The Gay War on Religion

Andrew Sullivan has gone off his rocking chair again this morning. I will quote in full without linking (to observe the general delinking policy on the right):

I strongly support civility in this struggle. Religious services and practices should be scrupulously respected. But when a church, like the Mormon church, makes a concerted effort to enter the public square and strip a small minority of basic civil rights, it is simply preposterous for them then to argue that the Mormon church cannot be criticized and protested because they are a religion. I have never done anything - nor would I do anything - to impede or restrict the civil rights of Mormons. I respect their right to freedom of conscience and religion. In fact, it is one of my strongest convictions. But when they use their money and power to target my family, to break it up, to demean it and marginalize it, to strip me and my husband of our civil rights, then they have started a war. And I am not a pacifist.

I do not intend in any way to remove a single right from Mormons. I do intend to protest their imposition of their own religious dogma - that marriage is always between a man and a woman and it is eternal and will be replicated in heaven by the couple physically present - on civil rights protections vested in a civil constitution.

I should add that I dated a Mormon man for a few months a while back. What he told me about the LDS church's psychological warfare on their gay members, the brutality and viciousness and intolerance with which they attack and hound and police the gay children of Mormon families, would make anyone shudder.

They hounded my ex for having HIV and for being gay. They followed him secretly, outed him to his family and persecuted him for his illness. When he was diagnosed with HIV at Brigham Young, he had to run out of the college clinic to escape those who wanted to sequester and punish him. He died a few years ago. Most of his Mormon family didn't show up for his funeral. You want me to love these people? Let me say it's my Christian duty to try.

The Mormons are not unique in this persecution of their own gay folk. My own church has recently capitulated to bigotry in its own hiring practices, even as the Vatican is run by so many psychologically scarred gay men. But the Mormons are particularly vicious homophobes. Gay people are rendered invisible, their personhood erased in this church. The cruelty the Mormon church inflicts on its gay members is matched only by the Mormons' centuries-long demonization and hatred of black people. That African-Americans would seek common cause with a church that only recently still believed they were the product of Satan shows how profound homophobia can be. But this shared hatred can be exploited by the Hewitts and Romneys of this world. And what we have just witnessed is a trial run for much larger ambitions.

If we don't resist this now, we will not be able to resist it later.

Sullivan sees himself as some kind of elder statesman of the gay movement, writing from his nasty little perch at the Atlantic, a magazine whose reputation he's working steadily to destroy.

What he's good at is taking anecdotal experience and distributing those examples as not only honest truth, but as representative of some kind of hegemonic anti-gay bigotry.

But as the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday:

...the Mormon Church has a more tolerant stance on homosexuality than some evangelical groups. The church has pointedly declined to state that homosexuality is a choice. And it has cautioned against programs that purport to "cure" same-sex attraction, even though Mormon theology holds that marriage is a divine relationship between men and women that continues into the afterlife.

What we're seeing with gay activists is a campaign of anti-religious recrimination. It's a secular jihad against those of traditional values who are exercising their legitimate constitutional rights to influence the political process. Interesting, not only are leftists willing to resort to intimidation and violence against Mormons, they are generally igornant of church affairs as well.

One of the most common, and frankly stupid, arguments of the protesters is that since Mormons faced bigotry in their past, they should abandon their beliefs on the sanctity of divine heterosexual union in favor of homosexual license.

Ron Chusid really sums up how daft this meme is:

While they legally are calling for marriage to be between a man and a woman in California, many are perfectly willing to accept that marriage can be between a man and a woman, and a woman, and a woman, and even some under-aged girls in Utah. A group which has had their religious views of marriage limited by law would hopefully be above using the law to impose their religious views upon others.

The Mormon Church repudiated the practice of plural wives in an 1890 manifesto. I talk with many Mormon students in my classroom discussions on freedom of religion and in 9 years of teaching college I've never heard a single student defend the practice. Polygamy exists as a fringe cult movement and is not sanctioned by any official Mormon institution. Today, the Church in Utah has been experiencing some of its greatest public acceptance in history, following the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002, and the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney.

No, leftist gay actiivists hope to destroy the moral basis for traditionalists, to enact a civil religion of their own choosing.

That's what this is all about, as I've said before: a new culture war has erupted across America, one that is likely to define who we are as people in the 21st century.