Tuesday, April 21, 2009

You'd Think a Prophet Would Have Seen This Coming

mormon, lds, homophobia, homosexual, evangelical, catholic, prop 8, marriage, tradition, gay
Mormons have been whining that everybody associates prop 8 with them, when in fact evangelicals and Catholics were instrumental in its passing, too.

I just had to post this because it’s too interesting to pass up. So Miss California makes a statement about believing marriage is between a man and a woman, I blog about it, and suddenly traffic to my blog jumps by the hundreds. And guess what people are searching for? You got it, variations of “Miss California + Mormon” and “Is Carrie Prejean Mormon?”

Why is it that we’re still stuck here, folks? Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not the only ones who donated to Proposition 8. And Mormons are not the only ones who worked to ensure the passage of Proposition 8. In fact, Mormons were the last faith-based group invited to join the Protect Marriage coalition! Granted, I take pride in defending marriage, but that doesn’t mean I was the only one doing it and maybe, just maybe, there are some other folks out there who would like their fair share of intimidation, intolerance, vandalism, and vulgarity. Just a thought . . . .


So I'll do the Mormons a favor and explain something obvious to them.

Everyone in the US already knew what Catholics and evangelicals are like. They've been in the public eye, being all intolerant and ridiculous for quite some time. Mormons, on the other hand, were an unknown quantity to most of the US until very recently, when Mitt Romney ran in the Republican primary and the Prop 8 debate reared its ugly head.

This may seem a little odd to Mormons, but if you had asked the average USian about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you would have had to rephrase that to "Mormons" to even get a response. Then, their response would have been something vague about "those guys in the white shirts and black ties" and "Utah". Very few people who weren't Mormon, or didn't live in a predominantly Mormon community, would have been able to tell you about the prophets currently leading LDS, or that the Book of Mormon is, to Mormons, as important, if not more important, than the Bible.

That's the unfortunate part about the leaders of LDS deciding to flex their newly discovered muscles in the Prop 8 debate: it cemented in many people's minds a connection between Mormons and anti gay propaganda. Now, if LDS' leaders had decided to jump into the public scene by, I dunno, helping Katrina victims or something, the general public perception of Mormons would be entirely different. "Oh, yeah, Mormons- didn't they build a bunch of houses for people in New Orleans? Yeah, they seem nice."

Really, you did it to yourselves, and it would not take a prophet to see the backlash before it even started.

So, there you have it, an object lesson to any up and coming religions looking to burst onto the scene: start with something nice.

12 comments:

  1. The Mormons also have Big Love to add to their image. I bet they're loving that.
    My brother and I were talking about the NOM storm video thing and he said that it was no where near as bad the Prop 8 commercials that they had in CA. Apparently they were completely hysterical and all but said that gay marriage will make Satan come and eat your kids while raping your puppy. So yeah, maybe the Mormons could have started somewhere other than Prop 8, because I'm pretty sure that wasn't the best way to make an entrance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What's funny is that Big Love portrays mainstream mormons one of two ways (and makes the difference between mainstream and fundamentalist mormons very clear): (1) just like normal people, or (2) very sincere, if somewhat odd, people.

    yeah, and you'd think prophets would have seen that if you want to be viewed in a positive light, you should start with something positive.

    those commercials, according to my brother, were wild. YOU'RE CHILDREN!!!1!!ONE!! THEY'LL MAKE YOUR CHILDREN GAY!!!!!nomnomnom!!!1!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I couldn't agree more. How people react on Gay rights is a perfect litmus test for all of their other values.

    My gay neighbors getting married, raising kids, dating, holding hands, or just being swinging gay dudes like my last gay neighbors, doesn't effect me at all, not a little. It doesn't effect my kids or my marriage, or my taxes or any other darn thing. Therefore the only possible reason I could have to oppose gay rights is if I did not like gay people.

    It would not matter if my reasons were religious, social, political or just plain old homophobic it would be the same. "I want to oppress gay people because I don't approve of them."

    People who rationalize that, are going to do the same thing with everything else they don't approve of.

    I have a friend who is openly homophobic. He doesn't want much of anything to do with gay men.(He is indifferent to lesbians). He says gay sex is unnatural and the idea creeps him out and that sort of thing.

    I don't mean he goes around saying those things. He doesn't seek out gay people to tell them his opinions, but privately he feels that way. However he has voted against every anti-gay measure that has made the ballot. If a pro gay marriage measure makes the ballot he would support it.

    Why? Because being homophobic doesn't make him a bigot. The ones who oppose gay rights aren't just homophobic or religious, they are bigots.

