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Given the fact that the Mormon Church was so front and center in the battle over the gay marriage amendment—Proposition 8—which was recently passed in California, I felt the need to speak out about them.
I have a special insight into the hypocrisy of this particular situation in that I, myself married a Mormon. Now don’t get me wrong, the man that I married was at the time a “jack” Mormon, or one who had gone astray and no longer attended church. He had been born into this faith and at the age of 18 when he left home for college never attended church again.
But my marriage to him and my exposure to members of the Mormon faith, his family and others, also gives me perspective about their unique culture, and because I lived in Utah for three years allows me to comment on the absurdity of the “marriage is between one man and one woman” philosophy which is at the heart of Proposition 8, and which they now supposedly find it necessary to whole-heartedly support.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints a.k.a. the Mormon Church or the L.D.S. Church has clearly and visibly stepped over a line when it comes to the separation of church and state. The Church’s top prophets commanded Mormons “to do all you can” to work for Proposition 8 and donate money to the campaign. Mormon leaders throughout California read the instructions to their members which number 750,000, according to Mother Jones Magazine.
“The Church has a single, undeviating standard of sexual morality: intimate relations are proper only between a husband and a wife united in bonds of matrimony . . . Any dilution of the traditional definition of marriage will further erode the already weakened stability of marriages and family generally . . . with harmful consequences for society,” as was quoted by Mother Jones.
Having taken a class in Utah History, which could have been subtitled Mormon history, I find this push for a constitutional amendment led by this particular group, whose members donated $19 million, which was 4 out of every 5 dollars given, as was reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, more than absurd.
During the 19th, century this group of believers like no other before them were persecuted for their own untraditional belief in polygamy, which was a foundation of their church. Members of the Mormon Church at that time were relentlessly and violently attacked for their belief in doctrine like “celestial marriage.” They were chased from states on the East Coast and in the Midwest to the desert of Utah, which is now the center of their operations.
Outsiders then accused Mormon parents of being unfit because of their practice of having nontraditional families consisting of many children and multiple wives. And now this same group wants to do the same type of thing to gays who want to become parents. Some of these polygamist women were related to one another, being sisters or mothers and daughters. Some of them were very young girls and became the “child-brides” of much older men.
It has now been over 100 years since the Mormon Church formally abandoned the practice of polygamy, but the mainstream media still reports on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints or FLDS who still practice polygamy and are sometimes caught and arrested for it, mainly on charges of rape and child abuse. The Warren Jeffs case is the latest to attract attention and evoke outrage across the country.
But don’t be fooled that the practice of polygamy is so rare. As a college student at a university in Southern Utah, I often had polygamist women sitting right next to me in class. They came to study to be teachers and then returned to polygamist communities that existed openly in nearby areas. This was common knowledge in this college town. The women in question were easily identifiable by their odd 19th century hairstyles and dress.
Even today, many other so-called Christian denominations do not consider Mormons to be Christians at all, but a cult. Much prejudice is still held against them for various practices and beliefs attributed to their past history.
Of all the groups in this country in support of an amendment to define marriage, the Mormon Church and its own peculiar history are the most hypocritical of them all. If I remember my Utah history class correctly and I do, the only reason the LDS Church abandoned this practice, which was originally considered a revelation from God, was when it became an objectionable little detail in Utah’s bid for statehood. At about that same time, another revelation from God was received and polygamy was abandoned in favor of becoming a state.
The LDS Church has not only a history of polygamist behavior, but one of being opponents of equal rights for women, which they also rallied against. And the Mormon Church was also publicly known as being racist, when they refused to give Black men the priesthood or to marry interracial couples, until they were humiliated by public opinion into doing so.
The Mormon Church should once again face scrutiny and public humiliation not only for its failure of separating church and state, for which they should certainly lose their “tax-exempt” status, but also for the hypocrisy of their willingness, given their own recent past of defining marriage through a state constitutional amendment as “between one man and one woman.”
