Thank you for an incisive commentary. I couldn’t agree more with your comments. People of all religious beliefs will suffer if Prop 8 is overturned. And not just because of this one issue, but due to the so-called unintended consequences of the precedence this will set in an apparent attempt to create “social justice.”

One reason members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints voiced concern over this issue is due to our belief in the Book of Mormon. This record gives an account of two ancient civilizations that were destroyed due to a group of politically-minded individuals intent on the overthrow of society and established government.

As members of the Church, we have been warned for many years about the existence of such groups in our own society. It seems apparent these groups are active – if only behind the scenes. For example, see Proposition 8, Mormons, and the New Statesman and Hegelian Dialectic.

The notion that Mormons underestimated the opposition is also amusing. If this were true, the result would have gone the other way. In reality, it was the opposition that misjudged the effectiveness of their rhetoric.

However, the first line of the final paragraph is a nearly perfect description of the nature of this debate. And the continued success of those in favor of traditional marriage is incumbent on their understanding of this point.

To whatever extent the pro-traditional marriage position is based in religious belief, the most – and in the end perhaps the only – effective method for turning aside this threat is to expose the erroneous nature of the civil rights argument.

Two effective arguments have been formulated during the Proposition 8 campaign, one based on the definition of what is a right, and the other based on the millennia-old definition of marriage. As the anti-marriage forces have shown, these points need to be refined and repeated, continually, for them to take hold in the psyche of society.