Professor Jeffrey Nielsen, whose op-ed two years ago against the LDS Church’s stance on gay marriage led to his demise at church-owned Brigham Young University, has written an open letter to California Mormons in the wake of the church’s request for members to support a constitutional ban on gay marriage in that state (from KCPW).
Open Letter to California Mormons
Jeffrey S. Nielsen
I am a member of the Mormon Church, a married heterosexual, and a supporter of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. I am asking you to pause and give sincere thought to the letter from our religious leaders you have heard read, or will soon hear read, over our church pulpits asking you to get involved and oppose marriage equality in California. Please think deeply about this, not only as a member of a particular church, but also as a citizen of a democracy.
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Do tell….what were your experiences today w/ the LDS Church’s anti-gay marriage statement in your local ward?
Feel free to share experiences of friend and family as well.
Perhaps our feelings about tomorrow’s letter were abreacted in last week’s multifarious and sporadically acerbic discussion. My purpose here is to highlight some of the feelings and perspective of one who is connected to many aspects of the Church’s political action regarding gay marriage. My sister Emily is a lawyer in California, and gay (also kind, witty, and sagacious, but that is beside the point). Her journey through life has had a positive and profound impact on my family and I. I have learned a lot from her, but this issue specifically has inspired me to be more thoughtful and considerate of those who are different from my straight white male middle-class American self (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
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[NOTE: I must be a masochist. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE read the questions asked in this post and stick to those questions when you comment. I don’t want this to turn into the typical battle over homosexuality. I use that topic only because it is perhaps the best example of the overall issue right now.]
Homosexuality is a complicated topic - especially because so many people, particularly in religious discussions, over-simplify it. I want to focus narrowly today on what is “sin”, “transgression”, “moral” or “immoral” - or a combination thereof. Continue reading…
News Flash: The LDS Church WILL be actively opposing gay marriage in California this November, and is encouraging members to actively oppose gay marriage in California.
They are asking all members of the church to, “do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.”
Here’s the memo to the church, which will be read to all members in California next Sunday.
Ouch.
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What can we learn about gender roles in marriage from committed gay couples? Is equity the ideal? Is it possible? With less than 24 hours until Father’s Day, here’s some food for thought. Continue reading…
Unless your last name is Van Winkle, you likely already know that, yesterday afternoon, the California Supreme Court concluded that the state’s law prohibiting same-sex marriage (SSM, for short) is unconstitutional. Put more simply, in 30 days, SSM will be a reality in California. For those of us here on the Left Coast, things are about to get very interesting. Within hours of the ruling, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, without a hint of irony, told a gathering of reporters: “I plan to marry as many people as I can.”
Like many others, I’m still working my way through the 100+ page opinion. We lawyers sure love our footnotes, and one in particular has got me thinking. To be clear, I am no fundamentalist Mormon, and I certainly am not bucking for the opportunity to bring another set of problems wife into my happy family. But I can’t help but be annoyed by the apparent fact that, over a century later, courts are still content to rely on outdated and prejudicial attitudes towards Mormon polygamy.
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When I was a kid in Southern California, it was obvious to me that there were two kinds of people in the world: Mormons and the rest. As I got older, the rest became more differentiated; there were Catholics and Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Baptists, Syrian Orthodox, Church of Christers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists and even some people who claimed to have no religion at all. I was puzzled at one family’s celebration of Christmas when they apparently didn’t really even belong to any particular religion that I could discern.
As I attended high school and early-morning seminary, I began to notice that there was more than one kind of Mormon in the world as well. Some Mormons had such different attitudes and beliefs from me that I sometimes felt like I had grown up in a different church. Also, some Mormons I knew made strange comments, like whites shouldn’t date those of other races because the prophets have counseled us not to, or Americans shouldn’t pay income taxes because the prophets said not to. To my horror, as one raised by a baby-boomer mom to respect Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, some even used statements of the BRETHREN to condemn the civil rights movement as communist-led and hence Satanic. Continue reading…
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Many of you may be aware of an ongoing case in Utah involving Peter and Mary Danzig. I’m not going to summarize here, as you can read about the details on various sites, but I’ll post links to the back-stories below. This post is just about opening a conversation. The core issues I feel are under debate are about how much involvement the LDS church officially has in the opposition of same sex marriage. The Danzigs resigned their membership because they felt the church was pressuring them to act against their own consciences. The church says (in a very unusual press response to a personal case) that it does not encourage one position or the other, but rather to be active in politics to support your values. Continue reading…
There’s a lot of talk in the media and across the ’nacle to the effect that Romney’s Mormon identity was the critical factor that torpedoed his candidacy. The argument is that a large percentage of Republican primary voters have anti-Mormon sentiments that kept them from supporting the candidate who, by the numbers, shared all the values positions that mattered to them most. The comparison has specifically been drawn with Log Cabin Republicans: Are Mormons a second group in the GOP’s big tent that find themselves despised by their fellow Republicans?
If that’s where Mormons find themselves, we should ask: What lessons can they learn from Log Cabin Republicans? Continue reading…
In this episode J. Nelson-Seawright, John Hamer, David King Landrith and Rosalynde Welch discuss same-sex marriage within Mormonism.
By Joe Geisner (guest blogger)
