Seriously, if Orlando's headed this way, pls pass along that there's no need to be shy. We're here. Guest rooms, friends, the whole nine yards.
Genghis knows where to reach me.
]]>Which is kind of the whole point of Margaret's essay.
Black, white, Mormon or not, we're all agreed that Beck's an asshat, right?
Just sayin'.
I'm neither a believer in nor an apologist for the LDS faith. But Mormonism is where I come from and I haven't turned out all that bad. It's not a zero-sum game. I'd like to think that I'm proof that progress is possible.
If Margaret chooses to still believe, to the extent that she refuses to apologize when the institutional church goes wrong, I'm going to respect that. At least in this thread (ha!).
And if cornered, I might even defend some of the more admirable aspects of a religious culture whose influence in American civic life I mostly decry. But that's not what this post is about.
I've railed long and hard enough against the LDS church that I don't feel any need to apologize to my readers for the random occasions when I detect and applaud a note of humanity being sung by the other choir.
Not that we can't have this conversation, but I'd much rather get back to dissin' Beck, OK?
]]>Corrections always welcome. Gratuitous insults? Not so much.
]]>Saudades do Brasil! Tchau!
]]>Twenty years on, it seems pretty apparent that we've now teamed up with the theocons.
]]>Last year, I helped construct a timeline of Mormon involvement in Prop 8, and this was one of the early dates that stood out:
September 2007: Mitt Romney, in an interview with Christianity Today, describes an earlier 2007 Salt Lake City meeting between Jerry Falwell and Gordon B. Hinckley to discuss their cooperation on a campaign against same-sex marriage in California.
Source: http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/8536/
So, yeah, the Mormons and the Falwells were planning a joint effort on Prop 8 way back before anyone had even heard of Prop 8.
]]>http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/06/us/AP-US-Gay-Rights-Herbert.html
The article also links to a site that some fellow Mormons have set up, and I'm gonna drop a link here, since they're trying in their own way to make some headway with the Utah and LDS leadership:
]]>Apparently, public school teachers could soon have the power to turn kids gay and would begin marrying them off during school hours just as soon as they were.
]]>Robby George over at Princeton who chairs NOM is no dummy. As he said in a speech at BYU, at some point the full faith and credit clause will be brought to apply and Utah will be "whipped into line" (his words - which lead to wonder if he isn't an Opus Dei self-flagellator - maybe a topic for another post).
]]>Regarding your final question, the explanation I've heard from LDS General Authorities (like Nelson above, and Bednar elsewhere) is that increasing hostility to discrimination against gays threatens to lead to the silencing of the Mormon view that there's something fundamentally wrong with gays, or something like that. It requires a serious Mormon-sized persecution complex to understand.
]]>If you're interested in reading a serious Mormon conservative's thoughts on marriage equality, I've always been impressed by Nate Oman's contributions to the discussion:
]]>Because, although rebellion sounds like more fun, the folks on the ground who we're counting on now have already been there and done that, and now it's all about them getting the work done.
And I'm now cautiously optimistic that they will.
This post is mostly a call to those stragglers among the faithful who remain hesitant to shout the truth in their hearts from the roof tops: be kind and be not afraid.
]]>