Yeah, yeah. He claims CA law violates the Constitution. However, that is his “belief” and yet to be determined by the federal courts.

We Catholics have been targeted as cultists for centuries. That’s one of the reasons I feel such empathy for the Mormons.

As a lifelong Catholic, personally I have always felt it better to directly confront bigotry. As a kid, I had many a fight over religion. As an adult, I fight with words and actions.

Mitt, don’t let them get away with it. I’m pretty sick of the bigotry, velvet glove or otherwise. Yes, Huckabee, that means you.

While the story did point out that Mormons do good things in their communities, it does go out of its way to paint Mormons as suffering from “group think”–while the people who are relentless advocates of racial politics are ignored. By simply telling the story of how the Catholics and various Evangelical churches also supported Prop 8, and got an endorsement by the voters on election day, the story could have been more balanced, especially in addressing the question in the title about whether the animosity toward Mormons is unfair.

The biggest omission, of course, is that there is NOTHING in the story explaining WHY the LDS Church leaders asked for the support of members for Prop 8 (other than the straw man about being forced to perform gay marriages). That is censorship, pure and simple. It would not do to let any words that might persuade a reader that the Mormons were right about the issue to intrude into Time Magazine.

The fact is that most homosexual people are not in long term couples, and even during the interlude that the California Supreme Court changed the marriage laws, the vast majority of gays and lesbians did not rush to get marriage licenses. California had already given homosexual couples legal rights equivalent to married couples in almost every way conceivable. But what the gay marriage court ruling did in addition was announce that homosexual relations are legally indistinguishable from traditional heterosexual relations. That crosses a bright line and has vast legal implications. A legislature granting homosexual couples inheritance rights and pension survivor rights is one thing, but announcing that same sex marriage is constitutionally required covers up the real change, namely that legislatures, and eventually Congress, will have NO control over what privileges are or are not granted to homosexuals or others of divergent sexual practices. Marriage will be a vast area of governance that is no longer subject to negotiated, democratic governance, just like abortion. And in the contest between the constitutional right to free practice of religion, and the new “constitutional right” to divergent sexual practice being endorsed by government, we can be pretty sure that there will be lots of cases where churches and other advocates of traditional sexual morality, like the Boy Scouts of America, will be losers.

Just consider the changes that will take place in the military if open homosexual activities are declared fully equal to normal marriage. Will military chaplains be allowed to preach the condemnation of sexual sin in the Old and New Testaments? Will they be forced to conduct marriages of homosexual couples against their own churches’ teachings? Will service members be required to affirm that they accept homosexual actions as legitimate and moral, the way they are currently (and properly) required to affirm gender and racial equality? Will military families in high cost of living areas find that they can’t get into more affordable base housing because homosexual couples are on the list ahead of them?

Prop 8 and other efforts to recognize same-sex marriage are not about prohibiting homosexuals from indulging in their chosen pastime. They are about using government to force everyone in society to embrace homosexuality as a moral choice equal to normal marriage, with threats of sanctions for those who refuse to do so on grounds of religious conscience.