Heroes and Victims in Prop. 8 Struggle

To preface, I love reading Orson Scott Card's weekly article in the Mormon Times section of the Deseret News. As I read today's all I could think was AMEN....couldn't have said it better myself.

Many people worked to pass Proposition 8 in California. Those who wish to be our enemies are working hard to blame it all on the Mormons, but our votes alone could never have done the job of protecting marriage from a fatal redefinition.There are many heroes in this struggle, but I want to call special attention to the young Saints in the singles wards of California. Outside the Church, most of their peers were against Proposition 8; inexperienced in marriage and child-rearing, they saw no harm in gay marriage.So when our Latter-day Saint singles heeded the call of the church's leaders to take part in the defense of marriage, they, more than any other group of Saints, were swimming upstream.They worked hard. They took risks. And many of them paid a price that is heavy indeed.
Many of them lost dear friends -- sometimes with bitter, angry recriminations from people they had once been close to.It seems ironic that these young Mormons were open-minded enough to be friends with people whose lives were so different from their own; but their friends, in the name of tolerance, could not remain friends with Mormons who merely stood up for their faith.If the situation had been reversed, if Prop. 8 had failed, these LDS young people would not have rejected their friends who voted to repudiate the meaning of marriage. And if they had, would they not have been condemned as bigots, for being unable to tolerate someone else voting his conscience? I have been more fortunate. All my gay friends who might have repudiated me for supporting Prop. 8 had already condemned me long ago for standing by a Christ-centered, prophet-led church. The gay friends who remained at the time of the vote already knew my views, and our relationship continues. (Not that I lack for hate mail and death threats from the "tolerant," mind you. It just didn't come from my friends.) I suspect that the young Saints from those California singles wards felt the cost -- socially and in their hearts -- more keenly than anyone.But as one of them pointed out to me in a conversation soon after the vote, "Now we know what it was like for believers in the Book of Mormon." So many times, the division between the followers of Christ and their opponents and persecutors was not geographical or national or cultural -- it was their own friends and neighbors who turned on them.

Reading the end of the book of Helaman, we can hear the voices of those who attack the church (and all religions) today. They accuse us of continuing a "wicked tradition, which has been handed down unto us by our fathers, to cause us that we should believe in some great and marvelous thing ... therefore they can keep us in ignorance, for we cannot witness with our own eyes."They accuse the church of wanting to "keep us down to be servants to their words, and also servants unto them ... and thus will they keep us in ignorance if we will yield ourselves unto them, all the days of our lives" (Hel. 16:20-21). Their story is that we Mormons somehow oppress them and force them; they claim to be our victims. And yet they are the ones who tried to force us to accept their radical change through judicial edict, rejecting a clear majority vote only a few years before. All we did was tell the truth, and try to persuade other people to act on that truth by voting for the proposition. We forced no one. We deceived no one. It was democracy. Out here in the East and South, many of our young men and women are serving missions in California. When a particularly vicious and bigoted ad showed Mormon missionaries bursting into the homes of gay couples, wresting the rings from their fingers and tearing up their marriage licenses, we feared that this might make people feel justified in acts of violence and hostility toward our missionaries. If we had put out an ad showing gay activists forcing their views on unwilling citizens, it would have actually been true -- since that is exactly what happened to make Prop. 8 necessary in the first place. But we were careful never to do or say anything that might seem to condone violence against individual gay people. They took no such care for our missionaries. Here is where the Savior's admonition to Peter comes into play. We can see that they would not bear it if we treated them as they have treated us -- but we will not treat them that way. This victory in California was by a shockingly slim margin. The forces arrayed against us depend on concealing actual scientific and historical evidence from the voters -- it is frightening how close they came to blinding a majority.Our opponents will move on to other states -- Massachusetts and Connecticut, for instance. And they will make us their targets and whipping boys. By painting us as the group trying to "force" our beliefs on unwilling people -- falsely accusing us, in short, of doing exactly what they really are doing -- they hope to arouse hatred and rage toward Mormons and use that as a means of prevailing in the political contest. We must be prepared to be the victims of lies. We may also see acts of violence and persecution by individuals and governments against Mormons, individually and as a church. What we must not do, what we must not tolerate, is the slightest action by any member of the church to harm or persecute others. They declare themselves our enemies, but we refuse to recognize that declaration. We know that we are in fact the friends of all; that a society that organizes itself to promote traditional marriage is the one most likely to promote the general happiness -- even of those who choose not to enter into such a marriage.We are not fighting a war, we are liberating people by telling them the truth. Only when they know the truth can they be free.