Chino Blanco's Blog tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565 2009-11-12T19:56:05Z Movable Type Pro 4.21-en Ultra-Conservative Utah Think Tank in Open Revolt against LDS leadership tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.301587 2009-11-12T18:06:20Z 2009-11-12T19:56:05Z LDS Apostle Elder Jeffrey R. Holland: Salt Lake City gay-rights measures could work statewide. Utah’s Sutherland Institute responds:As a public relations opportunity, the LDS Church’s statement before the Salt Lake City Council may assuage the minds and soften the hearts... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com LDS Apostle Elder Jeffrey R. Holland: Salt Lake City gay-rights measures could work statewide.

Utah’s Sutherland Institute responds:

As a public relations opportunity, the LDS Church’s statement before the Salt Lake City Council may assuage the minds and soften the hearts of advocates of “gay rights” in Utah. As a policy statement, it is problematic. The approved ordinances before the Salt Lake City Council are unsound in principle, clarity, and effect.

We, once again, call on the Utah State Legislature to overturn these local ordinances on the basis of sound public policy.

Sutherland’s president, Paul Mero: The Gloves Must Come Off
Sexual orientation is an illusion. Your idea of rights is an illusion. Your equality is illusory.
Video and complete transcript after the break.

]]>

Excerpt from Paul Mero’s opening remarks at the Common Ground debate with Equality Utah:

The gloves must come off. The fact remains that we don’t just disagree with you over the Common Ground Initiative, we disagree with you over nearly every motivating assumption that underlies the initiative.

We’re dealing here with two separate realities: one truth, one illusion. The intellectual, legal and moral chasm between the two sides is so great that true common ground is nearly impossible to achieve. And so, for my part anyway, I’m here to argue that the Equality Utah version of reality is an illusion.

The CGI bills constantly refer to sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is an illusion. It only exists in the minds of activists, and their academics, who need to explain away why people do what they do even when they don’t want to do it.

There are no replicable scientific or medical studies about that issue of sexual orientation that exist. Never mind that the only way it can be identified is through sexual behavior. There’s no reasonable argument to be made that subjective feelings or attractions toward another human being means anything deeper than what it actually is.

The truth is that we are born male and female with moral agency. Because it’s behavior, our sexuality is always a choice, and any other sexual construct is an illusion.

Your idea of rights is an illusion. With the backing of every miserable misanthropic philosopher of the post-Enlightenment era, your initiative feeds on the unreasonable notion that you have these magically organic rights to do whatever you desire.

These rights are usually couched in terms of equality, but because you constantly confuse what you do for who you are, your equality is illusory. You think your equality is about who you are, when it’s really only about what you do. In terms of human behavior, there’s no equality as you try to imagine.

Check out the first comment left in response to Sutherland’s statement on this thread:
I am not sure what the Sutherland group thinks they are doing, but the Brethren have spoken. No more needs to be said.
Folks like Sutherland’s Paul Mero have built careers in Utah peddling the notion that “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” are figments of disordered minds. With the LDS church now suddenly supporting ordinances that include this supposedly “make-believe” terminology, is the Sutherland Institute finally being hung out to dry?

Popcorn time.

Here’s local Utah TV coverage of the controversy:

Two further links with background/news re this interesting development:

Paul Mero Splits From The Church

Strange bedfolk

]]> Mormon Like Me: Black Saints, Bigots, and Beck tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.298090 2009-10-26T15:13:24Z 2009-10-26T15:27:33Z Guest post by MJBY (The author teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University and has written extensively about blacks in the American West). Marshall, Missouri — I’ve known the name of the town for a decade now, since I teamed... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com Guest post by MJBY (The author teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University and has written extensively about blacks in the American West).

Marshall, Missouri — I’ve known the name of the town for a decade now, since I teamed with Darius Gray to write three books and produce two documentaries on blacks in the Old West — black Mormons, to be specific — a subject which causes most to raise a skeptical brow. The usual response is, “You mean there were some?” Or “I thought you all didn’t let Blacks join your church until — what — 1980?” Or this one, which we heard at a Los Angeles book fair: “Didn’t you Mormons consider blacks one slim notch above monkeys until, like, last year?”

]]> As a white Mormon woman, I wince at such questions. I am fully aware of the appalling statements some of our Church leaders made about blacks throughout Mormon history. “You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence…” said Brigham Young in 1859 (Young 291) — one example of many I could cite. And I am all too familiar with our reputation for being a racist church. Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been publicly accused of racism simply because he’s a Mormon. Columnist Mychal Massie asserted in 2004: “Reid’s comments [about Clarence Thomas] should surprise no one - repulse, sicken and anger, yes, but surprise, no. He is simply being true to his inbred familial heritage. Mormons believed, as Reid’s comments indicate he still does: “Cain slew his brother … and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin”(Massie).

For Darius, who is a black Latter-day Saint, presumptive questions about Mormonism and race sting deep and often come with the bite of accusation. Usually, the questions are phrased in more direct ways to Darius than they are to me: “How can any self-respecting black man be a member of a church which…” This is followed by any number of reprehensible quotes from dead Mormons supporting the LDS priesthood restriction, a restriction which not only disallowed black men to be ordained to the priesthood (all other Mormon men are generally ordained at age twelve), but forbade all people of African descent from entering Mormon temples to participate in the profoundly significant endowment ceremony. The policy was in place from 1852-1978.

Darius learned about the priesthood restriction the night before his scheduled baptism and wrestled with the information for hours. He determined not to be baptized, and then wrestled some more. Finally, he prayed, and then prayed again. I have heard him tell the story no fewer than twenty times. It never changes, regardless of his audience. Darius Gray believes he had a revelation from God telling him to join the LDS Church — even with that restriction in place. He was baptized.

The next year, 1965, he moved to my hometown, Provo, Utah to attend Brigham Young University. At the time, Provo was the largest city in the United States without a resident black family. It was a year when anti-Communist groups were forming like overlapping viruses. W. Cleon Skousen created the “Freemen Institute” just off BYU’s campus — a center for ultra conservative conversation and speculation. Even at Provo High School, my history teacher had “Brother Skousen” come and talk to us about The Naked Capitalist (Skousen’s sparsely documented, fear-mongering book) and the nefarious Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which, said Skousen, was actually controlling everything in the world. Suspicion hovered in the air; Skousen’s conspiracy theories came as unauthorized supplements to my religion, and even my young classmates imagined the most innocuous events as Communist plots (Communism also being controlled by the CFR).

At BYU, Darius was invited to see a film about Civil Rights in the university’s only theater. As it turned out, the film was called Civil RIOTS and accused Martin Luther King Jr. of being complicit with Communists. After being called into the Dean’s office and told that complaints had been levied against him for associating with white girls, Darius left my hometown on a dead run. He returned to Utah one year later, when the LDS-owned television station, KSL, hired him to be a reporter. He was a trusted Negro, and when conspiracy theories spread to include all Civil Rights workers (in league with Communists, of course, and angry at Mormons because of the priesthood policy), and an alleged prophecy by Church president John Taylor started making the rounds in Mormon homes, the rumors were rampant and horrifying. The U.S. Constitution was going to hang by a thread, and blood would run down the streets. Where would the blood come from? I remember well when my family’s home teacher (fellow congregant) read us the “prophecy” suggesting that Negroes would invade our temples, ravish our women, and shed our blood. I have never been able to find the document I heard as a young teen, but I have found records of others who remember hearing it also.

Darius got a much more personal introduction to the terror which permeated Utah during the latter years of the 1960s: The police chief, Dewey Fillis, a friend of his, showed him the actual battle plans for dealing with the predicted Negro invasion — how the National Guard would be mobilized, where the troops would be bivouacked and stationed, where blockades would be set up, etc.

We all lived in fear. I lived on the white side of it. Darius, on the black side, actually made arrangements to get his wife out of the state, should things get violent. He also had plans for getting himself out — by horseback, if public transportation became too dangerous for a black man. And he got permission to carry a gun.

Finally, all LDS bishops were instructed by the Mormon leadership to read a statement over the pulpit debunking the Taylor “prophecy.” We retreated from full alert to half-alert, though Darius continued to fear for his own safety and his wife’s, and had to defend his right to be on Temple Square several times.

I did not meet Darius Gray until 1998. Then, one by one, I met his whole family, living and dead. I met them because they were included in the books Darius and I wrote.

Darius’s grandfather, James Louis Gray, was born a slave in Marshall, Missouri in 1859. James was born to Louis and Gracie Gray, slaves of Mortimer and Emily Gaines. James’s wife, Annie, gave birth to fifteen children, two of whom could have passed for white. One of them did pass. The other, Darius’s father and namesake, chose to live as a black man, and carried two copies of the Negro National Anthem - “Lift Every Voice” - in his wallet.

I know not only the name of Marshall but of nearby towns — Boonville and Sedalia — because of my research. I had imagined these towns in the beginnings of the Civil War, where they provided rehearsal stages for the massive battles which would ensue at Antietam, Gettysburg and elsewhere. Confederate general Sterling Price made a passionate speech in Marshall on November 16, 1861, urging its men to join the gray side of the war. “Are we a generation of driveling, sniveling, degraded slaves?” he shouted from Marshall’s city center. “Or are we men who dare assert and maintain the rights which cannot be surrendered? In the name of God and the attributes of manhood, let me appeal to you by considerations infinitely higher than money!” (Price 287). As we wrote our books, we knew that Mortimer Gaines had likely been in Price’s audience. Perhaps his slaves — Darius’s great grandparents — had been nearby as well.

