12 February 2010

Bullseye Series, Part Five


From comments to the story in the (reliably pro-LDS) Deseret News about Lance Wickman of the LDS Quorum of the Seventy saying marriage equality threatens religious liberty. I don't agree for a moment that any religious liberty is actually threatened, but the rest of the analysis is compelling:

We Latter-day Saints ought not to forget who put Prop 8 on the ballot. (Not to mention setting the stage with Prop 22 eight years earlier.) The (continuing) fallout was not altogether unforeseen. Further, when Prop 8 is overturned (as I suspect it will be within the next decade), it will probably take the form of language in the CA constitution *explicitly protecting gay marriage*. Thus, what the CA Supreme Court judged to be only an *implied* right will, because Prop 8 upped the ante, become an *explicit* right——like freedoms of religion and expression——complicating and compromising the possibility of the Church (and any other religion) to be involved in the political process. If there is indeed a battle looming, why did we choose to create a situation that increases the potential for the acquisition of civil rights to conflict with our religious rights? We have ensured that our battlefield is peppered with landmines, and when casualties begin to roll in we will have no one to blame but ourselves. If there is indeed "an arrow" pointing "directly at the heart ... of religion and religious views in the political" sphere, *we* strung the bow!

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