Subject: An open letter to Mr. Dave Lopata
F* you, and f* your church.
A*hole.
I confess when I first read it I wasn't sure what it was about. In fact, the guy that sent it is someone I consider to be a profound A-hole, so at first I thought he was actually signing his name that way for the first time. But then a flurry of other email and news reports started popping up about how my Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had encouraged (and potentially contributed in-kind donations) to support the California Proposition 8 legislation.
Oh. Joy.
First, let me just say this - if you think the LDS Church has enough clout in CA to get 5.4 million people to do anything, you're kidding yourself. There are about 800,000 LDS members on the books in CA. If you assume about 40% of them are active members (which seems high to me - world wide activity levels are around 35%), you're talking about 320,000 folks who are actually concerned about what the First Presidency of our Church says.
So, I'm not about to sit here and believe the LDS Church is responsible for the outcome of the CA vote. Obviously, there are the monetary contributions to consider. Sites like Mormons For Proposition 8 appear to be doing a good job collecting data around the actual percentages of donations, but at the end of the day, over 5 million non-LDS Californians felt compelled to vote to stifle various legal rights of their fellow citizens.
Since I've always considered California voters to be rather stupid, I'm not sure why this is surprising to anyone.
As for myself, in an ideal world there would be no legal requirement to define what a "marriage" is. . .If you look to things like the Fair Tax, and some common sense modifications to things like inheritance laws, it seems fairly simple to remove the need for the government to record or define any union between two (or more) consenting adults.
I also realize that will never happen.
So, if we have to define "marriage" for legal reasons, what makes sense? I'm a huge fan of The People keeping as much of their money as possible. I'm also a huge fan of the Government staying the heck out of The People's lives. So, logically, I'm for the most relaxed legal definition of marriage because it affords the greatest percentage of The People the opportunity to keep more of their money and more of their freedom.
As an LDS member, I understand that we consider marriage to be between a man and a woman. We even published a very nice Proclamation to the World stating the Church's opinion on the matter. Note that the proclamation doesn't speak at all about what tax breaks we feel a married couple should get, what property inheritance rules should be followed, or what insurance benefits they should get. I'm pretty sure those omissions were inspired.
It does have this interesting line, however:
We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.
Perhaps this is seen as justification for supporting Proposition 8. Personally, I don't see it that way. Proposition 8 does nothing to maintain and strengthen the family as a fundamental unit of society. Anyone supporting it because of that is, in my opinion, kidding themselves. The definition of "marriage" under state laws is not a moral issue, it is a financial one.
Additionally, the whole idea of voting to curtail a behavior of another person when that behavior is not harming your life, liberty, or property, seems contrary to the notion of Free Agency, which is really what life here is all about.
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