What the fu[del]c[/del]dge is up with Mormons and gay marriage? (amazingly short)

The BBQ Pit
1

Not being part of a religion myself I really don’t care what they preach and teach about gays or gay marriage or much of anything else except that I lament the gay kids and others who are victimized by the misinformation and general idiocy. And I certainly know that the Mormons are far from the only religion to have problems with gay marriage. BUT WHAT THE FUCK IS SO FUCKING IMPORTANT [extra FUCK here] TO IT ABOUT THEM THAT THEY SPEND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON AD CAMPAIGNS AND LOBBYISTS TO STOP IT?!?!?!?!

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Grill paid at least $2 million for ads and lobbyists to advance Prop 8 in California and they encouraged Mormon individuals to give much more (upwards of $20 million by some estimates). They paid millions in Arizona, Arkansas, and other states. They contribute to National Organization of Marriage and finance that dumbass Gathering Storm ad that has cheesier actors and graphics than any of its parodies (and get really pissy when the audition tapes are leaked) and they get their holy panties in a wad at any kind of mention of the subject…

Dudes- chill! Don’t you have enough problems to worry about in your religion without worrying about what queers do? You know those “lost boys” and 14 year old plural wives with the Little House on the Prairie dressed and the fucked up hair (that will alone take years to fix)- okay, you can say you renounce and denounce polygamy all you want (ever since God changed his mind about it being a wonderful and holy thing about the time the church got padlocked) but, um… your church made that mess. Show me a Baptist cult where women are kept barefoot, bighaired, pregnant, and groups of 5 (alright, Muenster in the 16th century, but I’m talking now). Those people live like that for reasons 100% attributible to your horndog plagiarizing “prophet” (who could see all through his magic 3D glasses but strangely didn’t know tearing up that particular printing press would be a bad idea— or that moving to Missouri was a bad idea---- or that going into the banking business was a bad idea— or that building— well you get the bad idea). How 'bout throwing that same money to help those people, the refugees from the cults who decided conventional Mormonism didn’t have enough easily disproven insane fruitloopiness and had to go into the desert and add in space ships and talking dogs or whatever- there the money could actually do some (and in fact could undo some bad that’s done in the name of your church) whereas all it does in the ads is get you mocked and preach to people who were already on your side.

I don’t mean to be critical or anything (well, okay I do), but really… what’s the deal? What’s so important? Is it because of the polygamy thing- “if we can’t redefine marriage no one can!”… or did a gay couple get through the boomshakalakas and [del]Masonic*secret handshakes and rituals and expose themselves to the guy dressed as Adam or what exactly? Because the same millions can be spent on productive things: food for the poor, food for the 7 year famine, homeless shelters, buying up incriminating forgeries, paying for Marie Osmond to retire, whatever… why the fuck is this of all “social ills” so damned important to you?

2

It’s an underwear thing. Knickers and the twisting thereof.

3

Mormons believe in marriage. I mean, they really believe in marriage…they think that it’s everyone’s moral duty to marry and have kids, and in fact, getting sealed in a Mormon temple wedding ceremony is the only way Moromons believe you can get to the highest heaven. So homosecuality really bothers them,and the Mormon church’s attitude is that gays should stop being gay and go ahead and get married to a member of the opposite sex like God wants you to. So they’re going to fight anything that:

  1. Encourages gay people to be comfortable and happy in their gayness
    and
  2. Says that gay relationships are somehow equal to straight marriages.
4

Not that I have any wish to defend them, but the group that was raided a couple of years ago has no more connection to the Church of Latter-Day Saints than the Methodists have to the Anglicans. They split off from the LDS, just as the Methodists split off from the CofE, but don’t have a current connection to the mainstream church.

5

There are lower and higher heavens? How many levels?

What level to you need to get to for HBO?

6

I think you can get HBO for a $20 month upgrade. A heckuva lot cheaper than getting married. And more nudity.

7

There are three levels of heaven in Mormonism, the telestial kingdom, where those people go who disobeyed the commandments and didn’t believe in Jesus, the terrestrial kingdom, where those people go who obeyed some of the commandments but fell short, as well as those people who accepted the gospel after their death, and the celestial kingdom, where the people who believed in Jesus, kept his commandments, and repented of their sins go.

8

But, can I stay unmarried, get into a lower heaven, and still have HBO?

9

And it should go without saying that you have to be LDS to get in, so belief in Jesus, commandment keeping, and repentance are not enough if you’re not LDS.

10

a great typo there… Secular homosexuals!

11

Well, the idea is that if you’re not LDS, you’re not really believing in Jesus or keeping his commandments.

12

Sure. Try the Unitarians. :wink:

13

It’s closer than Methodists to the Anglicans in both time and geography. The Divine okay to stop practicing polygamy came to Prophet, Seer & Revelator Wilford Woodruff (namesake and relative of Wilford Brimley incidentally) in September 1890. By complete coincidence God gave this revelation shortly after confiscation of millions of dollars of property belonging to the church and its leaders (including Woodruff), the disollution of the Church as a legal entity by the U.S. government, and while many of its leaders (including Woodruff) were in hiding to avoid imprisonment; there’s no causal connection though as God does not care about the laws of man.

However, Woodruff (83 at the time, the husband of several wives over the course of his life [at least 2 living in 1890] and father of 33 children) said of this “revelation”:

Note the italicized portion- he didn’t claim Jesus Himself said “stop practicing plural marriage”, but that he felt inspired by him. Similarly the Manifesto of 1890 does not mention a divine order. It’s more of an “I ran it by the Lord and He didn’t say ‘don’t do it’, so…”.

