Prop. 8: Whose "Traditional Marriage" Does It Protect?
 
By Peter Schrag
California Progress Report
 
According to the best estimates, the big money campaign for Proposition 8, the initiative banning gay marriage, has collected over $9.4 million from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), roughly 46 percent of the $20 million-plus raised in large contributions so far. That, needless to say, is the largest amount from any single category of contributors.

The sponsors of the November ballot measure call themselves defenders of "traditional marriage." But what version of traditional marriage do the Mormon contributors have in mind?

Is it the" traditional marriage" of Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith who, according to one Mormon site "was sealed to 28 women before his death, though it is not clear how many he cohabited with."

"Sealed," according to the same site, means married in the Church not only for the duration of this life, but forever. Smith apparently first resisted the idea of polygamy but was then persuaded that God ordained it.

Or was the exemplar of traditional marriage Mormon leader Brigham Young, the second prophet of the church, who, in the 1860s and 1870s, had 57 children by 16 women? So is traditional marriage one between one man and one woman, or a man and 16 women, or maybe 28? Joseph Smith called it "celestial marriage."

Utah, the "Zion", where the church settled after its members were harassed and persecuted in the Midwest, was admitted to the Union in 1896 on condition that it prohibit polygamy. But the church, under continuous pressure from Congress and from U.S. marshals seizing church property, didn’t officially end it until 1904, when the then-prophet got word from God that He wanted "plural marriage" to stop.

The church says it now excommunicates polygamists, and presumably few have kicked in to the Proposition 8 campaign. But as the news of the past year made clear, there are still polygamists running around in the hills of the southwest, including a few, it appears, with underage wives, who claim to be the real Mormons.

The point of all this is not to wander into the twists and turns of church history and doctrine, much less to cast doubts on it, only to question the right of any organization that’s twice changed its mind about marriage to try to impose its current beliefs about "traditional marriage" on others.

Is this a campaign organized by the LDS Church? The contributions of Mormons appear to be all from individuals. But as with the campaign to pass California Proposition 22 in 2000, which banned gay marriage until it was overturned earlier this year by the state Supreme Court, it takes only a formal letter or two from Salt Lake City to energize the faithful. And there’s more. According to the Salt-Lake City Tribune, quoting a campaign spokesman, "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is making arrangements for Californians living in Utah ‘to call friends, family and fellow-citizens in California to urge support of the effort to defend traditional marriage.’"

It wasn’t until 1978, just thirty years ago, that yet another "revelation" to Mormon leaders told them that blacks were now eligible for the Mormon priesthood, a title that had been open to all white males since the church’s founding in 1830.

After "supplicating the Lord for divine guidance," said a letter from church elders, "He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple. Accordingly, all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color."

That was more than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that miscegenation laws, long regarded as another protection of "traditional marriage", and long defended as such, violated the 14th Amendment.

The doctrines of the Mormon Church aren’t for outsiders to analyze or quarrel with. But when the church attempts to impose its particularistic and mutable dogma on the constitution and laws of a state, and especially a state where its members constitute about two percent of the population, it endangers both church and state.

That ought to be especially pertinent to Mormons, whose own history as targets of persecution, fire bombings, lynching and official harassment in Illinois, Missouri and, for a time even in Utah, ought to make those dangers particularly pertinent.

It took the Church three-quarters of a century to get its second revelation about polygamy, and 140-plus years to change its official mind about African-Americans, each of them an instance where federal law and cultural attitudes may have spoken as loud as the Lord. Doesn’t that history generate any second thoughts about yet another foray into an arena where, regardless of the outcome in November, the currents all seem to be running the other way?

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.
 
CaliforniaProgressReport.com
Originally published October 23, 2008
 
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