As the marriage equality fight began in California, polls showed that voters didn’t care.  The attitude was "Who cares? I’m not gay."  The Yes on 8 campaign knew they had to overcome that apathy — and that they could only do so with lies and obfuscation about children and churches and lawsuits.

“We could not have this as a battle between people of faith and the gays,” Mr. Schubert said. “That was a losing formula.”

But the “Yes” side also initially faced apathy from middle-of-the-road California voters who were largely unconcerned about same-sex marriage. The overall sense of the voters in the beginning of the campaign, Mr. Schubert said, was “Who cares? I’m not gay.”

To counter that, advertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little explanation.

Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children.

“We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said. 

"Hypothetical consequences," of course, is another term for, um, lying.

The New York Times, in an article the Mormon Church leadership won’t like one single bit, describes the final furious weeks of fundraising and volunteer activism, almost all of it coordinated through the Church itself.

The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.
[snip]
The California measure, Proposition 8, was to many Mormons a kind of firewall to be held at all costs.

“California is a huge state, often seen as a bellwether — this was seen as a very, very important test,” Mr. Otterson said.

San Francisco Roman Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer has a featured role in The Times’ story as well, although the article neglects to mention his previous role as Archbishop of Salt Lake City for eleven years:

First approached by the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco a few weeks after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in May, the Mormons were the last major religious group to join the campaign, and the final spice in an unusual stew that included Catholics, evangelical Christians, conservative black and Latino pastors, and myriad smaller ethnic groups with strong religious ties.

Shortly after receiving the invitation from the San Francisco Archdiocese, the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City issued a four-paragraph decree to be read to congregations, saying “the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan,” and urging members to become involved with the cause.

And Mormons, who unlike other faith adherents are quite used to mandatory top-down instructions from their Patriarchy, got very involved indeed.  The work was quite specific, and tailored to their audience.

The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day.

Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended.

But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead, emphasizing that Proposition 8 was about marriage, not about attacking gay people, and about restoring into law an earlier ban struck down by the State Supreme Court in May.

And did the Church know that its own direct involvement needed to be kept separate and hidden?

“No work will take place at the church, including no meeting there to hand out precinct walking assignments so as to not even give the appearance of politicking at the church,” one of the documents said.

If you don’t have anything to hide, what are you afraid of, Mormon leadership? 

So — the Church directly instructed its membership on the roles they were to play in the campaign, allegedly contributed hundreds of thousands in unreported in-kind contributions, kept actual politicking off their lavish campuses, and directed as much as twenty million dollars in church members’ contributions to the YES campaign.

But now they’d rather not have the bright spotlight of publicity on them, their members who contributed, and the businesses who contributed? Well, that’s the way it works in America, as the Mormon leadership very well knows. You can speak your piece in the public square, but you may also be held accountable for your speech and your politicking by your fellow citizens.

 Now is the time to hold them accountable. 

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