Some majorities are better than others

November 18, 2008 By

burningThere are almost too many stories about California’s Proposition 8 to keep up. But let’s look at a few dealing with religious groups.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story about the Mormon Church feeling heat — somewhat literally — over its support of the initiative:

Protesters have massed outside Mormon temples nationwide. For every donation to a fund to overturn Proposition 8, a postcard is sent to the president of the Mormon Church. Supporters of gay marriage have proposed a boycott of Utah businesses, and someone burned a Book of Mormon outside a temple near Denver.

“It’s disconcerting to Latter-day Saints that Mormonism is still the religious tradition that everybody loves to hate,” said Melissa Proctor, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School.

I’m never sure if it should be mentioned that, for instance, Proctor is LDS. The Boston Globe ran a great story on her and other Mormon scholars earlier this year.

Anyway, the Times piece has this really curious theme that I didn’t quite get. Here’s the subhead:

The church, which has long sought to be seen as mainstream, joins other religious organizations to back California’s gay-marriage ban. But now it has become a political target.

This notion of the LDS seeking to be mainstream is mentioned four times in the piece. Here, for instance:

That push helped the initiative win narrow passage on election day. And it has made the Mormon Church, which for years has striven to be seen as part of the American mainstream, a political target.

The article says that the LDS decision to join with evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox groups to pass the initiative carries “risks and rewards” toward its goal to be considered mainstream. But what could be more mainstream than supporting an initiative that passed with a majority of the vote? What could be more mainstream than supporting an initiative to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman — something that has passed the 30 states where it has been proposed? The only state to ever decline an opportunity to pass such an initiative has since reconsidered and passed it, meaning that it has a 100 percent success rate?

The only support for the assertion that the LDS joining with all these other religious groups somehow puts it out of the mainstream is that it “could hurt its efforts to expand.” But, of course, it could also help its efforts to expand. The article does quote Jan Shipps, another scholar who says that the Mormon Church has a more tolerant stance on homosexuality than some evangelical groups. Other than the “mainstream” problem, in fact, the article does a great job of letting Mormons defend their theology and political involvement.

Downplaying the popular appeal of traditional marriage seems to be a theme of mainstream media coverage. I think it’s funny how mainstream publications describe the victory of Barack Obama (with 53% of the national vote) as a landslide but the Proposition 8 victory (with 52% of the statewide vote) is described thusly:

Ever since a slim majority outlawed gay marriage in California, opponents have waged national protests and petitions, urging the judicial system to reconsider the results of the Nov. 4 referendum.

jerry brown linda ronstadtI guess that one percentage point is pretty significant!

Another story submitted by a reader was an LA Times piece about lawsuits attempting to overturn the democratic vote of Californians. The latest lawsuit to overturn Prop. 8 was filed by the California Council of Churches, the Episcopal Bishop of California, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the Progressive Jewish Alliance. It’s interesting that liberal religious groups were mentioned frequently in the run-up to the Prop. 8 vote but have been largely ignored in the aftermath. Even this story, which was about California Attorney General Jerry Brown (yes! Jerry Brown!) officially having to “defend” Proposition 8 despite his vociferous objection to the measure, is brief and doesn’t get into any substance.

That Jerry Brown situation reminds me of my former Gov. Roy Romer who was the official defendant in a lawsuit against a Colorado initiative (that prevented any state or local government from granting homosexuals minority status) despite the fact that he marched in the streets the night it passed overwhelmingly. Needless to say the “defense” didn’t quite deserve the name and the courts overturned it. Gov. Romer, incidentally, had an intriguing marital situation — but that’s another story entirely. Anyway, the Times story has this paragraph:

The California Supreme Court voted 4 to 3 on May 15 to overturn a state ban on same-sex marriage, but Christian groups gathered enough signatures to place Proposition 8 on the Nov. 4 ballot. It passed with about 52% of the vote.

But Christian groups gathered enough signatures? What bizarre phrasing. Who gets left out in that phrase? The reader who submitted the story noted that the article’s tone was “Christian groups” versus the state.

It’s also worth noting, in light of some of the extreme targeting of Prop. 8 supporters, that the Los Angeles Times is offering a service to its readers where they can search for donors to both sides of the Prop. 8 battle and find out names, cities, zip codes, and employers. Is that ethical in this environment?

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Catholicism, Evangelicals, Godbeat, Journalism, Mainline, Politics, Social Issues
  • Ivan Wolfe

    The usage of “mainstream” is an interesting one, but not unusual. Evangelicals as a whole are not considered mainstream, even though they are, as a whole, more successful at conversion and retention than liberal Protestant denominations – and in the parlance of the “mainstream media” a “mainstream religion” = liberal Protestant (usually because those are the the religions reporters are most comfortable with).

