I am truly, insanely happy that Obama was elected. An American miracle. Or, perhaps, just the latest proof of the genius authored by the Founders. Either way. There’s no way to play it down or understate it. In fact I can’t quite write about it yet because I’m still not convinced I’m not dreaming. More later I promise.
And I am thrilled (and honestly shocked, given how poorly she campaigns despite her success at governing) that Chris Gregoire is still our Governor. I couldn’t have dealt with Rossiocracy. We avoided that, and even got death with dignity. Here in Seattle we even got money for parks and our beloved Pike Place Market.
Of course, the bitter must come along with the sweet.
And I am bitter about Prop 8 in California. While we were in Palm Springs last weekend, we met several newlywed couples. To have that stripped away would be unimaginable. And now that it’s been done in California, none of our rights are safe anywhere.
Knowing that your marriage will soon cease to exist must feel pretty much like this video shows it.
I do hate to pick on the Mormons. I have LDS friends, employees and coworkers. (I also know plenty of gay former Mormons — it’s hard to feel sorry for someone’s religious upbringing given my Nazarene childhood, but being a gay Mormon must take the cake.) There is a strong tradition of charity (at least for the faithful poor) in the church that I respect.
But the fact is that the Mormon church was the largest donor to the Yes on 8 campaign — apparently as part of a larger strategy to “make their bones” with Christian conservatives. (Good luck there — they are only nice about the Catholics to their faces at the anti-abortion rallies. In their churches, they talk about how sad it is you’re going to hell.)
Here’s the thing. Do not pick a fight with gay and lesbians. We have time on our hands and bear a grudge. While we’re upset that the black vote might have put 8 over the top, they get a pass. And they didn’t buy millions of dollars worth of ads demonizing us. You did. I still can’t figure out how talking about other folks’ marriages is a win for Mormons. But I digress.
We. Are. Pissed. And: You. Are. Outnumbered.
Yes, Mormons breed at a high rate and your hot little missionaries (no, really — click that link!) are peddling magic underwear all through the developing world, but miraculously we spring forth in all times and in all places — almost like God wanted it that way. When Joseph Smith had his vision, we had already been fighting repression and undermining the dominant paradigm — with style — for millennia. Whether we are 10% or 5% or just 1% of the population, you will have to baptize a lot of dead Jews before there are more Mormons than queers. You have 13 million and change. We are a tolerant people and would have been happy, more than happy, to let your proselytize your way to a big happy planet of spirit babies. But you just had to go there.
To be sure — there are lots of Mormons who are terribly unhappy with the church leadership’s decision to go all in on Prop 8. And as for those Mormons who “judge not” spoke up in the media or in their congregations, or just wearing paper bags on YouTube, I salute you. And thank you. And apologize for slandering your faith. But your church has slandered me, and my family and, really, my personhood.
So… a few ideas to share about how we might show you what you get when you mess with my family:
- As a marketer, I know there are laws governing product claims… you folks sure do make a lot of claims about that underwear. It would be a darn shame if someone sued you for that.
- Your missionaries, with their white shirts, black ties and eco-friendly bikes, are very visible when they roll into town. Just as there is no law about their ringing on my doorbell during dinner, there’s no law against organizing to follow along behind them whenever they roll into town. In discreet vehicles of course. We could follow up your earnest little visits with additional information not contained in the book of Mormon. Maybe even some free DVDs. It’s not like we could be less factual, or more disrespectful, than the misinformation you spread about gays.
- This one’s my favorite.Your local gays put on a pretty respectable little Pride Parade in Salt Lake City. But really, we can do better. Boycotts are so… 2004. So I propose calling all of June, 2009 as a “reverse boycott.”
I’m not a huge fan of Pride Parades… it’s our guaranteed five minutes airtime every year and all we get on the news at 11 is floats and leather daddies and party boys. I have always wished for a little more balance, a little more insight into our profound everyday un-fabulousness. But your support of Prop 8 shows that no matter how much we show you that all we want is the right to have a family as boring as yours, you still need to demonize us and take away our rights. It would appear we have reached the limits of assimilationism. So I say we should bring to Tabernacle Square a spectacle that would make the Castro blush for SLC Pride… I will personally don harness and chaps and wear body glitter. We can bring a parade of Dykes on Bikes a mile long. We can turn out the fetish gear, the bulls, the bears, the otters, the foot fetishists, the subs and doms, the pony boys and the dirt fags and more twinks than a Hostess factory on overtime could ever churn out. We will make the streets dark with our gayness and into the long shadows of high desert evening we will defile your Mecca. Because in taking away our rights in California, where Milk shed his blood for our freedom, you defiled ours.
