Maryland Ward Mobilizes Against Gay Marriage
A member of the LDS church in Maryland recently received an email from his ward asking members to help a “coalition of inter-denominational churches…gather signatures within the LDS community”. While the email appears to be generated at the ward level, it is unclear what sanction, if any, it has from regional or general authorities of the church:
Attention Registered Voters who are Residents of Maryland:
As you have probably heard, the Maryland legislature passed a same sex marriage bill last February. A coalition of inter-denominational churches throughout Maryland has joined together to try to get a referendum on the November ballot that would allow the residents of Maryland to vote on this bill before it becomes law. Sister [Redacted], who is a member of the LDS Church, is organizing signature collection within Montgomery County and within the LDS Church.
We need to collect approximately 200,000 signatures by the end of May. We are looking for people to gather signatures within the LDS community. If you are willing to help with this important effort please contact Sister [Redacted] as soon as possible at REDACTED@gmail.com or Sister [Redacted] at REDACTED@juno.com.
If you would like to volunteer, you must attend a 30 minute training session due to the stringent Maryland laws concerning referendums. To register for a session please contact us as soon as possible. There will be several training sessions offered, but if transportation to them is a problem for you, a trainer would be happy to meet with you at a more convenient time and location.
The LDS Church is neutral of matters of party politics. The Church does encourage its members to play a role as responsible citizens, including becoming informed about issues and voting in elections, and becoming engaged in the political process in an informed and civil manner. Please consider helping with this very important effort. Every signature is important and every little bit helps!
This just infuriates me. Just when I think a little healing has begun between the church and it’s gay brothers and sisters, someone goes and fans the flames of discrmination. What possible purpose do their actions to keep gay couples from marrying the person they love serve? It helps no one and hurts many. Do they really follow the principles of Jesus Christ, or have they turned instead to the other brother?
I have to agree with Sheri. While this may not be done with the “official” sanction of the “official” church, it is in keeping with other political acts that the Church of LDS has taken against GLBT people.
It is so hard for me to watch people take a page from the “Who would Jesus hate” book and then pretend that it’s righteous to do so.
I think that the proper response is a “reply to all” with two questions:
1) Has this email been approved by the proper church authorities?
2) How does this signature gathering fit in with D&C 134:1-4, 9 and the 11th Article of Faith?
If members of the church wish to use resources provided by the church, which enables them to contact members of the church, to pivot for a specific political campaign, the church should be taxed. This is not right that these people are enabled to mobilize through resources provided by church funding. This woman would not have the contact information of these specific people she was emailing if it had not been for the church. She is abusing information provided to her by the church in order to promote a political campaign. The church for one either needs to come out against her and make it clear they do not support her actions, or they should be taxed. It is as simple as that, if the church enables it members to “play politics” through resources provided by the church, they deserved to be TAXED like any other group involved in the political process.
I am a Jewish gay man living with my partner for 27 years in Maryland. We have fought for so long to get this law to protect our relationship before the law.
If we didn’t have such a law horrible things could happen. For example, my partner who is ten years younger than me would have to give up most of his inheritance as taxes in order to just live in our home.
The fact that our Mormon neighbors are so openly working to take away our rights just infuriates me and many others here.
Is this the best use of Mormon energy to make your church look like a bunch of medieval bigots? What do you think we will talk about with the missionaries who come to our doors? This horrible publicity leaves an impression that will take a very long time to go away.
It is absolutely insane.
In addition, it has now galvanized me to finally get involved in local politics to stop this type of interference in my life by people whom I have never met but who hate me and all I represent in the name of their church and God.
Disgusting.
I am a member of the Church in the stake of New York. As a member, I have access to the stake directory as does any other member in good or not so good standing. And although the temptation for me to use this access to promote my agenda as a gay member is great, I have never used the directory for such purpose as I deeply believe that it is not designed to promote any political agenda.
If it is true that the aforementioned Sister used the Church directory to send this message (and not a social network as she should have), I would personally press my bishop and his councilors to discipline her. A good discipline would be to ask her to watch “Auntie Mame” and answer a quiz about the movie. To some fellow mormons, that’s worse than capital punishment.
More seriously, her address to the ‘registered voters who are residents of Maryland” is a compelling evidence that her motives were not in the right place when using the Church Directory. The directory is only designed to address your fellow brothers and sisters in the Gospel of Jesus the Christ. Any topic of contention or of division for a ward has no reason to be addressed with resources that are suppose to build Zion on earth (the kingdom of Heavenly Father where all of us live in peace, love and harmony: I know, I am very idealistic).
Furthermore, I don’t know where she got that figure of 200,000 signatures (I certainly hope it’s a typo) as the official number of signatures required is 55,736. Even a european-born out-of-state observer like myself know that.
This bad decision and poor judgment shown by one sister is sadly an insult to herself, to the RELIEF (emphasis here on RELIEF) Society to which she belongs, to her own ward and to the Church. In clear I am embarrassed for her but most embarrassing would be for the member, gay or not who received this email to seat quietly in his chair reading it and not acting upon it in a Christlike manner.
My Dear Sister, go and sin no more…