Sterling Price was the very man who had once stood guard over the founder of the Latter-day Saint religion, Joseph Smith, when he and others were imprisoned in Richmond, Missouri. Price had also led the Chariton militia protecting the Mormons from further violence after they were expelled from Missouri in 1838, and their hopes of building a temple in nearby Independence were dismantled along with their community. My own ancestors, Chandler and Eunice Holbrook, were among those who endured what we Mormons refer to as the “extermination order” in which Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered that the Latter-day Saints be driven from the state or exterminated. Though there had been some threats from Mormons (Church apostle Sidney Rigdon had used the phrase “war of extermination” in a July 4th, 1838 oration which challenged any who came against the Latter-day Saints), the suffering of the Mormons was undeniable. My own ancestors were literally driven from their homes. Chandler’s brother, Joseph Holbrook, recorded the events starkly: “My wife had very poor health during the fall and winter[1838] by … having to remove from place to place as our house had been burned and we were yet left to seek a home wherever our friends could accommodate us … [We] were now destitute” (Holbrook).

Mormons have a sad history in Missouri. As do blacks. Only two years before General Price issued his ardent invitation, two black men had been lynched and one burned at the stake over alleged crimes in Marshall. The Stauntan Spectator described the burning in lurid detail:

A correspondent of the St. Louis Democrat, writing from Marshall, Saline county, Missouri, on the 26th ult., says: Some time ago, you will recollect, a negro murdered a gentleman named Hinton, near Waverly, in this county. He was caught after a long search, and put to jail. Yesterday he was tried at this place and convicted of the crime, and sentenced to be hung. While the Sheriff was conveying him to prison he was set upon by the crowd and taken from that officer. The mob then proceeded to the jail and took from thence two other negroes. One of them had attempted the life of a citizen of this place, and the other had just committed an outrage upon a white girl. After the mob got the negroes together, they proceeded to the outskirts of the town, and selecting a proper place, chained the negro who killed Hinton, to a stake, got a quantity of dry wood, piled it around him, and set it on fire! Then commenced a scene which for sickening horrors has never been witnessed before in this, or perhaps any other place.

The negro was stripped to his waist, and barefooted. He looked the picture of despair - but there was no sympathy felt for him at the moment. Presently the fire began to surge up in flames around him, and its effects were soon made visible in the futile attempts of the poor wretch to move his feet. As the flames gathered around his limbs and body, he commenced the most frantic shrieks and appeals for mercy - for death - for water! He seized his chains - they were hot, and burnt the flesh off his hands. He would drop them and catch at them again and again. Then he would repeat his cries; but all to no purpose. In a few moments he was a charred mass - bones and flesh alike burnt into a powder. Many, very many of the spectators, who did not realize the full horrors of the scene until it was too late to change it, retired disgusted and sick at the sight.

May Marshall never witness such another spectacle. (Spectator, 1859)*

In September, 2009, Darius and I showed our documentary, Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, at the John Whitmer Historical Association in Independence, Missouri. There, I got to see the very property where my ancestors had envisioned a temple, the very land they had been driven from. As we continued our journey, I saw road signs pointing towards Sedalia and Boonville, and towards Marshall.

Then there we were, in Darius’s ancestral home. We went to the public library, where a genealogist and historian worked. He and Darius talked a bit about all of the names in the Gray/Gaines ancestry, and we prepared to go to the cemetery. It was on our way out of the library that I saw the magazines on display. Patrick Swayze, who had died that week, took up several covers. Glenn Beck stuck his tongue out under the title TIME. And that was when I had what I shall simply call “a moment.”

I was caught in history, gazing at library patrons working on computers which linked them to current events all over the world, and I was simultaneously aware of horrific events which had happened right there in that little Missouri town — events which were rooted in my co-author’s life story. And Glenn Beck was sticking his tongue out at me like a petulant four-year-old.

Why did Beck’s infantile sneer matter? Because Beck is a Mormon. Because his mocking presence in the small town of Marshall, Missouri meant he was sticking his tongue out at patrons in every library in the nation. Because the city of Provo, Utah — where I still live and now teach — sometimes invites him to be part of our Freedom Festival and host our “Stadium of Fire,” as though his ultra right, self-assured conviction and his simplistic view of contemporary issues comprise a worthy résumé. Because he is a disciple of W. Cleon Skousen, whose conspiracy theories resulted in students spying on each other and on their professors at BYU and fomented terror and suspicion throughout Provo — even at Provo High — and created a climate which made Darius fear for his family’s life. Because Beck has said such race-baiting things as, “This president has exposed himself as a guy … who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture” (July 28). (What on earth does he mean by “white culture”? Is it in the tradition of the Coen Brothers’ white supremacists in O brother Where Art Thou?: “We have gathered here to preserve our hallowed culture and heritage…”) Because on Fox News he loops a tape of Reverend Jeremiah Wright saying “Not God bless America…”, as though it were something new and newsworthy, and as though Wright had never said anything else. And because people think he represents me and even Darius, inasmuch as we all call ourselves Latter-day Saints.

I said something sotto voce and unprintable to the image of Beck’s tongue, and we headed to the cemetery.

I had never seen a segregated cemetery before. I was touched, disturbed, intrigued, energized.

A bluff overlooks the grounds, housing fifteen mobile homes, all rusty at the seams and sitting like appetizers for a tornado. A gravel path divides the “white” part of the cemetery from the “colored.” The white section is immaculate, kept up by the municipality, Darius informed me. Not so the black side. I set out to find the name GRAY on that side, where headstones were knocked over, moss-covered, and often simply absent. Many graves were nothing but coffin-size indentations in the earth. I imagined they once had been marked by rudimentary crosses, long since decayed. One grave had the name carved into it as though with a pen knife, the etchings deep but uneven. A fallen tree, as dead as anything else there, sprawled over eight yards of graves. One headstone was hidden within a small grove of saplings. Darius read the names on the tombstones and wondered out loud if the person buried in this or that plot had known his family. He was certain most had.

I looked at the birth and death years. What had these people seen? What had their lives been? 1896-1960. Born in the year of Plessy v. Ferguson; died on the dawn of the most intense years of the Civil Rights Movement. 1856-1908 — this person lived through the Civil War. One grave memorialized the deceased (born in 1857) as “faithful servant … for seventy-seven years.” Some were born the same year I was — 1955 — the year fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman, and the year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man. They would have lived through the same years I have, but on the “colored” side, enduring Jim Crow laws for another decade, and Jim Crow attitudes for years beyond any law’s passage.

Finally, I found the name Gray. I shouted to Darius, who was nearly out of earshot. “Do you know the name Morris? Morris Gray?”

“Morris Elijah Gray,” Darius said as he joined me. He had gone to the funeral in his childhood. The stone was partially uprooted, but the name still clear. “Hello Uncle Elijah,” Darius said. We knew others of his family were buried nearby, but their headstones were gone.

After some long, meditative moments, we headed back towards Independence — in many ways my ancestral home. Glenn Beck’s “nyah nyah” expression still haunted me. I could imagine him echoing Sterling Price: “Are we a generation of driveling, sniveling, degraded slaves?” — determined that his way was the only way. “In the name of God and the attributes of manhood, let me appeal to you!”

I can forgive Sterling Price, a slaveholder who grew up with traditions we find appalling now. I can deal with the misbegotten statements of my past church leaders. I have the same attitude towards them as Union General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain expressed in reflecting on the dignity he granted his surrendering enemies: “Although, as we believed, fatally wrong … blind to the signs of the times in the march of man, they fought as they were taught, true to such ideals as they saw, and put into their cause their best” (Chamberlain 158). Past leaders of my faith also “fought as they were taught” and passed on ideas and traditions inherited from generations before them. Part of my faith is to believe that with God’s help, we may and must become better.

Perhaps that is why Glenn Beck’s mocking, dismissive, sneering tongue and absurdly furrowed brow provoke me to unspoken epithets I would not normally even think. He is inviting me and any who will listen to the world I was terrified of as a child, and which, by the time I was in high school, I realized was an outlandishly hokey creation — a world which invents and obsesses on cloaked conspiracies; a world which encourages racial division; a world which loops a soundbite (“Not God bless America…”) and calls it an identity. A world which reduces the President to a well-spoken, “credit-to-his-race” guy who hates white people. Beck exhumes skeletons from our closets and coffins, and unholy passions from our past which should stay buried — or be instantly cremated if they still happen to yet be hovering. For me as a Mormon, Glenn Beck’s invitation to return to childish things forces me to confront anew the unsavory aspects of my religion’s past, and all the things we Latter-day Saints are now attempting to heal.

Independence, Missouri. An aptly named city, where my ancestors tried and failed to build a community, and then were driven out by gangs terrified that conspiratorial Mormons would take over everything.

God make us independent and free us from stupid ideas. Emancipate us from a worldview which foments fear from invented semiotics and imagined plots. Such fear is a form of terrorism (emphasis on terror), and the trigger of unthinkable violence and mindless mobocracy. Let us not be hostages of any false saying our religious or political leaders ever offered. We have suffered enough, and we have caused enough suffering in others.

We Mormons believe in eternal progression. Let’s get on with it.

Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence. Bayonet! Forward. Gettysburg: Stan Clark Military Books, 1994.

Holbrook, J. (n.d.). Early Saints.

Massie, M. (n.d.).

