Those matrimonial rebels
In a New Yorker commentary Eight is Enough, Hendrick Hertzberg wonders at theaudacity of the Mormon church's involvement in the defeat of Proposition 8:
You might think that an organization that for most of the first of its not yet two centuries of existence was the world’s most notorious proponent of startlingly unconventional forms of wedded bliss would be a little reticent about issuing orders to the rest of humanity specifying exactly who should be legally entitled to marry whom. But no. The Mormon Church—as anyone can attest who has ever answered the doorbell to find a pair of polite, persistent, adolescent “elders” standing on the stoop, tracts in hand—does not count reticence among the cardinal virtues.Hertzberg's piece slyly hints that Mormons were the marriage rebels, long before gay rights:
As Richard and Joan Ostling write in “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise” (2007), “Smith and his successors in Utah managed American history’s only wide-scale experiment in multiple wives, boldly challenging the nation’s entrenched family structure and the morality of Western Judeo-Christian culture.”The commentary ends on a positive note for gay-rights supporters by recalling that Mormon sports deity and football Hall of Famer Steve Young had an anti-prop 8 sign on his lawn:
Steve Young is a graduate of Brigham Young University, which is named for his great-great-great-grandfather. ... It wasn’t enough this time. But the time is coming.Note: Hertzberg recounts that Joseph Smith was lynched, which I usually associate with hanging, but some dictionaries hold than any mob killing without a legal trial is a lynching. Besides, Utah Sen. Chris Buttars threw the meaning of the word wide open when he accused his critics, including the NAACP, of being a "lynch mob."
4 Comments:
Joseph Smith was white. You can't call it lynching if the victim was white.
Yeah, after the American people spoke out against plural marriage the Mormons took to the streets in droves and proceeded to write angry sayings over all the local protestant churches...oh wait...they didn't.
Whoa...what a surprise. The Salt Lake Crawler is back from the T-Day break with yet another blog post about the LDS Church.
One wonders if this pony has any other tricks. If it weren't for the Mormons, this blog would not exist. Or, could it be that The Crawler just too lazy to write about much else?
And yet you keep coming back. Admit it, you eat this stuff up. If it weren't for the Crawler, you'd have nothing to gripe about. It's the circle of life my friend. The lds church feeds the crawler. The crawler feeds you. You pay your tithe thereby feeding the lds church and ensuring that the crawler will be fed. Good on you.
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