Four Reasons for Voting Yes
March 17, 2018I don’t live in California, and so the questions of what I thought of Proposition 8 and of my Church’s involvement in it were never presented to me with any more force than that of…
DiaBLOGue
The Political Is Personal
March 17, 2018As a California native, I have a stake in my home state’s politics, especially on social issues such as same-sex marriage. I was living in Pasadena, California, in 2000 when Proposition 22, defining marriage as…
An Evangelical Perspective
March 17, 2018As an evangelical Christian living in California, I had mixed feelings about the Christian community’s involvement in Proposition 8. I had just started attending a new church during election time. One Sunday, I was handed…
How We Talk about Marriage (and Why It Matters)
March 17, 2018A decade from now, same-sex marriage will likely be the law in a majority of states. Given the domino effect of legislatures embracing a cause that has successfully claimed the mantle of equality, coupled with…
The Church’s Use of Secular Arguments
March 17, 2018One fascinating development in the Proposition 8 debate in California was the extent to which secular arguments-involving legal, political, and sociological claims-came to take center stage, even in announcements from the Church itself. The Church’s…
Two Modes of Political Engagement
March 17, 2018The hard-fought campaign over Proposition 8, which in November 2008 rescinded the legal right to marriage for same-sex couples in California, is evidence of an important political success for religious conservative political groups who support…
Six Voices on Proposition 8: A Roundtable
March 17, 2018Dialogue 42.4 (Winter 2009): 106–141
After Prop 22 passed, it was overturned by the courts as a violation of the equal protection clause of the CA constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage devised a new proposition to amenda the CA constitution to ban same-sex marriage and the LDS church announced its public support and activism for the measure in the summer of 2008 before the november election. It was a deeply contentious issue bringing national attention to the church whose members provided the bulk of the funding for its passage, nearly $40m. The issue was a breaking point for many in the church and the above roundtable attempts to offer a variety of legal and religious arguments for and against the measure.