Posted by:
atheist&happy:-)
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Date: February 08, 2012 01:22AM
Of Mormons and (Gay) Marriage: He was one of the GOP's top dark-arts operators. Now he's riding into battle to save gay marriage—and unmask the Mormon Church. —By Stephanie Mencimer | March/April 2010 Issue
"IN THE SUMMER of 2008, Fred Karger was keeping a close eye on the California ballot initiative known as Proposition 8, the measure that would eventually outlaw gay marriage in the state. He didn't have much background in the marriage-equality movement—hell, he'd only really been out for a few years. But after retiring from 30 years in politics he wasn't quite ready to give up the game, and Prop 8 struck a nerve with him. He checked out the campaign finance reports for the main organization backing the initiative, ProtectMarriage.com. Polls had shown that the initiative was likely to fail, and the fundraising records dovetailed with that—Prop 8's supporters weren't raising nearly as much money as their Hollywood-backed opponents.
But then, in midsummer, Karger noticed something new. Suddenly, money started pouring in to ProtectMarriage.com, and by August, the group was raising about $500,000 a day. Karger wondered where all the money was coming from. Most of the donors, he soon realized, had never made a political contribution before. Some had given to just one candidate: Mitt Romney. Quite a few were graduates of Brigham Young University. It wasn't hard to connect the dots: This was Mormon money.
Once he knew what to look for, Karger found Mormons everywhere in the Prop 8 campaign: as actors in the TV ads, as volunteers, organizers, and political consultants. Just as intriguing, he would discover eventually, the group that had done the lion's share of the work to get Prop 8 on the ballot to begin with, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), also had deep ties to the Mormon Church—and the church itself had been engaged in a campaign to block gay marriage across the nation for more than a decade. What he was looking at, he realized, was a stealth campaign much like the ones he'd run during his long career as a Republican political operative.
As a political professional, Karger—who for decades worked for one of California's premier campaign consulting firms, a shop that had helped invent modern opposition research—was grudgingly impressed with what the Mormons were doing. "They completely altered the landscape," he says. "They took over every aspect of the campaign." Karger estimates that Mormons ultimately contributed $30 million of the $42 million total raised in support of Prop 8, which passed easily in November 2008. (By contrast, anti-Prop 8 forces raised $64 million.)"
*Of course, a lot of us would disagree with this interpretation of LD$ intentions:
“THE FAITH of a persecuted people, many of whom starved to death on their trek to Utah, Mormonism has always emphasized the role of marriage and childbearing (hence its early practice of polygamy) to boost its numbers. Mormons must marry and have children to achieve the highest levels of divinity. There's not much room in that scheme for same-sex marriage, at least not among a leadership dominated by men in their 70s and 80s. In 1995, the church made its position official by issuing a proclamation carrying the weight of scripture that declared marriage between a man and a woman the bedrock of society.”
*She may not know about the origins of polygamy (and polyandry), since most people do not. Also, someone here once mentioned that overall there were less children born in polygamous relationships than born in monogamous ones which makes that argument suspect.*
.......
“Even before that, the church had been working behind the scenes to block gay marriage nationwide—and aligning itself with the Catholic Church, which, elders noted in internal memos, had "more respect" than the Mormons. To execute that vision, the church used its public affairs committee, a body organized much like a political consulting firm. Its leadership has included high-ranking church elder Richard B. Wirthlin, a legendary California political consultant who was Ronald Reagan's pollster. Wirthlin was a major player in the Prop 8 fight (some of his relatives even appeared in ProtectMarriage.com's TV ads). The public-affairs committee for decades tracked gay-marriage efforts in every state, almost single-handedly blocked it in Hawaii in the 1990s, and had a significant role in killing it in Alaska.
The documents Karger obtained, some of which he has posted at mormongate.org, show that in Hawaii, the church went to the trouble of creating a front group to hide its role. Memos detail how the church looked for an "articulate middle-age mother who is neither Catholic nor LDS" to represent the organization—which would claim to also focus on prostitution and gambling, but would, in fact, be devoted solely to abolishing gay marriage.
The documents convinced Karger that the Mormons had also created a front group to fight gay marriage in California. That group, he believes, is NOM, which has also been active on the issue in Massachusetts and Maine, and which was primarily responsible for putting Prop 8 on the ballot. Its board had deep connections to the church, including a former Brigham Young University professor whose family is part of the top church hierarchy. NOM's president is Maggie Gallagher, the family-values activist who was exposed in 2005 for failing to disclose payments she received from the Bush administration.“
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/fred-karger-save-gay-marriageEdited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/08/2012 02:03PM by atheist&happy:-).