That’s just for starters. When you’ve started letting your young back out on the streets, we’ll go underground on you. We’ll book ourselves into your big hotels and your little B&Bs owned by bluehaired retirees and just keep on bringing the gay to the heart of Mormondom. We’ll continue for the entire month to dress up in our nicest, Republicanest clothes and walk into your temples, your restaurants and really anywhere else where you think your family is smugly secure from the world of people who wear regular underwear and don’t believe we’ll get our own personal paradise planets if we pray to the angel Moroni. We will quietly, silently invade every last inch of your reality and when you least expect it we will quietly, calmly start passing out our literature just as smilingly as your upstanding youth do on the doorsteps of the world. Everywhere you go — to your Wal-Marts and your Little League games — we will be there. Just like you have invaded our homes and our lives. Not so much civil disobedience, as civil omnipresence. Because unlike you, we are everywhere.
You have shown that you hate us for our efforts to gain respectability and stability. If you can hate a gay family’s attempts to protect itself, you must really love to hate. Being the accomodating people we are, we will bring you even more to hate — the dirtiest, raunchiest, most offensive we have to offer. And you will really, really hate it. And the more you hate, the more the world will see your faith for what it is: an idiotic cult built on misogyny, bigotry and hatred that is doomed for the dustbin of history.
But don’t worry. When your faith is gone, or dwindled to a persecuted remainer afraid to leave its inbred compounds in the desert, we gays will carry on your memory.
We will wear that sexy magic underwear of yours in our gay pride parades forever. Anything that strange will always be hot.
I’m an atheist and a psychologist practicing in Southern California (Stanford PhD). I am a liberal democrat. However, against everything I ever held to be true, I have been treating homosexuals with alarming success in my practice for about 9 years now. I have treated over three dozen, and approximately half of them are in hetersosexual relationships, and they are so happy now. In the psychological community, we are finding increasing success with helping individuals recognize the source of their homosexuality and overcome it. I think that it was the million and millions of dollars spent to prove that homosexiality was biological that actually led to this new thought in my field. The studies proved exactly the opposite, and forced many of us to consider that homosexuality is a condition. It is highly treatable with a strong level of dedication. It has been so rewarding to help people discover who they really are.
Interesting, Greg, even if your response is off-topic as we’re discussing politics. Could I have the contact information for your practice please? I ask not because I want to be a client (I’m so happy NOW, thanks much) but because I think you’re lying. Your IP address resolves to:
OrgName: Regus Business Center, LLC
OrgID: RBC
Address: 15305 Dallas Parkway
Address: Suite 1400
City: Addison
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 75001
Country: US
Perhaps you’re just on vacation? From sanity? The APA absolutely and vociferously rejects “reparative therapy” and the mainstream psychiatric community considers its practitioners quacks and best.
I think this is pretty much the state of the art. There are no peer-reviewed results suggesting that homosexuality can be “cured.” No mainstream medical or psychological body believes it ts a disease.
This is an awesome article. Being a San Franciscan, and Ex-Mormon…I totally relate to everything you’ve talked about here. The entire Prop 8 situation frustrates me to no end, and even further solidifies my stance as an Ex-Mormon. Props to you for writing this!
I just wanted to say, as a Utahn who has
recently resigned from the LDS church, I am
so happy to know that others are not giving
up on this..my heart broke when Prop 8 passed.
I cried real tears when Mormon Mothers against
Prop 8 had a candle vigil the night before the
election.
Many hugs..I belong to a postmormon group that
had great support for those who were against
Prop 8…so many worked hard and with a loss
of membership/family. Courage!! Lets fix this!!
The Mormom Church deserves to lose its tax-exempt status because of this, and according to IRS legislation, it should. Here’s how you can make that happen.
Thanks Vickie and Sean for your comments… there’s a lot to be hopeful for, and people like you are near the top of the list. But we WILL get even! 🙂
Jay, I love you and your eloquence. And I will fight with everything I can for you and David, who are the epitome of what a marriage should be, and all of my gay friends, family, and coworkers to have equal protection under the law.