Price, S. (1909). Speech. In J. McElroy, The Struggle for Missouri. Washington DC: National Tribune Company, 1909.

Staunton Spectator. (1859, August). “Negroes Hung - One Burnt at the Stake.”

Young, Brigham. Journal of Discourses, Volume 7.

*In no way should the fact that Mormons were persecuted in Missouri or elsewhere be equated with what blacks suffered during the four-hundred year holocaust of slavery and in the subsequent years of seeking full emancipation and equality. To suggest that there is a direct parallel would trivialize the entire Civil Rights Movement and the horrors which blacks — and others - endured in the quest for freedom.

]]> Mormon anti-gay efforts in Maine tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.294251 2009-10-06T14:22:06Z 2009-10-08T06:07:34Z Guest post by djinn Why are my people doing this? I just read “The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo. He ran the original Stanford Prison Experiment where students assigned to be guards quickly increased the abuse that they heaped on... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com Guest post by djinn

Why are my people doing this? I just read “The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo. He ran the original Stanford Prison Experiment where students assigned to be guards quickly increased the abuse that they heaped on students assigned to be prisoners such that after a single week (and after the guards had discovered sexual humiliation) the experiment was stopped. He chillingly details how almost all of us will be evil given the right circumstances. We all are good, but in the right circumstances, we all are bad.

Dr. Reed Quinn is both a cardiologist and a Stake President for the Mormon Church. This means he is the ecclesiastical leader for, in this case, 12 Mormon congregations. As a cardiologist he has undoubtedly saved the lives of many people. His wife, Eileen Quinn (or at least someone of that name who lives at the same address) is the CEO of the PAC Maine4Marriage.org, which has a spiffy website here. It’s slogan? “Marriage. One Man. One Woman.” That’s pretty amusing—even funnier since the authors don’t get the joke. You can point and snicker all you want.

]]> The website highlights a general authority of the Mormon church, Elder Russell Nelson, speaking about the importance of families.

Dear friends, future happiness and even the future of nations is linked to children. Families with children need to be re-enthroned as the fundamental unit of society. We simply must value children more than we do! Without a new generation to replace the old, there is no wealth; without families, there is no future.

How does Eileen Quinn plan on valuing families with children? By refusing to allow a subset of them to have the protections of marriage. Of course. I protect my right to (X) by refusing you to have any (X) at all. Because of course, there’s not enough X to go around. Or something. I guess the Quinns are afraid we’ll run out of marriage if the Gays get some share.

I’m sure that the Quinns are really decent kind loving people, but then they behave like this. Why? I think they know. Because their environment—the Mormon church—screams “Hate the Gay” (But, Shh, say it nice, and don’t use the word “hate.” It’s so, uh, hateful.) In the Stanford Prison Experiment, a significant portion of the guards, after confronting what they had done, spent a good portion of their lives keeping others from similar harm.

Elder Nelson’s speech highlighted on the maine4marriage.org site continues: “Those who seek to undermine traditional marriage would effectively limit the rights of those who do uphold the sanctions of these institutions.” Let me rephrase. Your right to equal protection is outweighed by my right to discriminate against you. My right to keep you from doing something (that doesn’t affect me at all) outweighs your right to do the same thing. How amazingly self-centered. And illogical. And dumb.

Being kind, being decent, treating people as you wish to be treated isn’t “undermin[ing] traditional institutions” any more than freeing the black slaves back in 1863 was undermining the freedom of white southerners. Zimbardo, in “The Lucifer Effect” describes how we all follow, blindly, those we deem a “virtuous authority,” even when we should know better. He also describes how we can rise above our situation. “I made a mistake,” “I am responsible,” “I want group acceptance, but value my independence,” “I respect authority, but rebel against unjust authority.”

Rebel.

Update (from Chino): Good Grief. Check out this ad that just launched in Washington (not Maine):

If you’re Mormon, you probably recognize some of the artwork in that ad. You should. It’s owned and copyrighted by the LDS church. Wow. The Washington contest is not even about marriage. Apparently, the LDS church doesn’t mind being associated with a campaign against little ol’ domestic partnership. What’s up with that?

]]> 3 out of 4 ain't bad (unless you're NOM) tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.293690 2009-10-02T13:01:17Z 2009-10-02T14:13:17Z Some fair-minded person sent me this link prior to NOM’s public posting of their 2007 and 2008 federal tax returns: http://www.nationformarriage.org/atf/cf/%257B39D8B5C1-F9FE-48C0-ABE6-1029BA77854C%257D/2008%2520Form%2520990.pdf That used to be an invisible link to NOM’s 2008 return. It’s dead now. But it was live when... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com Some fair-minded person sent me this link prior to NOM’s public posting of their 2007 and 2008 federal tax returns:

http://www.nationformarriage.org/atf/cf/%257B39D8B5C1-F9FE-48C0-ABE6-1029BA77854C%257D/2008%2520Form%2520990.pdf

That used to be an invisible link to NOM’s 2008 return. It’s dead now.

But it was live when I first posted it, and soon after I did, NOM (finally) posted their 2007 and 2008 returns in plain sight on their own website.

Interestingly enough, the 2007 return they’ve posted there differs from the 2007 return I previously received from the IRS. For example, they have removed Common Sense America from the list of hired contractors in this latest version of their 2007 return.

What happened? Did they suddenly realize (in 2009!) that they hadn’t actually paid Common Sense America $166,000 back in 2007 as previously reported?

]]> Compare Part II-A (Page 10) of the 2007 return now available at NOM’s website and the 2007 return I received from the IRS and you’ll see that Design4 and Common Sense America Inc. are no longer listed as independent contractors on the most recent filing (I’m assuming that the return now available on the NOM website is the latest amended version). What is NOM’s explanation for why Design4 and Common Sense America Inc. no longer appear?

Glaring discrepancies aside, is it SOP for a 501(c)(4) to file four different versions of the same return before finally making it public? Of course not. But that is exactly what NOM have done with their 2007 Form 990: one initial filing, three amended, none made public by NOM until now.

Absent an explanation regarding the disappearance of two highly-paid contractors from NOM’s latest amended 2007 return, the time has come to stop carefully referring to the members of this confusing quartet as “initial” or “amended” and start applying the simpler and more accurate “fraudulent” to describe this bewildering bunch of 2007 returns.

Moving on to their 2008 return … I enjoyed this snarky quip from Justin McLachlan: “How did [NOM] spend most of that money? Well, $2.1 million went to something they call ‘all other expense.’ How’s that for disclosure and transparency?”

Of course, it’s no secret that most of NOM’s 2008 expenditures went to the Prop 8 battle, considering that NOM was the outfit that paid to get Prop 8 on the ballot in the first place. This is why NOM’s fundraising and spending skyrocketed in 2008 compared to 2007. California is no “cheap date” (signature-gathering is a massive - and massively-expensive - undertaking in that huge state). This is also the main reason I’m highly skeptical of NOM’s $7 million 2009 budget forecast (as reported by Brian Brown to the Maine authorities in this sworn statement). There is simply no comparable battle on the horizon in NOM’s world that would require anything like the monies raised and spent during 2008’s Prop 8 contest. As you peruse NOM’s 2008 Form 990 below, please note that they finished 2008 with $78K cash on hand. In other words, this organization with a purported 2009 budget of $7,000,000 started the year with $78,000.

Which is why I suspect that all of Brian Brown and Barry Bostrom’s talk about paying Iowa and Maine expenses out of NOM’s general fund has been just that: talk.

And why I also suspect that one of the first things the Maine investigators are going to discover is that Brian’s 2009 budget forecast was a calculated lie.

Why lie? Here’s why: NOM needed to swear to an inflated $7 million figure in order to make their six-digit Maine expenditures look small by comparison. Otherwise, Maine law is clear: if NOM are allocating a substantial portion of their budget to a Maine ballot question, they absolutely must register as a Maine PAC.

It is now October 2009. If Brian was telling the truth in his September 2009 sworn affidavit to the Maine commission, he can prove it by confirming his year-to-date fundraising total. Considering that he began the year with $78K, Brian should by now have raised nearly $6.9 million. Has he?

The Maine investigators have subpoena power. I would suggest that there is no reason to delay asking Brian Brown this simple question under oath: What is the dollar amount of NOM’s total contributions received so far in 2009?

A simple question and one that any executive director worth $130K/year ought to be able to answer off the top of his head.

In any case, enough of that. On to the actual 2008 return itself:

NOM-2008-Form-990

I’m waiting to hear from the commenter who tipped me off to this as to whether or not s/he’d like to be publicly credited.

I’ll be taking a closer look at this Form 990 over the weekend.

Looking forward to reading what others notice in NOM’s 2008 tax return.

P.S. My Thursday flashback:

By the way, Brian and his attorneys (Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom) are up in Maine today. Maybe some intrepid blogger can catch up with Brian there (at the meeting of the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices to consider Fred Karger’s request for an investigation of the S4MM PAC re violations of state campaign finance laws).

Meeting time: 9:00 a.m., Thursday, October 1st

Location: Room 208, Burton M. Cross Office Building, 111 Sewall Street, Augusta.

UPDATE: Fred Karger and Danielle Truszkovsky did it!!!

Must read: Fred Karger describes his victory in Maine

And let’s hear it for the commissioners, too (three, to be exact): Bravo!

P.P.S. For those readers interested in hearing Brian Brown’s side of this story before making your own determination, you may schedule a tête-à-tête with Brian by contacting Elizabeth Ray (x.130) or Mary Beth Hutchins (x.105) at 703-683-5004.

