Religion Dispatches brings us this excellent piece which shows more people are realizing just how much the Mormons put into the travesty of justice known as Proposition 8.
On Wednesday, January 20, in a federal courthouse in San Francisco, plaintiffs in the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger trial challenging the legality of California’s Proposition 8 introduced two documents (over strenuous objections from the defense) indicating close but cautious coordination between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Yes on 8 campaign.
The documents, according to plaintiffs’ witness Gary Segura, a professor of political science at Stanford University, indicated a desire on the part of the Church to create “plausible deniability or respectable distance between the church organization per se and the actual campaign.
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Of course they wanted to create “plausible deniability”. They couldn’t maintain the facade they keep promoting that Mormons are benign and loving toward everyone if they were the major players in a campaign to eradicate rights from a minority group, could they? But that’s where their passive-aggressive nature comes in. They love gays. They really, really love them. They love them so much they want to attach electrodes to their groins (if they’re Mormon gays), beat them for kissing in public, or eradicate their rights via a campaign of hateful lies.
Documents compiled by Mormon supporters of same-sex marriage—including campaign time lines and donor profiles—show that LDS Church ecclesiastical structures, resources, and relationships were fully mobilized to generate the majority of volunteers and donations for the Yes on 8 campaign, even as Church members were coached to handle their Mormonism carefully in campaign contributions and activities.
There was nothing plausibly deniable about the Church’s relationship to the Proposition 8 campaign when, in Sunday meetings on June 29, 2008, a letter from Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Thomas Monson was read over the pulpit of every Mormon congregation in California urging Church members to “do all you can” to support the ballot measure.
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Speaking of letters, lets not forget the blackmail attempt signed by Mormon Mark Janssen and others.
“Make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error. Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. … The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published.”
Nice folks working on the “pro-family” side. They probably all get a set of brass knuckles when they sign up.
The Church-coordinated fundraising drive intensified in late August, when select LDS Church members identified as potential large donors were invited to participate in conference calls with members of the Quorum of the Seventy, a high-ranking Church leadership body. (Mormon Yes on 8 campaign observers believe that tithing records were used to identify call participants.) On the conference calls, high-ranking church leaders encouraged potential large donors to individually contribute $25,000 to protectmarriage.com.
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And they donated like the good little worker bees they’re trained to be. Take Stephen Samuelian, who donated $100,000, for instance, or Charles and Gloria Pope ($60,000 between them–and their own daughter is a lesbian). Of course they’re only a few of the thousands of Mormons in Base8. (The estimates that about 75% of the donations to Yes on 8 came from Mormons are pretty much dead on from what we’ve discovered. If you don’t believe us, see for yourself.)
That’s when Nadine Hansen, a Mormon veteran of the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, initiated an effort to document the extent of Mormon funding for the Yes on 8 campaign. During the ERA campaign, Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson had shared with Hansen fundraising disclosure sheets from an anti-ERA group that had raised money in California. Using church directories, Hansen was then able to identify “all but one or two” of the ERA donors as Mormon. Sensing that the Church was pressing ERA-era strategies into service once again, she prepared to undertake the same donor-identification project for Proposition 8 at the Web site mormonsfor8.com.
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The Mormon church is very good at mobilizing its minions, and their methods work. Don’t ever fall for their cries of persecution when called on it, or pretense that they did nothing.
Mormon volunteers were coached to avoid disclosing their ties to the LDS Church. “When we went to our training meetings, they said, don’t bring up the fact that you’re Mormon. Don’t wear white shirts and ties; don’t look like missionaries. When you go out [canvassing], bring a non-member friend. When you’re calling people, don’t say I’m a Mormon,” says Laura Compton.
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More Lying for the Lord. Strange how those who claim to be on the side of righteousness and truth feel the need to engage in so much subterfuge to achieve their desired results.
On October 8, LDS Church members in California attended a special meeting broadcast from Salt Lake City by satellite to wards and stakes throughout California and to BYU students with California ties. Encouraging Church members to think of the satellite broadcast as though they were “sitting in [a] living room having a confidential talk,” high-ranking LDS Church officials, members of the Quorum of the Twelve and the Quorum of the Seventy, introduced Church members to the final voter persuasion and get-out-the-vote “phases” of the campaign, asking members to use social networking technology to “go viral” with their support for Proposition 8 and commit four hours each week to the ground and phone campaign.
A primary source of Mormon messaging during the Proposition 8 campaign was the anonymously-authored “Six Consequences if Prop 8 Fails” document, which went viral across Mormon social networks after its introduction by email in mid-August and was utilized as a training document and handout in the Mormon-coordinated ground campaign. The document alleged that the legalization of same-sex marriage would eventuate in the teaching of same-sex marriage in public schools and the elimination of religious freedoms. Mormon legal scholar Morris Thurston described this as “untrue” and “misleading” and urged the LDS Church to discontinue its further dissemination.
As it turns out, the “Six Consequences” propaganda piece was indeed concocted by a Mormon. Big surprise. Not.
Highly centralized and hierarchical LDS institutional structures, widespread experience with door-to-door proselytizing, disciplined messaging among former missionaries, and extensive social networks that facilitated viral messaging, combined with a religious and cultural tradition that assigns enormous value to obedience to church authorities, service, discipline, and sacrifice to create a potent political force that was no secret to those within the culture.
It’s no secret to many of us outside the “culture” now, anymore, thanks to Prop 8. All the green jello and funeral potatoes in the world won’t ameliorate the harm Mormons have done to LGBT families.
“They did not want to be outed,” Hansen relates. “And yet they were with ones with all the organizational skills. And whether its because [the Church] is concerned about tax-exempt status or they want to avoid bad publicity… they want to do it and not have anyone know they do it at the same time.”
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If they wanted to harm others in anonymity perhaps they should have donned white hoods. As it stands they can deny and play the victim all they want, but LDSinc is now inextricably linked with Prop 8, and with hatred.
