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03/09/2009

by Jeremy Hooper

This from One News Now:

Illinois is considering homosexual "marriage" and civil unions, so HRC is now challenging Mormons in that state after one ward sent an email to its members to oppose the legislation. Accusing the Church of Latter-day Saints of "fighting an anti-gay crusade" across America, the pro-homosexual group has called to action its Illinois-based supporters and asked them to confront the church for its "deceitful, fear-mongering tactics."

David Smith of the Illinois Family Institute was asked if this is a backlash for Mormon support for Proposition 8 in California.

"That's true -- sure," he responds. "They're probably targeting the LDS here in Illinois because Mormons have been defenders in California and in Arizona, coming up to the plate and defending natural marriage when the question of should marriage be defined as one-man, one-woman was on the ballot in those states."
Marriage traditionalists in the crosshairs [ONN]

Okay. So they are right about gay activists challenging Mormons on their attempts to foist their personal faith views onto civil society. We are doing so unabashedly and unapologetically. Illinois is just the latest state where Mormon influence has come to light, so it is the latest state where we are stepping in and calling shenanigans.

But what these folks don't seem to get (or at least won't admit) is that our resistance to these anti-gay activities are not tactical, coordinated, plotted out "attacks" on any one group. They act as if we sit around going, "Hmm -- who can we f*** with today?" They make us sound like militants and always put us behind the turrets, when the reality, of course, is that WE are the ones being targeted, and our pushbacks are simply defensive moves against our opposition's offenses. And what they fail to see is that our pushbacks will focus on ANYONE of ANY stripe or faith view who seeks to make our civil lives that much more difficult!

The bottom lines for our side involve (a) standing up for fairness and (b) standing against unfair persecution so that we can (c) live our lives in peace. It's surely easy for our "pro-family" opposition to think of the LGBT community as sitting in a war room with maps of areas and organizations that we plan to bombard with our "I do"-seeking missiles, since those sorts of strategic bombardments closely match their own side's anti-equality playbook. But they really need to stop giving their side so much credit in terms of influence over our thoughts. For most of us on the pro-LGBT side, our concerns about the daily goings-on of the "pro-family" community rank somewhere below our interest in whether the cast of "ALF" will ever reunite for a reunion movie. Or at least that's where our concerns would lie, if they would just stop messing with our existences!

So to conclude this ramble: Yes, we are focusing on the Mormons' support, and yes we are highlighting their religious-based rights-stifling for a mostly unaware general public. But we are not doing so because they are LDS. We are not doing so because they are a church. We are not doing so because we're mad at the way the mainstream LDS community reacts to the Hendricksons on "Bg Love." We are not doing so because such was part of our plans. We are doing so BECAUSE THEY ARE WORKING AGAINST OUR BASIC PROTECTIONS. Action = reaction.

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