Sunday, October 26, 2008

Utah Mormons Will No Longer Aid Prop 8

A couple days ago the tribune reported:

Church: Utah Mormons will no longer aid Prop 8

While I doubt the headline is completely accurate, there has been a change and I've been wondering about this for a while.

The reason given is:
"It would be more troublesome for Prop 8's public relations if non-Californians were making those calls," said Davis, who teaches political science at Brigham Young University. "If a caller says, 'Hi, I'm calling from American Fork, Utah,' that might be a turn-off to a California voter."
They aren't going to call people because their calls will make marriage equality for our families more likely?
Have you ever gotten a political call where the person said "Hi, I'm calling from [not your state]..."?

For all I know every political call I've received was from Bolivia.

Rob thinks the actual reason is fear of having to pay taxes while acting as such a significant political force. But, as I understand it, they're fully within the IRS guidelines.

Why did they think these calls were a good idea and put out a call for them and then change their mind so quickly, though? Even if they did plan to ID themselves as Utahns in their calls, you'd think the negative consequence of that would have occurred to them right off the bat.

Maybe they did rethink the whole thing... but I guess I'm saying I'd like to think the true reason was that they saw the trouble this was causing in families like mine, and they wanted to pull back and doing so in Utah was as much as they could afford. Yeah, it's a little late, and I'm probably being naively optimistic.

I am glad I've less reason to be upset with some of my family, though it's not much when you know they'd just have to move a day's drive and they'd be as active in the anti-marriage equality campaign as possible. Still, it's something... or it might be?

Ug, I'm tired of having so much of my family riding on the choices of strangers.

4 comments:

B.G. Christensen said...

So this means they'll return all the money Utahns have donated too, right?

Craig said...

Heh, of course.

Scot said...

"So this means they'll return all the money Utahns have donated too, right?"

In so many ways there are no refunds here.

What's sad is that some news accounts have talked about cash strapped LDS parents dipping into their savings to promote this.

Kevin Jackson said...

I like to believe that Stake Presidents started complaining that after a few phone calls, most of their Utah callers have been persuaded that gay marriage is a good thing.

Anyways, I looked at a site (I can't remember where, for the life of me) that had a list of California LDS donors to Prop 8. I didn't go through the entire list, as I started puking when I saw somebody's donation of 150,000 dollars. As a fast offering, that could feed a few needy families for a year. But instead, it went to breaking up families.

It just doesn't add up.