In response to California voters' support of traditional marriage, those who have demanded tolerance for themselves, and claim to champion diversity and inclusiveness, are now focusing their ire on blacks and Mormons.
-- From "Religion today" by Eric Gorski, Associated Press 11/13/08
For months, the Mormon church sought to portray itself as just one member of a coalition of Catholics, evangelicals, black Protestants and others supporting Proposition 8, a measure to stop gay marriage in California.
Since the measure's passage last week, media outlets reported chants of "Mormon scum" and slurs against church founder Joseph Smith at a demonstration outside a Los Angeles-area temple, and a church meeting-house was vandalized. More Mormon-specific protests are in the works.
One factor in Mormons becoming an opposition target was Mormonsfor8.com, a Web site founded by Nadine Hansen, a 61-year-old semiretired lawyer from Cedar City, Utah.
Originally, the site named Mormon givers, but Hansen said she changed it to include only first names and last-name initials over concerns Mormons would be hate-crime targets.
Some gay marriage backers in California began taking a sharper tone against Mormons in October. The liberal group Courage Campaign organized an online petition asking LDS Church President Thomas Monson to stop bearing false witness, among other things.
On Election Night, the group aired a controversial ad that depicted Mormon missionaries ransacking a lesbian couple's house and destroying their marriage certificate.
Roman Catholic Bishop William Weigand of Sacramento . . . defended Mormons, calling the backlash "serious religious bigotry."
Gay-marriage backers "look at this whole thing as a discrimination issue. And they're giving the same, in a sense, to Mormons and other religious people," Weigand said in an interview.
Anti-Mormon rhetoric is politically safe because Mormons remain a relatively small minority and "have never been completely assimilated as 'normal Americans' to completely live down the image of 'weirdness' inherited from the 19th century," [said Armand Mauss, a retired Washington State University sociologist.]
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