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Proposition 8
Another case when the LDS Church systematically acted in a political manner while claiming political neutrality occurred in 2008, when it campaigned in favor of the passage of Proposition 8. The intent of this ballot proposition was to effectively make gay marriage illegal in California for perpetuity by affirming marriage as something exclusive to heterosexual couples. This case further reinforces the belonging narrative that I argued for in the case of the Equal Rights Amendment.
There is evidence from several major news outlets that the LDS Church invested significant financial resources in ensuring the passage of the proposition. According to the New York Times, members of LDS Church were decisive in mobilizing in support of Proposition 8, both financially and with boots on the ground.[1] A donation from Alan Ashton, grandson of former Church President David O. McKay, reached $1 million in size. That money, in concert with $5 million in other donations they so quickly raised, dealt the final blow to the effort to resist Proposition 8. The Mormons were not the only group involved in this effort, only the last to step into the ring where Catholics and Evangelicals were already standing. This fresh blood was enough to tip the scale in the ban’s favor.
Articles from the Atlantic suggest that the scope of the LDS Church’s financial involvement in passing Proposition 8 extends far beyond the $6 million that the New York Times mentioned as donations to the Protect Marriage coalition with other religious groups. The editors of the Atlantic claim that anywhere from 40% to 77% of all funding toward the Proposition 8 effort came from the Mormons.[2] Karger of the group Californians Against Hate arrived at a 77% figure from comparing Church records with people’s names.[3] The Wall Street Journal offers a more conservative estimate, reporting that between 30 and 40% of the $22.5 million in donations to the Protect Marriage coalition came from Mormons.[4] This all suggests that the donations were not limited to Church leaders. Ordinary members donated time and money to secure the proposition’s passage.
Further, according to this same article the institutional LDS Church funded an “advertising blitz.” In this action political neutrality is necessarily lost. Purchasing billboards advocating for the passage of a specific ballot proposition is not politically neutral. Mobilizing the LDS membership from the top-down, while not illegal, is not politically neutral either.[5]
Karger, an advocate for LGBT+ people and outsider to Mormonism, is struck by the extent to which the effort seemed to be driven by acceptance. This is so impressed upon him that he says, “the surge in support has been an attempt to boost the church’s social standing among the greater religious community…. ‘For whatever reason, they’re trying to get some respect from other religions….they’ve always been looked down upon by the Christians, the Catholics, and evangelicals.’ Success with the marriage amendment would give the church credibility.”’ That an outsider noticed evidence of the belonging narrative I argue for is significant; it seems so obvious that even someone with relatively little experience with Mormonism observed it. Though this short comment, of course, cannot capture the nuance of my argument, it does suggest that I am not theonly person to see this in Mormonism.
Given the historical analysis I provided of the motivations behind the resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment, Karger’s argument makes sense. Evangelical and Catholic groups with strong political power engaged in the political fight to pass Proposition 8 long before the LDS Church stepped in. The preservation of “traditional” marriage motivated all of these groups, yet the Mormons were the only group with a century-ago history of nonconformity to the bounds of “traditional” marriage. They were also the only group that had not yet garnered full acceptance into political power.[6]
They also had not yet gained social acceptance into mainstream American society beyond the Wasatch front, as evidenced by the later launch of LDS Church’s massive “I’m a Mormon” public relations campaign.[7] This campaign, launched in 2011, attempted to change the image of the LDS Church to reflect its global nature, but also to normalize its public perception. Public perception then, and still now to some extent, was shaped by television programs like Big Love that did not reflect the lives of members of the LDS faith. Ultimately, the goal of this campaign went beyond seeking normalization to wanting acceptance from the broader culture. The overall message of the campaign was that Mormons are no different from anyone else. In the videos, their professions
include, professional swimmer, aerial dancer, comedian, doctor, researcher, and flight nurse. People in the videos come from countries including the United States, Costa Rica, Ukraine, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Japan, among other places. In addition to the Internet videos, the campaign involved the placement of billboards all over the country, including in places as prominent as Times Square in New York City (see figure 2).
Further, there exists primary source evidence, leaked by MormonLeaks, of a push by the LDS Church to mobilize church members in California to campaign for Proposition 8. I analyzed two of these sources, a PowerPoint presentation and a handout. These documents delineate how the LDS Church mobilized members in California to convince voters to pass Proposition 8 with a 52% majority.