P.P.P.S. It’s not harassment, Brian. It’s curiosity. And you have only yourself to blame for stoking it.

]]> Federal gov't must investigate NOM's finances tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.292059 2009-09-24T05:40:30Z 2009-09-24T05:56:50Z Guest post by Danielle Truszkovsky. BEFORE WRITING THIS column, I sat and stared at my computer screen for what seemed like ages trying to figure out a way to make the topic of IRS regulations seem a bit more interesting.... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com Guest post by Danielle Truszkovsky.

BEFORE WRITING THIS column, I sat and stared at my computer screen for what seemed like ages trying to figure out a way to make the topic of IRS regulations seem a bit more interesting.

Let’s face it, most people just don’t want to read about a subject as dry as tax law. Unfortunately, one of the only ways to detect questionable practices by organizations like the National Organization for Marriage is to first acquire the group’s tax return, research it in detail, and make public the findings. Not surprisingly, NOM’s initial return generated more questions than answers.

]]> Obtaining the return has been an ongoing process spanning many months. On March 25, 2009, the group Californians Against Hate sent a certified request to NOM at their headquarters (20 Nassau St., Suite 242, Princeton, N.J.) for a copy of their 2007 tax return (Form 990). Under IRS regulations, NOM was required to release this information to the group within 30 days or face penalties of $20 per day. As of this week, NOM had not turned over their return to Californians Against Hate.

Back in April, I personally visited the NOM headquarters in Princeton to request a copy of the 990. Although I visited suite 242 numerous times during normal office hours, no one ever answered the door at the tiny, one-room space. It was surprising that a supposed “national” organization that donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in elections around the country and ran multi-million dollar media campaigns did not have even one person at their tiny office to manage this huge effort. If the national headquarters is essentially empty, then who is doing the work and where is all of the money coming from?

I made another attempt in May to reach someone at the NOM Princeton office to no avail — the only reason the group’s 2007 return is currently available to the public is because the IRS released a copy at the end of August.

After reviewing the 2007 return, there were several questions I had, so once again I decided to visit NOM, this time at their new office at 1100 H St., N.W., Suite 700 in Washington, D.C. As in Princeton, this office also is shared space. In fact, NOM’s name doesn’t appear at all on the list of tenants or even on the door. Unlike in Princeton, when I knocked on suite 700 someone actually answered. I was greeted by NOM Executive Director, Brian Brown.

WHAT INTERESTED ME most was the fact that the 2007 filing that I possessed was an amended return stamped as received by the IRS on June 11, 2009 — more than a year after the initial 990 should have been filed. Would Brown be willing to release the original filing?

Brown: “No. There’s no sense in releasing an original return because this is now the return.”

Me: “But, if it’s dramatically different than the original …”

Brown: “Well, you may be interested in knowing what it is, but we’re not releasing it.”

Me: “OK. Is it dramatically different than the original return?”

Brown: “No, I know that for example there were changes in addresses … We changed addresses, I know there were also changes to some … some vendors I think had been incorrectly put in as independent contractors when they should not have been put in as independent contractors. There were errors like that that are … that are relatively common and we corrected them and we gave them back to the IRS and that’s why the return is amended but we’re not going to be releasing the original return.”

Me: “Is there any reason why you went back over [the return] a year later?”

Brown: “We constantly are checking through them and making sure there … there aren’t any errors.”

Upon further inspection, Brown revealed that the 990 I possessed was not the final return, there was another amendment. So what was changed on this newest form, which remains unavailable? Apparently, the itemization of highest paid independent contractors is deleted because they were the aforementioned miscategorized vendors. This section included a $166,000 payment to Common Sense America for consulting services. Not surprisingly, Common Sense America is one of the groups that is listed as sharing office space with NOM in Princeton. Brown admitted that he was “president and volunteer” for the organization, but denied that NOM was funneling money to its board members. The return also listed the NOM salary for Brown as $57,292.

AS IF THE NOM tax filings weren’t confusing enough, Brian indicated that there were actually a total of three amendments to the 2007 return. If this information is correct, it brings the total of NOM filings for the tax year June-December 2007 up to a whopping four returns — one initial and three amended. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, “less than one percent of returns received by the IRS are amended at a later date.”

And how many returns are amended three times? Unfortunately, it is so rare that a foundation amends its return three times that neither the IRS nor NCCS provide these statistics. More importantly, why would an organization need to amend its filing so many times unless it was either purposefully attempting to conceal or revise potentially damaging information or numerous egregious errors? Either way, this raises the questions: Where is the oversight and why aren’t there more compelling regulations for charitable organizations to make their records transparent and available to the public?

NOM is an organization with a mission to pass discriminatory legislation in all states that propose that same-sex couples have the same civil rights as opposite-sex couples. Currently NOM is under an active investigation by California to determine if the group was set up by the Mormon Church to pass Proposition 8. Nearly 75 percent of the money used to help pass Prop 8 in California came from Mormon donors — mostly from outside of the state.

NOM has been accused of money laundering in Maine and the state’s Commission on Governmental Ethics & Election Practices is considering an investigation into NOM to see if it has violated Maine’s campaign finance laws by purposefully attempting to conceal donor names. Currently, 99 percent of the money being used in Maine to support anti-gay legislation has come from NOM and three major religious contributors: James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the Knights of Columbus and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland. The Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board also is questioning NOM’s practices for attempting to conceal out-of-state donors in violation of the state’s campaign finance laws.

NOM also is now working in D.C., New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Although individual states are doing their part in oversight, they are limited by their boundaries and resources and, unfortunately, the anti-gay legislation that NOM backs is extremely time sensitive. Meanwhile, the group is allowed to operate virtually unmonitored by the federal government. NOM’s agenda involves an important public issue — swaying elections state by state — and its practices have come under fire in every state in which they operate.

Since the group seems to be pioneering the way to circumventing the democratic process, one can only wonder when the federal government will take notice.

Originally published as “Follow The Money.” Republished with permission.

Previously by Danielle Truszkovsky: “Deception, Denial and Opus Dei” and “Meet your anti-gay adversaries.”

]]> 8: The Mormon Proposition (Pre-Sundance Update) tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.291422 2009-09-21T19:48:42Z 2009-11-05T08:06:13Z This past May, I caught up with documentary filmmaker Reed Cowan, who didn’t shy away from answering some pointed (and personal) questions about 8: The Mormon Proposition. As the first NYU grad in my family’s six generations of Mormons,... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com

This past May, I caught up with documentary filmmaker Reed Cowan, who didn’t shy away from answering some pointed (and personal) questions about 8: The Mormon Proposition. As the first NYU grad in my family’s six generations of Mormons, go figure that I’d be personally interested in both Mormonism and film (nevermind Mormons on film!). In other words, since that initial interview with Reed, I’ve been anxiously hoping that he’d keep me in the loop as the film progressed. After bugging Reed for an update, he’s now brought me up to speed:

CB: Since we last spoke, I’ve heard through the grapevine that a certain Dustin Lance Black provided the narration for 8:TMP, and Bruce Bastian is now on board as Executive Producer. How did that happen?

]]> RC: Dustin Lance Black is truly a treasure. Not only to the film world, where I’m certain he’ll go down in history as a Hollywood legend, but also for helping LGBT causes in the wake of his Oscar win for MILK. I first got to know Lance when I came in contact with a young girl whose high school project was rejected because she chose to do it on Harvey Milk. Knowing the girl is a huge fan of Dustin Lance Black, I contacted Lance to see if he would like to have her contact information to call her personally. I knew that would blow her mind and I wanted her bravery to be celebrated. He was immediate in responding and personally called to speak with the girl…which put her over the moon, of course. Since then, I’ve been submitting rough cuts of our film 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION to Lance hoping that he would be involved as our narrator. Last week while in the middle of production for WHAT’S WRONG WITH VIRGINIA (Executive Producer Gus Van Zant) which he wrote and is now directing, DLB green-lighted a voice-over session, and worked until almost midnight laying down the track.

He’s expressed great confidence in our film and we are working closely with him to make sure that each cut of the film rises to his approval and standards. On that note, I’ll tip my hat that I’m impressed with how careful he has been in making sure that any track he voices be truthful and respectful to all parties—even those who may disagree with the film’s content. He is a TRUE genius and professional. His tracks for the film sound great and I’m thrilled with his participation.

As for Bruce Bastian…he’s a hero. He became involved in our film after things got huge following Senator Buttars’ explosive interview. As the months have progressed he has moved from being a helper on the project to a full blown executive producer and I couldn’t be more thankful. To have the co-founder of Word Perfect and a major player with the HRC on board with our film is the stuff of fate.

CB: What about other technical aspects of the project? Does 8:TMP have a score? All apologies, but we’re talking documentary film here and you’re talking to a huge Errol Morris fan. Anything to report on that front?

RC: Indeed we do have a score and I’m thrilled to announce the debut of Nick Greer’s work in our film. Nick shared with me that he finished his bachelor’s work at Mormon owned BYU and then was near completion of his Masters in Composition there as well when campus henchmen learned he is gay and partnered. Nick tells me he was denied completion of his education and thrown out of BYU because of this. I think his beautiful score for 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION is a testament to the fact that he lived beyond the bigotry to create something powerful and beautiful.

CB: I’m assuming that bringing in this level of talent means that Sundance is now on the calendar for sure. If so, that’s great news, but what am I supposed to do about my reservations regarding spending travel dollars in Utah? And if I’m conflicted on this point (and I am), can I look forward to catching a screening in friendlier territory?

