For those of you who do not keep yourselves abreast of current events, you may have missed perhaps one of the most important news stories in the past several years. Californian residents stood and defied the activist judges who overturned a previous measure defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The residents of California passed Proposition 8 52% to 48% and amended the states constitution and returned California law to prohibit same sex marriage.
Before I go further I wanted make it perfectly clear that I do not opposed the civil union of two consenting adults nor do I think it right to deny them the same financial and medical benefits heterosexual couples receive.
Now to the point of my post. The residents of California have spoken and as in ANY OTHER democratic vote someone goes home disappointed. Unfortunately thousands of "No on 8" supporters have allowed their disappointment to fester into outbursts of hypocritical rage thus resulting in a massive mob mentality. In order for this mob to maintain their momentum, they have, as all mobs do, focused their negative energy onto one single entity. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a.k.a. "Mormons".
I will henceforth call this mob the "Ragers".
Unknown to many people outside this mob of Ragers, there are websites now devoted to finding out every single Mormon who donated to the "Yes on 8 campaign". Someone has compiled a list of both large and small donors and made them into spreadsheets. All of this is available online. If you are a Mormon and donated to the Yes on 8 campaign, do not be surprised to find your name on this list. Upon further inspection you will discover that the site encourages the further identification of all members who donated money. This in and of itself is very disconcerting. Other sites are encouraging everyone to use online phone directories to find and boycott every mormon in the area. Who knows where this could lead? This rage is startlingly similar to the same wrath and bigotry of another movement against a religious group. Except that group was in Germany and it was the 1930's.
What the Ragers forget is that first and foremost, the No on 8 campaign had MORE money than the Yes on 8 campaign did. Had Proposition 8 failed, you wouldn't see thousands of people protesting Apple corp. HQ in Cupertino or thousands of people marching outside of Hollywood. You certainly wouldn't see a general complacency of the state government if the Yes on 8 supporters desecrated and forced the closure of the holy places of worship for those that were opposed to Proposition 8. Anyone caught desecrating said places would likely be locked up on hate crimes charges. Sadly, it is exactly these kinds of things that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are being subject to. The entrance gates to the holiest places for mormons--their temples--have been marked up with graffiti.
Another thing fueling the fury of the Ragers is that they got smacked upside the head by the law of unintended consequences. In all their fervor to encourage a strong black and hispanic turnout in order to elect Barak Obama, they were caught off guard by the morally conservative vote of those same ethnicities. Blacks and Hispanics overwhelming voted for Proposition 8. How's that for a bit of irony?
All in all the Mormons are simply an easy target. Following the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the Ragers simply picked the easiest target. Protesting B.E.T. and Univison would be seen as racist and morally reprehensible, therefore they had to pick another target. Sadly they are ignoring their own blatant hypocrisy and targeting a group of people who exercised their own constitutional rights.