Since the documents I discuss are such recent releases, questions naturally arise surrounding the source and the credibility of the documents. Ryan McNight and Scott K. Fausett founded MormonLeaks in 2016 with the goal of increasing transparency within the LDS Church.[8] The evidence for the documents’ authenticity is strong given that the LDS Church sent a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to McNight and Fausett.[9] If the documents were inauthentic, it is highly unlikely that a high profile organization like the LDS Church would address them in any way. Further, by sending a DMCA notice, the LDS Church claimed the materials as their own under copyright law, thereby authenticating the MormonLeaks and establishing credibility.
A look at the “Proposition 8 Volunteer Outline” document offers critical insight into some of the rationale for a Proposition 8 mobilization effort. The statement, “We are being asked to canvass the neighborhoods and telephone voters; Not to persuade or convert, but only to determine how they will be voting. This approach is non-confrontational,” is tellingly contradictory. The very purpose of canvassing is to persuade people of something, usually political in nature. A face-to-face approach, like the one they describe, is inherently political because asking someone how they intend to vote is a political confrontation. The document offers figures as precedent for the passage of a bill like proposition 8. Further, it argues that, “a ‘Yes’ vote on Proposition 8 reinstates the democratic voice of the people.” The problem with this argument is that it implies the will of the people cannot change.
As we get further down the page, indicators of the belonging narrative begin to emerge. Among them is the claim that, “We will be outspent in the media by at least two to one, but we have the volunteer advantage,” a strongly “us vs. them” statement. They also argue the issue at hand is not the existence of same-sex couples. They instead object to applying the word “marriage” to same-sex relationships. The rest of the document is addled with fallacious arguments, including the slippery slope fallacy.
Finally, that the volunteers are acting politically seems to be a given in this document. No attempt is made in any of the statements on the handout to explain that these actions are not politically neutral or to otherwise rationalize this coordination of volunteers to canvass, a decidedly political action. The volunteers are also acting religiously, as the inclusion of a quote from Boyd K. Packer, then-President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.[10]
Overall, the wording of this documents bears key similarities to texts produced by evangelical groups. Carey Britney from the University of Hawaii analyzed materials released by conservative evangelical Christian groups, including Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, Family Research Institute, and The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).[11] Carey’s analysis of the “Issues” section of the Family Research Council’s website as of 2010 notes the use of scare quotes around the word “marriage.” She argues that this choice of punctuation is significant in that it seeks to delegitimize same-sex marriage, mocking it as something that can never be equivalent in legitimacy to heterosexual marriage. The “Proposition 8 Volunteer Outline” released by the LDS Church uses the same tactic in the last statement on the page, where the organization placed the phrase “same-sex marriage” within quotation marks. The parallelism has similar implications here, that a marriage between members of the same sex could never be a “real” (i.e. “traditional,” heterosexual) marriage.
The other document I examine, a PowerPoint presentation, is much more explicit in its intentions than the “Volunteer Outline” handout. The title slide refers to the mobilization effort as a “grassroots program.”[12] Obviously, this effort is not grassroots at all in that it was a centralized, top-down effort (the very opposite of grassroots). Although it involved the local membership, that alone does not a grassroots campaign make. The idea for this mobilization needed to originate at the local level to be considered grassroots, and it did not. Beyond that point, the statements on the “Our Goals” page lay out the group’s intentions to convince voters to vote for the proposition’s passage quite clearly. It also references the core of their methodology saying, “It is not our goal in this campaign to attack the homosexual lifestyle or to convince gays and lesbians that their behavior is wrong. The less we refer to homosexuality, the better. We are pro-marriage, not anti-gay.” The language used in this passage is loaded with assumptions. First, in the words “lifestyle” and “behavior” imply that homosexuality is a choice. At the same time, the wording here concedes that the voters in California no longer see homosexuality that way. If they did, there would be no reason to avoid referring to the existence of LGBT people, as people would simply agree with them. Another purpose of the presentation is to describe ways to assuage the fears of people who are uncomfortable with the process of canvassing by addressing specific concerns, including embarrassment, performance, and commitment. Under the “fear of performance” section, the following statement is made: “Explain that they do not have to persuade, only explain what Proposition 8 is and identify the voter’s position.” This segment contradicts one of specific the main goals of the campaign, to persuade. Perhaps this means indicated that the individual making the call did not have to act persuasively (even if persuasion is the goal of the campaign).
The PowerPoint also clarifies methods for attempting to convince voters to vote in favor of Proposition 8. The organizational charts explaining the interplay between the LDS Church hierarchy and that of the Protect Marriage Coalition combine with a detailed list of volunteer roles to describe exactly how they intend to achieve this goal. These roles include identifiers, messengers, closers, trackers, walkers (knockers and stickers), schedulers, recorders, emailers, networkers, monitors (of media, blogs, or polling places), distributors, speakers, writers, diplomats, and registrars. Each of these roles is accompanied by a description of what type of person would be best suited for each. Finally, scripts are offered for conversations to put volunteers at ease. The content of these scripts are interesting to dissect. They read like choose-your-own adventure stories, where each answer has its own designated response. The twenty-third slide contains responses that might point to the success of the campaign. These are:
[If definitely Yes and voter is married, ask]: Does your spouse agree with you?