RC: Regarding your confidence that Sundance is in the bag for us…NO! Not at all! SUNDANCE is the brass ring and when you drop a film on their screeners nothing is a guarantee. I have seen many great films that did not make the cut at Sundance simply because there are only so many films they can choose each year. So, we’re submitting to Sundance and about twenty other big-name festivals and have our fingers and toes crossed. The film goes in the mail to all of them this week and we’ll just wait and see. Until then, we’re re-shooting and re-tooling some scenes in the movie to take it from a solid rough-cut stage to something close to perfection. As for screenings, after what we hope to be an amazing festival run, I’m reaching out to movie theaters all over the country to hold week-long screenings that will help benefit LGBT causes in the towns where the film screens. Sundance green-lighting our film WOULD really blow my hair back though. Can you imagine it? Things would really come home to roost, wouldn’t they?

CB: If Sundance were to get smart and pick this up, of course they would. That said, since the recent changes over at Sundance, I’m not qualified to comment on the chances. I hope they show it. And now I’m suddenly thinking of my own (huge) family reunion next year in Seattle. One of the biggest concessions that I feel I’ve won from my immediate Mormon family is that we’ve all agreed to be steadfast friends on our Facebook pages. It’s understood that we don’t sever our Facebook relationships over anything as trivial as the content we choose to post on our own pages. If family is important, it means weathering disagreement. That said, for some of my extended family, as Mormons, I think this all represents their first experience with boundaries and how such boundaries work in practice in a world outside the Mormon enclave. Along those lines, I wonder if you have experienced any personal fallout from making this film? I mean, my random online commentary is one thing, but to ask Mormon folks to sit down and face a message from the big screen that is diametrically opposed to their own views is something else altogether. Your family must know that’s coming. How’s that working out?

RC: Worry over what my film might say has really done a great deal of damage to my family relationships. I haven’t spoken to my mother or father for weeks now. They hung in there longer than my sisters did. But their dramatic reactions to my film and their difficulty supporting what I’m doing has finally wore thin to the point that we’re no longer speaking. I have two sisters. One sister told me Prop. 8 was God’s doing through his Mormon Prophet and that regardless of her ties to me, “If the prophet told me to cut off my arm and eat it, I would.” My other sister (who I thought was much more supportive) shocked and hurt me to the core when she called in as a guest on the Dr. Laura show to discuss things painful and personal about my film and my life, asking: “So how do I treat him?” I was amazed that Dr. Laura cut her call off and said: “YOU TREAT HIM LIKE HE’S YOUR BROTHER.” Needless to say, after that I haven’t spoken to my sister and I don’t plan to. The damage to my family has been deeply painful and I’d like to say to Mormon leaders who tout strong families: WHAT ABOUT MY FAMILY? DON’T YOU SEE THAT WHAT YOU DID HURT MY FAMILY AND THOUSANDS OF OTHER FAMILIES TOO?

The good thing is that during production for this film I adopted twin boys and became a father again!

CB: Hey, congrats! You’re in for good times. And speaking of good times, what to make of Bruce C. Hafen’s latest pronouncement? As far as I can tell, he’s never had any. This guy has now proven himself to be the latest in a long line of Mormon operators eager to scare the sheep into line for his own personal gain. Pity he spoke up too late to make an appearance in your film. Or did he?

RC: Well, he’s speaking for the church and his rants are in similitude with what others in the Mormon church have said for years. In essence he said “you can and should ‘fix’ your homosexuality” and bashed the scientific community who discourages such attempts to “cure homosexuality.” I’m also horrified at another Mormon big-wig (Holland) whose words ended up published in the Salt Lake Tribune recently, saying parents have “every right to exclude from [their] dwelling any behavior that offends the spirit of the Lord.” I’d like to take Hafen and Holland out of their gilded cages to go with me two stories underground in the dead of winter in Salt Lake City where Utah’s considerable gay homeless teen population lives in filth and squalor. I would like to show them the result of their teachings. Those kids told me their parents (following their leaders’ council) insisted they could “fix” their homosexuality if they tried hard enough and that their presence in their homes “offends the spirit of the Lord” and to get out. Those kids represent one of the most compelling portions of 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION toward the end of our film.

CB: Now I’m sorry to have brought Bruce into this. As much as I personally resent those, like Bruce, who seek to convince Mormons that they’re the only ones making personal sacrifices in all of this, my resentment is nothing compared to the reality of those living out-of-doors on account of Bruce’s ignorance. That said, only speaking for myself, I’m a straight (inactive) Mormon with a great family, someone who never bothered the LDS church after returning disillusioned from my Mormon mission twenty years ago. Love it or leave it? No problem. I left. Years ago. I knew I had my own life to live, and I was all for live and let live until Prop 8. Since then, my sense is that a lot of us have sacrificed time we would have rather devoted elsewhere in the course of calling out the insanity emanating from SLC. Final question: Can you relate?

RC: Absolutely. Look, Mormonism is my own religious heritage. My ancestor traveled from Scotland, sacrificing all he had to join the Mormons in their quest for freedom from religious tyranny at the hands of evangelicals who were disgusted at Mormon alternative marriage. He laid the stones to the very wall around the base of the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City. I’m very sad, as are thousands of others, that the Mormon Church has taken this course in to political activism and lost the very heart and soul of what any church is about…THE PEOPLE. Frankly, I think it’s time for the people to take back their churches. It’s time for the people to reclaim their heritage. Zealotry is a disease that can infect any faith. It’s time we throw the money changers out of the temple and start over with the basics.

]]> Maine "Yes On 1" TV Debut tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.290126 2009-09-15T14:07:54Z 2009-09-15T14:11:32Z The much awaited spin-off of last summer’s hit series, Yes on 8, is now ready to launch its new season. The same drama, the same white-knuckle fear, featuring an all-new Bostonian cast. Be the first to watch the powerhouse debut... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com The much awaited spin-off of last summer’s hit series, Yes on 8, is now ready to launch its new season.

The same drama, the same white-knuckle fear, featuring an all-new Bostonian cast.

Be the first to watch the powerhouse debut episode of Yes on 1, Hide the Children:

And once you’ve watched this episode, tell us what you think!

(And if you do, you’ll get access to bonus scenes not available to regular Yes on 1 viewers!)

]]> Scenes like these:

Meet Sam Putnam of Portland, who plays high school football and baseball, and is the pride and joy of his mother, Jennifer and her partner, Michelle. For Sam, it’s pretty basic — this is his family and he wants them to be valued and treated equally in Maine.

Meet Bill Whitten of Yarmouth, a former college football player and U.S. Marine. Bill has two daughters — one gay and one straight. For Bill, it’s simple — he wants both his girls treated fairly and equally, and that includes marrying the person they love.

And if you preferred the bonus material to the regular fare, here’s where you find out how you can make sure it gets aired.

]]> Swiftboating Same-Sex Marriage in Maine tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.289498 2009-09-11T17:04:07Z 2009-09-12T10:25:41Z X-posted at Dirigo Blue and Daily Kos. Karen Ocamb is a SoCal journalist who covered last summer’s Prop 8 fight. If past is prologue, her recapping of that contest may serve as a useful reminder of what’s in store as... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com X-posted at Dirigo Blue and Daily Kos.

Karen Ocamb is a SoCal journalist who covered last summer’s Prop 8 fight. If past is prologue, her recapping of that contest may serve as a useful reminder of what’s in store as the Question 1 contest heats up in Maine.

The Religious Right is Swiftboating Same Sex Marriage in Maine

By Karen Ocamb

News editor, Frontiers in LA

“God has no grandchildren,” the evangelical ex-Marine father of my late friend Chip Howe said, explaining how he surrendered judgment and came to accept Chip’s homosexuality.  Chip, a Lieutenant in the Navy during the Vietnam War, was supposed to get married and provide his parents with grandchildren. Chip’s father thought being gay meant that would never happen.

That was in 1990, before there was any real hope for marriage rights for same sex couples.  Though Chip had known love before he died, he never got to experience the fruition of his constitutional right to pursue happiness - marriage and a family of his own.

The story is instructive because Religious Right professionals have succeeded in making it appear as if all people of faith are antigay and anti-marriage equality. Worse yet, they are using religion as an excuse to perpetrate lies and deception - to swiftboat same sex couples in the name of God, when in fact they are just advancing another end-justifies-the-means political scheme.

That’s what happened in California and that’s what is now underway in Maine as opponents of same sex marriage fight to prevent Maine’s marriage equality law from taking effect though a referendum on the Nov. 3 ballot.

State Sen. Larry Bliss (D-South Portland) got to the heart of the issue in his Sept. 8 op-ed response to Rev. Bob Emrich’s Aug. 26 Maine Voices column advocating passage of the anti-gay Question 1.

Bliss wrote:

“Do we want a Maine where Rev. Emrich and his supporters tell the rest of us who can be a family and who can love whom? Marriage equality upholds traditional Maine values of personal freedom and equality by respecting the right of every Mainer to marry the person he or she loves. That’s the Maine I live in. Those are the values I hold dear.”
]]> Watch Out Maine

But that’s not the Maine residents will recognize in the next two months as the Proposition 1 political campaign heats up.

This Sunday, Sept. 13, for instance, Maine Jeremiah Project’s Emrich and the National Organization for Marriage with their Stand for Marriage Maine coalition (S4MM) are holding a rally featuring some of the big guns in the Religious Right professional world - Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC), Pastor Chris Clark from San Diego, and via video, Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson.

