Monday, November 10, 2008

Another Thought On That Mormon / Prop 8 Thing

I have to admit, Mormons aren't the reason Proposition 8 passed in California. It's 52% of Calfornians who are the reason. I can countenance a little low-brow tit-for-tat, goose/gander action (like my idea from the other day) against Mormons... but the way that the anti-Prop-8 protestors are targeting the Mormon Church with menacing temple-front demonstrations, chest-thumping objurgations of the "this-is-all-your-fault" variety, and scheming punitory legal action against the Mormon church for doing what was well within their rights to do is not very productive.

Dale Carpenter says it best:
Here's my advice to righteously furious gay-marriage supporters: Stop the focus on the Mormon Church. Stop it now. We just lost a ballot fight in which we were falsely but effectively portrayed as attacking religion. So now some of us attack a religion? People were warned that churches would lose their tax-exempt status, which was untrue. So now we have (frivolous) calls for the Mormon Church to lose its tax-exempt status? It's rather selective indignation, anyway, since lots of demographic groups gave us Prop 8 in different ways — some with money and others with votes. I understand the frustration, but this particular expression of it is wrong and counter-productive.
Hat tip Sullivan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quite true. There was an article today that discussed, mathematically speaking, that one of the reasons why Prop 8 passed was Barack Obama. It makes sense when you look at who voted for him in large numbers in California --Hispanics and African-Americans -- but who will be more conservative on that issue.

Jil Wrinkle said...

Yeah. It's really sad that black people would vote to take away rights from another minority.

Andrew Sullivan is far and away my favorite blogger. He's a conservative and he's also gay. He is right when he says that the largest and most strongly anti-gay population in the world is black people.