You can hide your money but not your behind.

Well, the Proposition 8 lawsuit in federal court right now is churning up a lot of stuff, and airing a lot of “dirty linen.” What would it be like if all of us had to live our everyday lives “under oath” to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? How much sooner would the Catholic bishops have had to confess they were hiding the real child molesters, for example? but that’s another story.

Mormon Church Aimed to Cover Tracks on Marriage Ban — Directed funds to outside organizationBy Will McCahill| Posted Jan 20, 10 9:45 PM CST

(Newser) – The Mormon church wanted its members to support the 2008 effort to ban same-sex marriage in California, but urged they do it through an outside organization to give the leadership “plausible deniability,” according to documents released today in the Proposition 8 trial in San Francisco. The Catholic church also helped bankroll the operation, an executive says in one email, while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided “financial, organizational and management contributions.”Later in today’s session, a Stanford professor testified that although high-profile politicians pay lip service to homosexual issues, “Gays and lesbians do not possess a meaningful degree of political power. They are not able to protect their essential interests.” Though President Obama describes himself as a “fierce advocate” for gay causes, lack of action on the military’s ban on openly gay service members and other issues shows he “is not a reliable ally.”I can corroborate at least part of this. In the wake of the Prop 8 victory in November 2008 I spent several hours pouring over the donor list posted by the state of California, trying to find the contributions of the Mormon Church. Nothing significant turned up, and I was quite surprised. It began to dawn on me and many others that they had covered their behind successfully.It is no coincidence that Catholic and Mormon money funded a large part of the Proposition 8 campaign, however. Both have moral issues of their own they would just as soon hide or at least forget. It seems logical that the best way to distract the public memory from Mormon polygamy or Catholic priestly child molestation is to try to take the “moral high ground” when it comes to marriage.But the “moral high ground” lies quite bare and fallow when a court of law focuses its attention there. The high ground and plausible deniability simply don’t congeal. The moral high ground benefits from transparency, and it is quite obvious that the donors—major and minor—that literally “bought” Proposition 8 for the California Constitution—fear transparency and want their identity concealed as much as possible.Shame! Shame! Shame!

—Pastor Dan Hooper

This entry was posted on January 21, 2010 at 14:55 and is filed under Go figure!, Catholic matters, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Fundamentalism, Public Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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