Elderly men show an interest in gay marriage

Absolutely outrageous.

Even though the LDS Church’s own scripture forbids it to meddle in political affairs, the First Presidency is directly asking Latter-day Saints to vote against gay marriage in California.

A statement called “Preserving Traditional Marriage and Strengthening Families” (PDF) will be read in LDS sacrament meetings. It says, in part:

We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment [to overturn marriage for everyone] by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.

This is abominable. For a church to promote any kind of inequality is wrong. For a church to promote discrimination is wrong. The LDS Church has already given over a million dollars of its funds to defeat gay-marriage laws in Hawai’i and Alaska, which may have come from the tithing donated by its membership.

And all this energy and rhetoric expended in the mistaken (in my view) belief that this will somehow harm straight marriages and children.

You know what this reminds me of? Galileo.

Galileo?

Galileo.

For the Catholic Church, it was such a big deal that the sun went around the earth. They burned Bruno at the stake, and put Galileo under house arrest for espousing the Copernican model. And yet, the earth moved.

And now it doesn’t seem such a big deal. Today we wonder what the fuss was about. Religious dogma, wrong once again, had to give way. The church decided that maybe the whole earth-thing was a non-core belief, and life went on.

I feel embarrassed for Monson et al because they’re just going to have to backtrack that much farther when gay marriage turns out not to be the nation-destroying plague they’re envisioning.

I also feel bad for liberal Mormons who rightly deplore this hateful edict from their leadership. This is exactly the conflict I would have had in my believing days: wanting to support equality, but believing that church leaders were inspired and good. Rationalism has certainly saved me from that conflict.