Joanna Brooks has a worthy piece on Mormon Prop 8 involvement currently up on the front page of Religion Dispatches.
This next bit is just me filling in a (minor) gap in the reporting:
“A primary source of Mormon messaging during the Proposition 8 campaign was the anonymously-authored ‘Six Consequences if Prop 8 Fails’ document, which went viral across Mormon social networks after its introduction by email in mid-August and was utilized as a training document and handout in the Mormon-coordinated ground campaign”.
Anonymous? Ahem. Here’s an 8-second clip of LDS/GOP pollster Gary Lawrence claiming authorship of the infamous half-baked half-dozen:
“In fact, the idiot who wrote the Meridian magazine article is me.
And the idiot who wrote the ‘Six Consequences’ is me.”
Of course, this gem remains my all-time favorite Gary Lawrence clip: We Want Negative Buzz!
You want it, you got it, Gary. Mission accomplished.
All Niblets silliness aside, for the record, what Christian denomination wouldn’t thrill at the prospect of having so many articulate, compassionate defenders of the faith so publicly and anxiously engaged in the cause?
Only one that’s lost sight of the bigger picture, as far as I can tell. And with that nod to and praise for the Bloggernacle, here we go …
My sense is that, at least in broad terms, the public role of both the LDS leadership and the Mormon rank-and-file has now been fairly well analyzed and chronicled re the ‘Yes on 8’ campaign.
What remains to be painted is the picture of how and why a certain fraction/faction of the LDS leadership/membership managed to gain ascendancy inside both the Mormon church and the ‘Yes on 8’ campaign.
If we’re to seriously document the Mormon ‘Yes on 8’ campaign, writing the next chapter will require wielding a finer brush than the one that’s been applied to date.
In other words, I remain somewhat leery of any broad brush that paints either the “LDS leadership” or the “Mormon rank-and-file” or some “fuzzy combination of the two” as the prime culprits in this drama.
As with any faction, the players have names. I suspect that some of the Mormon names include Bart Marcois, David Parker, Lowell Brown, Sonja Eddings Brown, Gary Lawrence, Glen Greener, Russell M. Nelson, Paul Mero, and yes, Mitt Romney.
And speaking of that last name, as a next step, I’d suggest that those of us who ‘give a hoot’ ought to spend the next few months busying ourselves with disambiguating the Romney campaign of 2008 from the LDS Prop 8 campaign of that same year.
As far as I can tell, those two campaigns eventually became one and the same. It was simply the LGBT community’s rotten luck that as soon as Mitt was out of the running in the GOP primary, suddenly a core of Romney supporters had extra time to devote to passing Prop 8.
If James Bopp and the Wirthlins hadn’t been in the mix, I’d be more hesitant to put this out there, but since they were, I seriously suspect that Prop 8 was just as much a GOP thing as it ever was an LDS thing.
It’s exactly what Chris Buttars is being called out for in a recent BCC thread. Only bigger. So who’s gonna be the first to step up and salvage the institution by speaking truth about certain embedded bad actors?
Plenty of folks in the Bloggernacle, to their credit, know what I’m talking about. Will they ever talk about it? I guess we’ll see. Joanna is certainly speaking up, but who else? If you’re anybody in SLC or DC or SoCal, you know what I’m talking about. Do you have it in you? Or are you just gonna ride out the storm?
This is a sad, sad situation. What’s not known too widely is that Gary Lawrence has a gay son whom he has disowned! Is this his own quest to prove to his mormon brethern that he’s not a BAD PARENT. Is this his attempt to parent his now adult son?