The purpose of the rally is to galvanize their conservative Christian base and help organize an army of volunteers and a network of churches to “Impact Maine Culture,” as described on the Maine Jeremiah Project website. Apparently the media is not being allowed into the event.

California also experienced a pre-election onslaught of out-of-state Religious Right professionals - including Perkins and Dobson - for a massive rally in San Diego dubbed TheCall. (Religious Right watcher Bruce Wilson, who is straight, later described on the Huffington Post how TheCall’s organizer Lou Engle is tied to violent Religious Right extremists.)

Perhaps the most widely publicized religious involvement in California’s Prop 8 battle was by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), more commonly referred to as the Mormon Church. Protect Marriage/Yes on 8 campaign manger Frank Schubert said members of the Mormon Church eventually contributed “somewhere in the $20 million range, so about half of what we raised - which we were very grateful for.”

Progressive California Courage Campaign founder Rick Jacobs and the Rev. Eric Lee, director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, held a news conference outside the Mormon Church in LA after church elders asked members to sacrifice to fund Yes on 8 - which they did, getting second mortgages and dipping into their scarce savings.

In fact, on Nov. 3, 2008, blogger hekebolos published a leaked internal memo on Daily Kos that seemed to indicate that Mormon leaders had been working to prevent marriage equality in California and Hawaii since 1997, recruiting local California Catholic bishops to serve as the front for the operation. The story was later picked up by blogger Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin, which expanded the reach to Arizona.

With a prominent member of the Mormon Church on the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) board of directors, longtime politico Fred Karger publically challenged NOM founder Maggie Gallagher over whether NOM is really a “front” for the Mormon Church. Last month, Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, pressed the question, asking whether Maine’s Stand for Marriage PAC might be receiving funds “laundered” through groups such as NOM. The Maine Commission of Government Ethics and Election Practices will consider Karger’s official request for an investigation on Oct. 1 in Augusta.

Not all Mormons backed Prop 8 or appreciated what the church did in their name. Famous former San Francisco 49er quarterback Steve Young, for instance, who is a descendant of Mormon founder Brigham Young, opposed Prop 8, posting “No on 8” signs in front of his Palo Alto home and his wife Barbara contributed $50,000. And many non-Mormon residents of Utah worried about whether a growing backlash over Mormon involvement might impact the state.

Spiritual Warfare

But to hear the Religious Right professionals talk about it, the campaign over Prop 8 in California was “spiritual warfare,” a cataclysmic battle between good and evil.

Chuck Colson, Watergate felon and founder of the Prison Fellowship Ministries, said this on a Yes on 8 video produced by the American Family Association for widespread distribution to pastors and Christian activists:

“This vote on whether we stop the gay marriage juggernaut in California is the Armageddon. We lose this, we’re going to lose in a lot of other ways, including freedom of religion.”

Catholics for Protect Marriage leader Bill May told the Associated Press:

This [California] Supreme court decision was a huge wake-up call for Catholics. It was shocking. The sense is that this is the last chance to restore the definition of marriage, and if unsuccessful, it is going to have serious ramifications for California and across the nation.

FRC’s National Prayer Director Rev. Pierre Bynum said in an email:

“Thirty-five years of an American abortion holocaust, the civil imposition of homosexual ‘marriage’ upon America and the indoctrination of America’s public school children in pro-homosexual ideology are practices that a Holy God will not tolerate.”

FRC President Tony Perkins wrote in an e-mail:

“The future of our nation hangs in the balance!”

And Jim Garlow, pastor of the evangelical Skyline Church in San Diego County, told AP:

“This is not political to us. We see it as very spiritual.”

Garlow was one of the organizers of TheCall in San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, which was designed to mobilize “God’s Army” for a war between “Darkness versus Light.”

“We would not have won without people of faith in California,” Jeff Flint, Schubert’s partner in Schubert/Flint Public Affairs said later. Their first survey showed that the “ultimate driver” of contributions and volunteers was a belief that the institution of marriage was created by God and not a construct of man. They wound up with an “army of volunteers” - 100,000 on Election Day with 3 million people identified in their database. The ethnic vote, he said, “was the margin of victory for us.”

Third party validaters - including 7,500 pastors - helped galvanize their tremendous grassroots effort, which was organized down to the precinct level.  “We spent almost a million dollars on pastor involvement,” Schubert said later. “Conference calls, webinars, you name it - we got people involved in it. Catholic, evangelical, Mormon churches were very fully engaged.”

Creating a Movement

For the most part, gay people and their allies didn’t pay much attention to the pronouncements of people they considered fanatic “wing nuts.” Besides, they were too happy getting married and feeling equal for the first time in their lives. And the polls indicated that Prop 8 was destined for defeat. They could not imagine that anyone with a heart would want to take away such a precious fundamental right that the California Supreme Court said they had too long been denied.

What few people knew at the time was that the Religious Right professionals were taking Bush Administration political operative Karl Rove’s successful anti-gay marriage playbook and expanding and transforming it into a national Protect Marriage Movement. (See the lower right corner of the S4MM website).

NOM executive director Brian Brown moved to California and became one of the main leaders of the Yes on 8/Protect Marriage campaign. After Prop 8’s startling success, the Protect Marriage Movement decided to export their victory - and headed to Maine. But as Brown told the Washington Blade, NOM is also preparing to do battle in Washington DC, New York and New Jersey and “monitoring” developments in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch noted that NOM’s financing still remains a mystery. Brown told the Blade that they would release NOM’s 2008 990 form “as soon as it completes its processing.” The problem, Right Wing Watch noted, is that “there’s no such thing as a ‘processing’ period.”

Right Wing Watch also cited an interview by EDGE publication with Christopher Plante, Executive Director of NOM’s Rhode Island chapter, in which Plante dismissed statements by NOM board member Orson Scott Card who called for the overthrow of civil government if Prop 8 failed in California. According to an op-ed in the July 24, 2008 Mormon Times, Card said:

“How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.”

Meanwhile, Frank Schubert, hired though NOM to be S4MM’s campaign manager, told National Public Radio Sept. 3 that the Mormon Church would not be involved in the Maine effort. Nonetheless, according to Karger’s review of the first campaign report filed on July 15, S4MM raised about $350,000 - with “99.99%” coming from three professional Religious Right sources: the National Organization for Marriage, the Maine chapter of Focus on the Family and the Portland diocese.

Schubert, who hopes for a civil debate in Maine, told NPR:

“The reality is that this is a national campaign. People around the country and internationally are looking at what’s going to happen in Maine. Both sides are doing what they can to marshal support wherever they can find support. It will be a pitched battle.”

Marc Mutty, S4MM executive chairman who NPR says is on loan from the diocese, told NPR:

“It isn’t about anything other than the definition of marriage, what it’s going to mean to us and how it’s going to be defined in society….Many certainly feel uncomfortable about [the belief that legalizing same-sex marriage will lead to a new curriculum in the schools] and about the fact that children as young as 7 or 8 years old are being taught about gay sex in some detail.” [Emphasis added]

The Big Swiftboat Lie

And there, in a nutshell, is the conflation by a Religious Right professional of the political mission of the Yes on 1 campaign and the scary flat out lie that same sex marriage will invariably lead to gay sex being taught to young school children “in some detail.”

This is intentional and purely political - as Frank Schubert himself outlined in a discussion of Prop 8 during the convention last March of the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC), where Republican Catholic Schubert sits on the board of directors. Schubert and his company Schubert/Flint Public Affairs won several awards for their Prop 8 campaign, but he apparently received a cold reception from his peers.

One reason for the cold shoulder may have been that on a June 23, 2008 AAPC panel in Sacramento just after he was hired, Schubert promised to run a very different campaign from what Yes on 8 turned out to be. (Please note that all videos of Schubert at AAPC were shot and produced by Edward Headington of the Headington Media Group.) Schubert anticipated a “very broad and deep source of contributors” including pharmaceutical companies.

Additionally, Schubert said:

“We’re going to do everything we can to run a positive, uplifting campaign. There is not going to be any gay-bashing in our campaign. That is not to say that won’t occur - but when it does occur, we’ll do everything in our power to stop it. There are many people working to develop messages that are positive and affirming for the institution of marriage. That’s our objective.”

But that’s not what happened, as Schubert explained during a “Prop 8 Case Study” panel presented by AAPC last March. In order to win, Yes on 8 needed to define the terms of the debate:

“We knew from the very beginning that a campaign that was simply an affirmation of traditional marriage and did not develop a path that lead voters to consider consequences to legalized same sex marriage in California - that that formula would not be successful. We would not get to 50% of the vote. So we redefined the measure as not being about tolerance of gay relationships but about being about consequences of gay marriage.”

The change in strategy, Schubert noted, came after considerable research into public opinion through firms such as San Francisco-based Bill Criswell who is working with Schubert on the advertising and media campaign in Maine.

Several bloggers have raised questions about Criswell Associates - the creative mind behind the NOM-sponsored “Gathering Storm” ad. (Parodies of the ad were plentiful, including this one with “One Tree Hill” actress Sophia Bush and “Clueless” star Alicia Silverstone.)

 Jeremy Hooper at Good As You and Lisa Derrick at La Figa at Fire Dog Lake penned some painfully funny descriptions of Criswell’s inept casting director trying to find “real Mainers” for campaign ads. (Respectful hat tip to Jason Echols at Chino Blanco for his shared reporting.)

