Remember Prop 8?

How much of your time and money went into trying to stop something that eventually happened anyway?

Here's the difference.

Mormonism is a relatively small, insular cult compared to all of society. EV fundies outnumber Mormons in terms of numbers and influence, but are still a minority and do not have the support of the younger generation. They can try to create "God’s law" on Earth, but they won't be truly changing hearts and minds even with totalitarian oppression as in Iran.

##########

David P. Gushee is a leading Christian ethicist. serves as distinguished university professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair of Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is a past president of both the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics.

https://baptistnews.com/article/the-christian-right-continues-its-futile-but-dangerous-war-of-reaction/

For a long time, it was clear the white Christian Right in the United States was waging a war of reaction (sometimes open, sometimes clandestine) against just about every social, cultural and legal change that has taken place in our country since about, say, 1962.

If we take the time horizon that far back, these changes would cover the following:

The Supreme Court banning state-sponsored prayer in public schools
The legalization, use and spread of the birth control pill and then other contraceptives
SCOTUS overturning state bans on interracial marriage in 1967
The sexual revolution
The gay rights movement
The Civil Rights movement for Black Americans
The feminist movement
The rise of sexual cohabitation before marriage
The rise in the divorce rate
The protests challenging the Vietnam War, rejecting unquestioning patriotism and doubting the integrity of the U.S. government
The 1965 Immigration Act and other immigration-loosening laws
The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide


American society continued to liberalize, democratize and pluralize. The Christian Right lost battle after battle.

The sexual revolution was not reversed.
LGBTQ people became increasingly accepted. Gay marriage was legalized in 2015 by the Supreme Court.
Women continued their march toward equality and political, social and economic power.
Marriage remained more and more optional and dissoluble.
Patriotism declined — certainly unquestioned patriotism declined dramatically.
State-sponsored Christian observance ended or at least declined in most places.
More and more immigrants came, along with more and more intermarriage, and a less and less monoracial, white-dominated society resulted.
Abortion became a routine social practice, although the rate of abortions gradually declined.


##########

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2070050

Ezra Taft Benson's Bigoted Blasts Against the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

To put it bluntly, my grandfather considered the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to have been a disreputable individual, a dishonorable and dishonest man, and a Communist.

Of him, he wrote:

"The man who is generally recognized as the leader of the so-called civil rights movement today in America is a man who has lectured at a Communists training school, who has solicited funds through Communist sources, who hired a Communist as a top-level aide, who has affiliated with Communist fronts, who is often praised in the Communist press and who unquestionably parallels the Communist line. This same man advocates the breaking of the law and has been described by J. Edgar Hoover as 'the most notorious liar in the country.' . . .

"Would anyone deny that the President [Lyndon Johnson], the chief law enforcer in the United States, belies his position by playing gracious host to the late Martin L. King who has preached disobedience to laws which in his opinion are unjust?"

(Ezra Taft Benson, "It Can Happen Here," in An Enemy Hath Done This, Jerrold L. Newquist, comp. [Salt Lake City, Utah: Parliament Publishers, 1969], pp. 103, 310)

##########



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2024 05:51AM by anybody.

Early Utahans must have been scary crazy.

The Catholic Church had quite a stranglehold on Ireland. Five years ago the Irish people voted to allow abortions. It passed overwhelmingly. We happened to be visiting Ireland when this occurred. It was a major victory over religion. Hopefully that can happen in the US.