Now, polygamy had been approved— commanded of the righteous even— by God Himself in the 1840s. Many Mormons, especially those already in plural marriages, saw- can’t think why- the 1890 Manifesto as less a spiritual matter than a completely secular appeasing, something born of a man who wasn’t willing to keep fighting Babylon to keep Zion. For many years most of the polygamists went underground with a don’t ask/don’t tell policy of sorts before the Church began its own crackdown on the practice due to Federal pressure. (The last Church Seer, Revelator, and Prophet to have practiced polygamy in his lifetime was Heber Jeddie Grant who died in May 1945, though in fairness he apparently stopped sleeping with his two plural wives in the 1890s as there were no children born after the Manifesto.)

So, the split from mainstream Mormonism occurred, at most, 119 years ago. It’s very easy to understand why the Fundamentalist Mormons saw the renunciation of the Principle as a complete sellout. They remain most populous in the same area as mainstream Mormons (Utah, Idaho, Arizona) and believe in the divinity of the Book of Mormon. They’re similar to sedevacantist Catholics.

In any case, it’s true that Mormons now excommunicate people who practice the principle that their Founder taught was holy and heaven sent (though not in public of course- Brigham Young “came out” as a polygamist in the late 1850s [by which time everybody already knew it but he’d denied it repeatedly- again, when the leader himself lies to authorities is it any wonder many Mormons once thought that the Manifesto was one more example of lying for the Lord?]). However, the current Mormon church could do a LOT more to help clean up the mess of the Fundies financially and socially and in other ways. According to the many memoirs and interviews I’ve read from those who’ve left polygamous cults they received no help from the mainstream church and in fact some ended up returning to the cults or turning to drugs and prostitution due to poverty. (Many received help from individual Mormons- most in particularly a couple of very wealthy former Fundamentalists who are now monogamous and mainstream- and not from the church itself.) However, they spend millions to defeat gay marriage.

So, there are approximately 6 million Mormons in the USA- roughly 2% of the population. Assuming that 2% of the population identifies as openly gay (seems a conservative number, but 2% is enough for this purpose), that makes Mormons and gays roughly equal in number and probably in earnings and purchasing power.

Have gays ever banded together to spend millions to prevent Mormons from practicing their religion? Have gays ever spent millions of dollars on paranoid hate ads against Mormons? Or have gays ever spent millions of dollars to do anything against Mormons?

If we (gays) piss them off by our very existence… well, too fucking bad. But the Mormons have fired every single shot in this fight. It fucking pisses me off.

Personally I think gays need to start firing back. I’d contribute. As the parody ads have shown gays and the gay friendly have FAR better creative resources than the Mormons and their homophobic allies, and they’ve got skeletons not so much in their closet as hanging on the porch with great big signs marked SKELETONS ===>>> and they have more to fear from us than we from them. An anti-Mormon ad/propaganda/outreach campaign from gays would probably make a helluva lot more people give up/not take up Mormonism than Mormon financed ads would have in making people give up/not take up being gay.

I suppose the real hell of it is that Mormons and gays should be allies. We’re both a tiny but overrepresented minority of the population, we’re both feared and painted in outlandish colors and seen as intrinsically misguided and hellbound by the ignorant of other religions, and we’re both seen as “great people on the individual level… it’s their lifestyle I can’t stand”. In fact, pretty much every group that hates gays also hates Mormons, and vice versa, with of course the exception of Mormons. Instead, they ally with their own enemies to do harm to a group that has never done them harm.

Well I’ll stop ranting now. And please don’t get me wrong:

On the individual level I like Mormons… I’ve really and truly had good friends who were Mormon and I’ve known many Mormons who were good people and I’d be just fine with letting them babysit my kids or live next door to me. It’s just their lifestyle I disapprove of. Actually not lifestyle so much as belief system, but that doesn’t work as well semantically.

14

We prefer Gaytheists or Fagnostic Americans.

15

I’ve wondered the same about all those who focus on gay marriage as opposed to, say, kids dying from lack of water.

What I think is that they don’t think life is that important - the afterlife is. Life is temporal, but the afterlife is eternal. You could prolong someone’s temporal life by giving them the money and skills to dig a well, but if you don’t get them into the afterlife, that’s not worth much. That old saw about give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; give him a net, he’ll eat for a lifetime - they see it in that way:

Give a man a net, he’ll eat for a lifetime; help a man accept the glory of God for eternity, he’ll live forever and ever and ever.

That’s an understandable way of thinking if you believe in God granting eternal life.

The real problem comes in assessing what tool, exactly, is needed for God to accept this person into eternal life. Some people think that, bizarrely, God cares more about gender than about love. They think that they can decide what gets people into heaven - they put themselves above God.

They’re even willing to take away the money that could give people longer to live on this earth (which gives them more chance to be good in God’s eyes - more chance to be bad, too, but at least there’s a chance), and give that money to something that they think God wants.

16

I’ve been watching a lot of 3rd Rock From the Sun recently (insomnia), and I totally heard that in Dick Solomon’s voice.

He’s definitely not a Mormom. No HBO for you!

17

Naw, the LDS has the sacred underpants. That’s the deal maker for me.

18

There is no heaven without HBO. Purgatory has Showtime. Limbo has Starz.

19

Which reminds me of the line from The Color Purple.

[Sophia]Girl, you need to beat Mistuh’s head open and thank on heaven later…[/Sophia]

Not to be construed as a suggestion on knocking beating anybody’s head open (be they Danny Glover, Mormon, or otherwise).

20

Paraphrasing T.H. White, from The Book of Merlin: