On the occasion of his fortieth birthday, Truman Madsen wrote my grandmother, Dessie Grant Boyle, a very long letter. She had raised Truman after his mother (and her sister), Emily Grant Madsen, died shortly after…
Truman Madsen was a speaker extraordinaire, one of the finest orators in the Church, able to speak extemporaneously in a captivating voice. Alert to his audience, he was able to thread the pieces of his…
I 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…
As 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…
As 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…
A 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…
One 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…
The hard-fought campaign over Proposition 8, which in November 2008 rescinded the legal right to marriage for same-sex couples in California, is evidence of an important political success for religious conservative political groups who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…
Dialogue 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.
Prince: You have been involved in Guantanamo for some time, and recently one of your cases was in the headlines. Give us the background of the ongoing legal battles there, and then tell us of your involvement in them.
Rushforth: The process that is now unfolding in Guantanamo grew out of our panicked response to 9/11. A friend of mine, a lawyer in Washington, very shortly after 9/11—within a year or so—had gone to Guantanamo to represent a prisoner there.