Additionally, according to the blog The Verifiable Truth, Criswell did political advertising for conservative California Republican Tom McClintock’s successful 2008 congressional campaign. But the blog reported that the Secretary of State records show that McClintock paid more than $130,000 to “Marketing Communications Svcs., Inc” - not Criswell Associates - at the same address. However, Marketing Communications Svcs., Inc., is not registered as a corporation in California.

Change in Strategy

During the Prop 8 Case Study workshop, Schubert said he, Flint and their team spent hours “looking at where people were and what we needed to do to reach them.”

What they found was that most Californians were very tolerant of same sex relationships. Schubert said:

“They didn’t see how gay marriage effected them, per se. It wasn’t their issue. It wasn’t something they cared to think about. It wasn’t something they wanted to talk about. It was an uncomfortable subject generally for them event to get their arms around.”

In fact, a more recent story on NOM executive director Brian Brown in the Washington Post noted just how prevalent that point of view is:

“Sue Brown had never really thought about same-sex marriage until she met Brian. “Obviously, I always realized there were gay people,” she says one Friday morning, sitting in the still-sparsely furnished living room. “But I didn’t think about them wanting to get married.” And once she did: “Initially, I probably thought, well, what’s the big deal if they do? What does it have to do with me?”

The solution, Schubert said, was to get voters to think about “potential consequences” if gays were allowed legal rights beyond domestic partnerships.

They conducted a series of surveys where they discovered that about 45% were with the Yes on 1 side, about 42% supported marriage equality, so after qualifying the measure and firing up their base, they targeted the 10-12% in the middle.

Schubert said:

“At the end of the day, people vote on issues based on how they think it will impact them and their families. We spent a great deal of time trying to understand what impacts could we develop that would work. Communication has to be aimed at and appeal to those self interests of the electorate.”

Flint said that applying the art and science of what they do, they decided they needed to raise a doubt about something-

“…raising a doubt and projecting a doubt forward - that you have to get people to believe may happen but it hasn’t happened yet. So in this case, gay marriage had been legal for a few months and we wanted people to understand that that could mean consequences. But largely because it was a new thing, those consequences were something that could happen in the future.”

It was “one of the turning points in the campaign” during a late night session in the office, Flint said, when they realized that they could run with that: “something could happen that you may not like so you need to vote Yes to stop that from happening.”

“We had to stick together a whole series of arguments,” Schubert said, noting the enormous complexity of the message that must include understanding that most Californians were tolerant, wanted legal rights for same sex couples, didn’t see how same sex marriage impacted them, and didn’t want to throw gay couples under the bus.

Then they figured it out, Schubert said, aided by this “gift” of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s exuberant reaction to the California Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same sex marriage.

“This is not about tolerance. This is about forced acceptance of gay marriage - whether you like it or not….You’re going to have this conflict that arises in everyday life with a gay couple asserting their right to marry under the Supreme Court’s decision and the deeply held beliefs of people who do not support gay marriage. And when those collide - when that conflict exists - it comes in a dozen different situations - the rights of the gay couple are going to prevail because of the way the court reached their decision. That’s why it’s important to this underlying message you have to accept gay marriage, whether you like it or not.”

The Ah-ha Moment: Consequences

Additionally, Schubert said:

“What the research showed was that we could not win by simply affirming traditional marriage. People said, ‘Yeah, OK - but what’s the problem here. How does this impact me?’…. This forced acceptance [by the court] that gay marriage was now mandatory was a big deal - the consequences - specifically regarding religious freedom, religious expression and teaching of gay marriage in schools - and the education consequences become the most powerful in the course of the campaign. We bet the campaign on consequences - especially on education. Education from the beginning - while it was one of three consequences - it was the one that was the most emotionally charged and the most powerful. And I remember testing an ad in focus groups in Southern California….[One ad was} with the Wirthlin couple from Massachusetts. She’s telling the story of her son Joey - about he’s being taught how a prince can marry another prince - and he’s in second grade. There’s an African American gentleman in this group watching the ad [who] just shakes his head. So I [told the researcher to] ask him what he meant. And the guy says, ‘I’ll tell you what, if that happened to me - I would be pissed.’ And that was the moment that we decided that the campaign would rely on education.”

The “Real” Wirthlins

The Yes on 8 team flew the Wirthlins from Massachusetts to California for a bus tour of the state, positing them as “real people” who exemplified the “consequence” of same sex marriage being taught in schools. “We bet the farm on this argument over whether gay marriage would be taught in public schools,” Flint said.

But the reality of this “real” couple is that they, too, were Religious Right professionals, too. When The Bay Area Reporter picked up the story about the LDS internal memo from 1997, reporter Dan Aiello noted the role played in California’s antigay initiative Prop 22 by Mormon strategist and Republican pollster Richard “Dick” Wirthlin, a relative of the Massachusetts couple Joseph Robb and Robin Wirthlin used by Yes on 8. Schubert told BAR that it was “preposterous” to connect Dick Wirthlin to Yes on 8.

But BAR uncovered significant information indicating that the Wirthlins actively sought conflict with the school:

“Parents in the Lexington School District in Massachusetts disputed many of the Wirthlins claims to the B.A.R., pointing out that when the Wirthlins moved into the district they were already involved with two groups seeking to ban same-sex marriage. One of those groups, MassResistance, run by Brian Camenker, has been called an “anti-gay hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The Lexington parents told the B.A.R. that the couple moved into the district and enrolled their son into the school already aware of a complaint filed by David Parker against the school’s anti-bias curriculum. Additionally, Lexington School District superintendent Paul Ash told the B.A.R. that he made “several attempts to appease the Wirthlins and accommodate their religious convictions” but he concluded that the couple was intent on a public fight. Just weeks after they moved into the district, the Wirthlins joined Parker in filing a lawsuit.

At the AAPC Prop 8 Case Study panel, Frank Schubert said, “I want to make this crystal clear: there is nothing that we said in this campaign that we did not believe to be true.”

But there is a difference between believing something to be true and factual accuracy. Like the discredited “Swiftboaters for Truth” who challenged Sen. John Kerry’s heroism in the Vietnam War, it appears that Schubert and the Religious Right professionals used religion as moral cover to swiftboat and intentionally mislead voters for the politically expedient purpose of winning the election in California. Maine voters should be aware of these swiftboating political false prophets.

Update: Bonus video clip showing what bravely standing up to swiftboating false prophets looks like in action.

A faithful, earnest, calm Mormon testifies against Prop 8 in church …

And the LDS bishop cuts his mic! Grrrrr.

Please watch. The video, and the courage, speaks for itself:

More Mormons (and more LDS Fast and Testimony meetings) like this one, please.

Bravo, sir!

]]> Weekend Video Roundup: All Utah, Ten Clips in All tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.282517 2009-07-31T21:19:16Z 2009-07-31T22:20:36Z First up, our local Speed Racer, who didn’t want to go to church: With scads of Speed Racer vids after the break …... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com First up, our local Speed Racer, who didn’t want to go to church:

With scads of Speed Racer vids after the break …

]]> If Speed Racer’s not your thing, feel free to skip the next six clips:

Because here’s the real story out of Utah this week:

Blech.

Speed Racer had the right idea.

And now, so do these guys.

]]> Mormon-owned KSL.com: We strive to be a family-friendly site, unless the topic is gay tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.282089 2009-07-29T16:10:52Z 2009-07-29T16:43:30Z I know it’s the Internet. Threads littered with hateful comments are part of the terrain almost everywhere. But KSL.com is not just anywhere. It is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As KSL’s warning to commenters... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com I know it’s the Internet. Threads littered with hateful comments are part of the terrain almost everywhere. But KSL.com is not just anywhere. It is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As KSL’s warning to commenters notes:
… KSL strives to be a family-friendly web site, so please keep the language clean when you add your comments. We reserve the right to accept or reject any message. Thanks.
But 385 comments later, dozens of hateful, sickening messages have been accepted and posted under this story. Where are the moderators? They are no doubt Mormon. Do they not understand the disservice they’re doing their LDS-owned employer by giving free rein to homophobia and hate at KSL.com?

Sad.

Here’s the story: SLC one of many cities signing on for national kiss-in

If you can spare a moment, head over, register, and leave a comment of your own.

It now seems more obvious than ever why this particular action needs to happen:

The Great Nationwide Kiss-In

Update: Good for KSL.com, they’ve begun deleting some comments, which now number 364 (down from 385).

P.S. Memo to LDS Public Affairs: You’re the problem, not the solution.

]]> Ron Prentice Speaks, July 2009 Edition tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.281170 2009-07-24T15:07:41Z 2009-07-24T15:09:05Z H/T Unite The Fight … Ron Prentice: When Pedophiles Attack “So, for example, if a pedophile were to attack - I say ‘attack’ - approach a child in a church or in an employment situation or public school situation and... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com H/T Unite The Fight …

Ron Prentice: When Pedophiles Attack

“So, for example, if a pedophile were to attack - I say ‘attack’ - approach a child in a church or in an employment situation or public school situation and you or I were to pull that pedophile off the child and say something to that pedophile about his poor behavior, that pedophile could actually file suit against you for having committed a hate crime against them for what you verbalized.”