    The Mormons jumped up and said "Look at us , were bigots too." Now they wonder why it made people mad at them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. PF, you are so smart...

    so smart, in fact, that when I Take Over The World(tm), and convert all my subjects to the Proper Religion(tm), YOU are going to be the Minister In Charge Of Making Sure We Do It Nicely(tm)

    future prospects aside (did i mention the 401(k) that my future ministers will all receive? i think its a very nice little package) i think that the LDS leadership DID, in fact, know what was going to happen. and wanted it that way. so they now have all the damned street cred of the homophoboc movements but don't have their specific histories weighing them down (ya know, the Catholic history of crusades that can be used against them, and the inquisition, etc.)

    i think it was a finely calculated move, positioning themselves just as strongly as the other religious movenments against gay people, but without all the baggage, leaving them in an actually STRONGER position.

    i hate them, i do. i really really do. i'm not supposed to. but i can't help it anymore. hate breeds hate.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You're going to like this...

    Here's what I commented on her blog.

    -----

    " The idea is this: “If you believe marriage is between a man and a woman, you must either be LDS or have some connection to the LDS Church.”With respect, your analysis is completely flawed.

    By adding up the number of searches involving "Carrie Prejean" and some variation of "Mormon" or "LDS" you'd see that they're outnumbered by searches for "Carrie Prejean" which do not include those references, and by searches for "Mormon" which do not make mention of Ms. Prejean, Miss California, etc. By far your biggest source of referrals is from "carrie prejean religion", a search which makes no assumptions as to her specific beliefs.

    Also, your search results will naturally be biased in favor of inquiries which include any reference to "LDS" or "Mormon" by virtue of the fact that you're Mormon and you blog about it. What you won't have seen are the many thousands of hits which didn't reference her being Mormon, because they're less relevant to your blog, and Google is good at what it does.

    What does all this tell us? That vastly more people didn't assume or wonder whether she's Mormon than did, and also that many assumed that because she's against gay marriage, she's at least religious, a presumption strongly supported by that correlation.

    There is absolutely nothing remarkable about any of this."

    -----

    And the kicker is my latest post completely trashes the Mormons. Ha!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think this blogger doesn't seem to understand the Mormon mindset. Mormons have, if anything, a huge persecution complex. Much of it justified, as they were run out of half a dozen places before settling in Utah, and haven't been too welcome anywhere else since. if they're reacting to the response to their activity on prop 8 this way its because of the way they're taught to think. They're not stupid, and most of them probably saw it coming. Doesn't mean they won't play the persecution card every chance.

    ReplyDelete
  7. She is mormon. she has a wonderful testimony for all of us, in fact.

    oh, and the mormons have a fine history of crusades type embarrasments.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I don't think she's complaining about persecution so much as asking why everybody automatically assumes that an anti-gay marriage advocate is Mormon. Only problem is, they're not. A simple addition exercise would have told her that most people were simply wondering if she's religious, and if so, what denomination. But even after showing her that, she still didn't get it.

    Talk about remedial stats. Shit.

    ReplyDelete
  9. they do have a history, but it isn't talked about in schools. we didn't learn ANYthing about LDS or the history *even when it was totally relevant) and i went to school in norther CA - which has a REALLY high percentage of mormons (no, really, more than 10% of the students at my schools were mormon)

    unlike the Inquisition, which everyone hears about.

    ReplyDelete
  10. see, even in areas where mormons are a large percentage of the population, most people are only minimally knowledgeable/aware of them. until now.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I briefly learned about Mormons in history at school, but they were only a footnote in the settling of the West.

    I'm not very impressed with that girl whose blog you linked to. She hasn't acknowledged that she made a simple factual error, even after I spelled it out in great detail, and she doesn't look like she's going to either. But hell, after she got all worked over a perceived slight (which if she was at all consistent, she should actually be proud of), I'm not surprised.

    ReplyDelete
  12. There's a reason for that, you know. She isn't college-educated and is VERY PISSY ABOUT IT. She won't address the stats thing because she doesn't get it and she's not willing to admit she doesn't get it. (I've made up my mind don't confuse me with the facts, right?)

    ReplyDelete

Comments are for you guys, not for me. Say what you will. Don't feel compelled to stay on topic, I enjoy it when comments enter Tangentville or veer off into Non Sequitur Town. Just keep it polite, okay?

I am attempting to use blogger's new comment spam feature. If you don't immediately see your comment, it is being held in spam, I will get it out next time I check the filter. Unless you are Dennis Markuze, in which case you're never seeing your comment.

Creative Commons License
Forever in Hell by Personal Failure is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at foreverinhell.blogspot.com.