Man what a pair on this guy. Autumn mentioned this story in This and That, but I had to weigh in. This is church that didn’t allow blacks to be ordained into the priesthood officially until 1978, and the LDS leader Brigham Young believed:

You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind …. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race-that they should be the ‘servant of servants’; and they will be, until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree.”

Yet in the wake of the tons of money dumped into Prop 8 by the Mormons, its current head, Elder Dallin H. Oaks, says that after the initiative passed, the church was demonized for its political involvement. [Gee, I wonder why]. The choice of victim card to play is almost beyond belief:

“The extent and nature of religious devotion in this nation is changing,” said Oaks, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a church governing body. “The tide of public opinion in favor of religion is receding, and this probably portends public pressures for laws that will impinge on religious freedom.”

…Oaks said that while “aggressive intimidation” connected to Proposition 8 was primarily directed at religious people and symbols, “it was not anti-religious as such.” He called the incidents “expressions of outrage against those who disagreed with the gay-rights position and had prevailed in a public contest.”

“As such, these incidents of ‘violence and intimidation’ are not so much anti-religious as anti-democratic,” he said. “In their effect they are like well-known and widely condemned voter-intimidation of blacks in the South that produced corrective federal civil-rights legislation.”

Aside from that level of preposterous sentiment, the LDS has not been behaving in any kind of way you’d expect people of faith should act. Why are they wasting all this money to beat back gays and lesbians who want to marry when they could be filling the food banks, helping to ensure those who are destitute will have clean water, food and clothing as winter approaches…a host of more productive and meaningful ways to fulfill its mission.