]]> Ron Prentice: Thank you, Mormons

“Next week, I’m told, Time magazine is putting out an article that talks about how Proposition 8 was successful. They give a lot of credit to the Latter-day Saints, as they should. Because Latter-day Saints were out there on the street. LDS’s have a model of community action and when we worked with LDS and said this is what we want to do, you know, before we knew it, they were knocking on doors with their own information about marriage. It was wonderful. And the Roman Catholics and the Evangelical Protestants had to catch up. And, fortunately, eventually, we feel like we sort of did. But I remember being here, and addressing a group of 200 or more pastors about Prop 8 early on, and the Time magazine article is gonna say that the Evangelicals were nowhere to be found. And I had a call from one of the members of our executive committee for Protect Marriage who is Mormon and he said, ‘I just want to apologize, because I didn’t write this article, but it gives all kind of credit to LDS’ and I said, ‘Mark, don’t worry, the LDS deserve a lot of credit …’”
This Ron Prentice: Crusading for ‘Judeo-Christian values’ doesn’t come cheap

]]> Knock, Knock, Anybody NOM? Anybody Mormon? tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.279516 2009-07-14T18:25:52Z 2009-07-14T18:49:15Z According to the latest from NOM’s Maggie Gallagher: ” … there is no connection between NOM and the [LDS] church except that a Mormon serves on NOM’s board.” In that same article, Kim Farah, spokeswoman for the LDS church in... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com According to the latest from NOM’s Maggie Gallagher: ” … there is no connection between NOM and the [LDS] church except that a Mormon serves on NOM’s board.”

In that same article, Kim Farah, spokeswoman for the LDS church in Salt Lake City, insists that the church “did not establish the National Organization for Marriage … [but fails to] respond to a question about whether the Mormon church has been active in the campaigns to defeat gay marriage in New England and New York.”

]]> This Kim Farah:

Whatever, Kim.

I look forward to perusing the IRS filings of any of the below NOM iterations just as soon as they become available:

National Organization for Marriage, Inc. (EIN: 26-0240498)
a 501(c)(4) formed January 2008
c/o Neil Corkery
9502 Nelson Ln
Manassas, VA 20110-4310

National Organization for Marriage Education Fund (EIN: 20-7472471)
a 501(c)(3) formed July 2008
c/o Neil Corkery
9502 Nelson Ln
Manassas, VA 20110-4310

National Organization for Marriage California PAC (EIN: 26-4205819)
a 501(c)(4) formed February 2009
c/o David Bauer
2150 River Plaza Dr Ste 150
Sacramento, CA 95833-4131

National Organization for Marriage PAC New York (EIN: 27-0394565)
a 501(c)(4) formed June 2009
c/o Brian S. Brown
20 Nassau Street Suite 242
Princeton, NJ 08542

In the meantime, some beyond-the-boardroom LDS-NOM connections for our readers’ consideration.

Because that’s all I’ve got. Because tracking down NOM’s board and officers has become an exercise in futility. All apologies, I wish I had more, but friends have taken the time to actually visit the NOM office in New Jersey, and here’s what they found:

Crickets. Ghosts. Iconography:

So, moving on from what stubbornly remains unknowable, here’s what we do know:

Audition #3: Nanci Wudel

Fave line from Nanci’s winning essay: “We openly cried to be back home where we knew what freedom meant - the right to live as responsible citizens who cared as much about others’ freedoms as our own.”


Audition #5: Carol Soelberg

Carol qualifies Nanci’s take on freedom: “Every aspect of life and freedom as we know it will be diluted by the liberal agenda of the homosexual movement.”


Audition #6: Glade Soelberg

Glade’s son weighs in: “My dad very rarely ever raised his voice, and knowing how my mom confided in me and trusted me, I always made the right decisions so as not to disappoint her.” — Alan Soelberg talking about Mom and Dad.


Audition #7: Gilberto Laparra

“The [Mesa] pageant is about Jesus Christ and His love for us, which is very comforting to feel.”


Audition #9: Dee Dee Abaroa

Dee Dee opines:

“Loving leadership is a concept slipping through our young society’s fingers. The idea of democracy is being tested by candidates who are socialistic in a democratic bodysuit.

The hidden agendas that our candidates are pushing ever so nonchalantly and deceitfully are the exact contradiction to what we are as a country.

We profess to be the little brother of goodness and mercy for our global neighbors yet our own walls are beginning to lose strength in integrity and honesty.

Do the history! A country fallen always falls from within.

The political battlefield has already been a nasty showing of our own domestic differences. We’re not talking a differentiation in just basic partisan platform issues.

We’re talking about differences in national structural stances such as same-sex marital rights, socialistic medicine for all and nationalization of the oil industry.”


Audition #10: Steve Abaroa

Former pupil: “Apparently [Steve] is now the drama teacher at Highland. What a fabulous position!”


Audition #12: Jake Clark


Audition #19: Sterling Baer

Michele’s husband.


Audition #20: Michele Baer

Michele explains Prop 102.
In case anyone’s forgotten these faces, here’s the ad:
And here are the audition reels:
Auditions 1-12:

Auditions 13-23:

Once again, NOM’s Maggie Gallagher:
” … there is no connection between NOM and the [LDS] church except that a Mormon serves on NOM’s board.”

Will You Take a Lie Detector Test, Maggie Gallagher?
And for those still reading after all this, here’s a bonus clip just for you:
Clearing Time: Fighting a Mormon Gulag (Trailer):

Confused? It’s the sequel to: Trapped in a Mormon Gulag.
And here’s the rub as far as I’m concerned: Since Mormon Gulag went live, there’s been an outpouring of support from the LDS community in terms of stepping up and identifying the culprits behind the unrighteous sequestration that is the Utah Boys Ranch, but not so much as a peep from those Arizona Mormons who must’ve seen the NOM audition reels and recognized their wingnut homophobe neighbors … what’s up with that?


Have you been cowed into submission/silence simply by dint of your co-religionists having access to a camera and a production crew? If so, you’ve got it bass ackwards … In the words of Spiderman’s Uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.”


And accountability.


Or does it?


Or does parroting NOM’s anti-gay lies in front of a camera somehow make it all beyond reproach?

]]> Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Interracial Mormon Marriages tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.277742 2009-07-01T17:43:32Z 2009-07-02T13:00:35Z But first, time out for an oldie-but-goodie … Interracial Marriage - The Gathering Storm Sorry, I needed that laugh. The original post continues below … I’ve just finished watching a fascinating documentary on DVD that attempts to tell the story... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com But first, time out for an oldie-but-goodie …

Interracial Marriage - The Gathering Storm

Sorry, I needed that laugh. The original post continues below …

I’ve just finished watching a fascinating documentary on DVD that attempts to tell the story of black Mormons, who - according to the liner notes - “have been a continuous presence in the LDS church from its earliest days.” The creators bring an insider’s POV - but don’t flinch from grappling with Mormonism’s racist past - and I applaud their effort and welcome the Mormon conversation it has engendered.

That said, it wasn’t the film’s treatment of historical injustice that provoked me to write this post, but rather what the clip below reveals about an ongoing and very present cause for concern.

First, a quick synopsis to set up the clip:

00:00:00 - Faithful young Mormon couple, parents of nine

00:00:55 - Their encounter with racism inside the Salt Lake Temple

00:01:13 - “You speak such good English!”

00:01:25 - This worthy Mormon family is apparently not appropriate for LDS church media? Good enough to tithe, to attend the Mormon Temple, but not good enough for Mormon magazine covers? What is it with the Mormon church and its addiction to artifice and actors?

And here it is, a short excerpt from Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons …

For the record, I have no association with the folks who created Nobody Knows.

I’m too busy with my own documentary project (and I could probably use some help with the title, because it seems a bit long) …

“Everybody Knows Except the Mormons Who Never Got Told: Why a religion so rigid that until today it’s still grappling with the meaning of interracial marriage in its own church culture decided to bankroll a nationwide campaign to define marriage for the rest of the country.”

]]> Weekend Video Roundup: Why We Fight (Idaho Edition) tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.277096 2009-06-26T18:14:15Z 2009-06-26T18:19:37Z Interview with Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach on local Idaho TV 7:... Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com Interview with Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach on local Idaho TV 7:

]]> Boise Pride, courtesy local Idaho FOX 12:

Boise Proud Concert (Part One):

Boise Proud Concert (Part Two):

Enjoy!

Have a great weekend.

]]> NOM Chairman Robert P. George warns BYU forum: "Utah will be whipped into line." tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/jason_echols//1565.276513 2009-06-24T08:57:42Z 2009-06-24T14:55:09Z Chino Blanco http://www.chinoblanco.com

]]> “Just as the nation could not endure half slave and half free but eventually had to go all one way or all the other, we will not be able to get by with a situation in which some couples are married in one state, not married when they move to or travel through the next, and married again when they reach a third.

If same‐sex marriage is legally recognized in a small number of states, it will spread throughout the nation, either through judicial action under the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause or by the working of informal cultural pressures. Some states - Utah would be one - may try to hold out, but sooner or later they will be whipped into line.”

—Robert P. George, Chairman,
National Organization for Marriage,
speaking at Brigham Young University,
October 28, 2008

That sounds about right, Prof. George.

Remind me again, what were we arguing about?

I’m six years late, but I’ve just read George’s WSJ Op-Ed from 2003, and I’m now very curious as to how he justifies his continuing role in this contest? His own accounts (both from his BYU Forum lecture and in that WSJ article) leave me convinced that he knows it’s over. In which case, what is it that he’s hoping to accomplish at this point through NOM’s political fundraising and spending, considering that the political objective is one that he himself describes as a lost cause?

]]>