[If definitely Yes, ask]: Would you be interested in helping with the campaign, such as displaying a yard sign, or making a few phone calls?
I am struck by the outward focus of these two questions. They extend beyond the individual with whom the canvasser speaks. If they can elicit a positive response to either of these questions, they open the door to reaching a potentially exponential people tree, especially if someone agrees to the second request.
Some components of the two documents I analyzed here contradict one another. One occurrence crops up on the second slide, titled “Our Goals.” Here, campaigners are told to “Persuade our potential voters.” This phrase stands in contrast to the language of the handout, which claims that that they are, as I quoted earlier, “not there to persuade or convert.” There are a few possible reasons for this discrepancy. One is simply that different people wrote it and poor internal communication prevented consistency in this arena. Another explanation is that the difference was intentional, made with awareness that the handouts would be more broadly circulated. This meant that a handout could possibly be picked up by external sources and therefore might be more subject to scrutiny than an internal PowerPoint presentation. For this reason, I am inclined to find the information gleaned from the PowerPoint to more closely mirror the actual thoughts of the people running this campaign than the handout.
Regardless of why the documents differ, some persuasive intention was clearly evident in the LDS Church’s pro-Proposition 8 effort. In addition to the explicit reference to persuasion I mentioned earlier, the entire presentation is structured to offer a role in this campaign to every person within the LDS Church in California. Even if someone did not feel comfortable walking up to people and convincing them, they had a place providing support for those who did by providing for their physical needs (food, etc.) or taking care of documentation. This extended as far as trying to convince nonmembers of the LDS Church to join them in this process. Every effort, no matter how small, played a role in bringing more people to vote in favor of the ballot proposition.
The LDS Church’s mirroring of evangelical language serves as a means to the end of achieving in-group status and political position within the influential power structures of evangelical Christianity. There is an apparent desire to achieve that status to gain political power and influence in the United States to affect global policy. One suggestive is that Gordon Smith, a former Oregonian U.S. senator, claimed in leaked footage to have voted in favor of the Iraq war because political stability was a precursor to sending Mormon missionaries into Iraq.[13] In other words, he voted for the war for religious reasons. Surely, this is not acting in a politically neutral manner. Further, this decision process is something that Oregonian citizens might care to know. While it is not fair to assume that every elected official of faith, LDS or otherwise, makes decisions for explicitly faith-based reasons, it does shed light on the reality that religion does often affect political decision-making in the United States without explicit discussions about its role in the public sphere.
[1] Mckinley, Jesse, and Kirk Johnson. “Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage.” The New York Times. November 14, 2008. Accessed April 28, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html?ref=oembed&_r=0.
[2] Dish, The Daily. “The Mormon Church vs Civil Marriage Equality.” The Atlantic. October 22, 2008. Accessed May 12, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/10/the-mormon-church-vs-civil-marriage-equality/209810/.
[3] Dish, The Daily. “The Mormon Money Behind Proposition 8.” The Atlantic. October 23, 2008. Accessed April 28, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/10/the-mormon-money-behind-proposition-8/209748/.
[4] Carlton, Jim. “Gay Marriage in Peril in California.” The Wall Street Journal. October 22, 2008. Accessed April 28, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122463078466356397.
[5] As per the Johnson Amendment
[6] Anyone in dispute of that can look to the suspicion of Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election among other religious groups.
[7] The videos can be found at https://www.mormonchannel.org/watch/series/im-a-mormon
[8] MormonLeaks™ – Home. https://mormonleaks.io/#about.
[9] “2017 03 01 DMCA Notice_Mormonleaks_final.pdf.” DocDroid. https://www.docdroid.net/Go946j5/2017-03-01-dmca-notice-mormonleaks-final.pdf.html.
[10] a high-ranking position within the LDS Church
[11] Carey, Britney. “The Language of Homophobia: Word Choice in Anti-Gay Propaganda.”
[12] “Proposition 8 Grassroots Program.” March 23, 2017. https://mormonleaks.io/wiki/documents/e/ed/Proposition_8_Grassroots_Program.pdf.
[13] In Which They Discuss Politics With Senator Gordon Smith. YouTube. October 02, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FPVZH8fIg.