] can to support the proposed constitutional amendment” against gay marriage in California. It was Cog’s post—and the subsequent discussion—that finally inspired me to write about it myself.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was personally involved in the Prop. 22 push in California in 2000, along with many, many other Mormons. When I think back, it’s like I was a different person. I wasn’t just a fanatical Mormon who despised gays, but I was also much more authoritarian, more punitive, and interested in legislation that would outlaw behavior I didn’t agree with—a philosophy that makes no sense to me now, at least when it comes to non-harmful behavior.

I guess the question is, is gay marriage harmful? And the answer is: it doesn’t matter, because it can’t possibly be more harmful than cohabitation, which is not illegal and happens all over the place, by gays and straights. The same goes for gay adoption: gays have and raise children, and there is no jurisdiction in which this is completely illegal—nor can I think of a way to consistently legislate against it, if the idea is so heinous to society. Consider a single lesbian mother raising her natural offspring. How is this scenario made worse by her having a loving lesbian partner, and the partner adopting the children? Now, how is it made worse if she and her partner are married to each other?

Gay people exist. They are not going away. Gay relationships exist. They are not going away. Gay parents exist, and they are not going away. Gay people, gay relationships and gay families are part of society. Society is strengthened when they are strengthened and society is damaged when they are attacked and denied legitimacy. The Mormon church and the “pro-family” groups are acting as enemies of society in their battle against gay marriage. This is a fact that should be openly recognized by gays, straights, Mormons, non-Mormons, the religious and the non-religious alike.