I feel like I shouldn’t be shocked by Prop 8 passing, but I guess I shouldn’t be. I’ve recently been discouraged to see so much homophobia at Microsoft on discussion aliases. It’s disturbing to know the diversity message doesn’t quite make it around to everyone. More distressing to read mail from Microsoft FTEs denigrating the rights of gay people to equal protection while another coworker tells me she’s been crying for hours because she doesn’t know if her marriage is still valid anywhere.
Count me in the for the fight. Count me in to support a new ballot measure to overturn the ban, to fight to have the mormon church’s tax exemption revoked, and to help fund any lawsuits challenging this stupid proposition.
I’m mad at California, but even more mad at Florida right now, and proud of my former CT home.
We’re all in this fight together.
As an active Mormon, browsing to see how this is all panning out. I can tell you are upset, but you don’t fully understand. While I followed some of your annotated links I saw the depth of your ignorance of our beliefs. I know we don’t understand each other and probably little of what I way will change your mind. In fact, i don’t even live in California, so I had no say in the vote anyway. And fine, we felt strongly about this issue. You feel it is matter of rights, that this is a free country. Well that doesn’t promise everyone that they get what they want. There still have to be laws or there isn’t safety in our freedom. We felt we should support it, you felt you should oppose it. We have our reasons and you have yours. This is not about personal hatred. This is not about bigotry. To me, I stand for what I know is right. If you want to contest that, you should know that even as an active member, I have “broken the rules”, but what I know to be true persuades me to change. Some people, even those who are gay in the LDS church have felt the same way. So, go ahead, protest our temples. Make us out to be bigots. But please, maybe you should also try to understand us, not just throw out whatever seems the most scandalous and outrageous, because anyone can do that with any group. Try Muslims for example.
In the end I can’t contest that fact, that overall LDS contributors gave the most, but don’t forget everyone had a say in it.
This is interesting. Don’t we live in a democracy? The people of California were given a choice, on a ballot, and they chose. Some donated money to their cause, for whatever side they were on. Your message above is a message of hate, and it saddens me. You cry for equal rights, yet you are picking out a people, a religious group, and making fun and demoralizing them. Isn’t that in contrast to everything you say stand for? Couldn’t that be called hypocritical? Yes, Mormons believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not going to say whether I agree with them or not. I am going to say that they have a RIGHT to that opinion. They even have a right to support that opinion with their hard earned dollars. That is the beauty of America. In all of this backlash after the election I see so much hate, I see YOU picking out a group of people and hating them for exercising their right to a democracy. You are going to follow their missionaries around and harass them? You are threatening to scare them taunt them every chance you get? From what I can tell, Mormons are law abiding citizens. When polygamy became illegal, they quit practicing it. They could have screamed about their rights being taken away, they could have cried and said people hated them. They simply followed the law. I understand that you feel your rights are being taken away. I support you in that effort. But, c’mon, harassing and spiting out hatred is not the way to get what you want. It just makes you look bitter and ugly. And frankly, it is contrast to everything I believe America stands for. Fight for your rights, but do it with some class. You can even dislike Mormons. But trying to scare them, taking their rights away to have an opinion…. hmmmm… you might want to stop and think about what you are suggesting.
The issue here is that the Mormon church wanted to run on the field of democracy, make their play and run back off. If you play you have to take your hits like everyone else. I don’t hate mormons — I just think they are possibly the last religious group that needs to weigh in on marriage. Or civil rights… since they only stopped believing blacks were descended from Satan in the 70s.
Gays have been an easy political target for a long time because we didn’t hit back. Those days are over, as the Mormon Church is learning.
Jay, once again. Please check your facts before you use them as arguments. This isn’t the first time we’ve weighed in. And secondly, blacks descended from Satan??? No, that was not the issue. Please try and read something other than Anti-Mormom literature to get your arguments. And fine, play ball, it’s your right, as leila said, but don’t think that singling out people and hate is going to help. As she said, do it with class.
The only positive that can be taken away from this episode of “buy the vote” is that with a larger turnout in California this vote was closer than the previous referendum. The thing to look forward to is the very real possibility of the CA Supreme Court striking this down like they did the last one.
Civil marriage statutes should not be held hostage to sexual orientation any more than they should be to race. Two consenting adults looking to share a life and wanting the legal and economic protection that civil marriage provides should not be subject to the religious views of anyone. A church can refuse to provide facilities, personnel or sanction of the sacrament if it does not jibe with their dogma but the State must extend the legal protection of its licensed institutions to all members of society. That is what it means to be equal before the law. It will be a rude awakening for the “religious” of the world when they realize that we are all equal in God’s love, too.