  • http://www.wildhunt.org/blog.html Jason Pitzl-Waters

    … Mollie, why is one a landside and the other not? Because there is a real difference between 53% in a national Presidential election, and 52% on a statewide ballot initiative. I’m sure you know this, but couldn’t resist the rhetorical broadside. Let me know if you want me to explain further why these two results, while superficially similar, are indeed radically different.

    “…about lawsuits attempting to overturn the democratic vote of Californians…”

    Are democratic votes always, and at all times, fair and just? The reason “popular” democratically passed laws can be challenged in the judiciary is to protect minorities (the electoral losers) from unfair or prejudicial laws and ordinances. Considering your tone here, I hope you stay consistent and never, ever, write glowingly about a judicial challenge to a democratically passed law. Because “traditional marriage” advocates would never challenge “the will of the people” right? Right?

  • Dave G.

    there is a real difference between 53% in a national Presidential election, and 52% on a statewide ballot initiative.

    Actually, the problem with the jab about the % of vote being a landslide isn’t that the vote wasn’t marginal for Prop 8, but that it really wasn’t a landslide for Obama. Oh, in comparison to recent elections, it was a decisive victory. Consider the 2000 election debacle, or the fact that in 1992, Bill Clinton won with a lower % of the popular vote than many losing presidential candidates have obtained. But that still doesn’t rate Obama’s win a landslide. For that, consider Johnson’s annihilation of Goldwater in ‘64 (Johnson 61% to Goldwater’s 38%; with Johnson getting 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52; and Johnson winning by 16 million votes), or Reagan’s trouncing of Carter in ‘80 (Reagan 51%, Carter 41%; with Reagan getting 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49; and Reagan winning by over 10 million votes (it was the huge electoral victory that made Reagan’s win legendary)), or Reagan’s mauling of Mondale in ’84 (Mondale carried D.C. and Minnesota for a whopping 13 electoral votes). Obama won by about 8 million votes, a spread of 53% to 46%, got 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 162. Obama’s win is about the same as Bush’s win in 1988 (which I have never heard described as a landslide, then or now), but nowhere near what has traditionally been called a landslide. So in this case, describing the victory of Prop 8 as marginal is probably accurate. The MSM just has been a little fast and loose describing Obama’s win as a landslide, and that’s where the problem comes in.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    No slurs folks.

    Spiking away when I can …

  • http://rub-a-dub.blogspot.com Mattk

    Stories like this make it difficult to think of the L.A. Times as anything other than the mouth of Sauron.

  • Who Is Telling The Truth?

    The anti-Prop 8, pro gay marriage groups ran ads charging this whole idea that public schools will teach gay marriage is just a “lie.”

    The same groups now charging it’s a lie (public schools will teach about gay marriage whether parents like it or not) — were just in court in Massachusetts filing amicus briefs arguing parents don’t have any right to opt their children out of the pro-gay marriage curriculum.

    From the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Amicus Curiae Brief:
    “In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where the right of same-sex couples to marry is protected under the state constitution, it is particularly important to teach children about families with gay parents.” [p 5]

    From the Human Rights Campaign Amicus Curiae Brief:
    “There is no constitutional principle grounded in either the First Amendment’s free exercise clause or the right to direct the upbringing of one’s children, which requires defendants to either remove the books now in issue – or to treat them as suspect by imposing an opt-out system.” [pp1-2]

    From the ACLU Amicus Curiae Brief:
    “Specifically, the parents in this case do not have a constitutional right to override the professional pedagogical judgment of the school with respect to the inclusion within the curriculum of the age-appropriate children’s book…King and King.” [p 9]

    Which side is really telling the truth here about its aims? I suspect the “Yes on 8” folks keep many more of the Ten Commandments (including “Bearing false witness”) than the “No on 8” side.

  • Dale

    Jason wrote:

    Because there is a real difference between 53% in a national Presidential election, and 52% on a statewide ballot initiative.

    There, you’ve just described the difference, one that is much more informative and objective than “landslide” or “slim margin”.

    The reason “popular” democratically passed laws can be challenged in the judiciary is to protect minorities (the electoral losers) from unfair or prejudicial laws and ordinances.

    No. Laws can be challenged in court for a number of reasons, but not because they are merely “unfair” or “prejudicial”. Justices do not have license to rewrite the law to fit their own notions of justice. Justices must interpret laws in accordance with federal and state constitutions, statutes and previous appellate court decisions. The 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution and most state constitutions extend an explicit guarantee of equal protection of the laws without regard to race and religion, among other factors. The Federal Constitution and state constitutions say nothing about sexual behavior or orientation. Court decisions like the one in California that imposed same-sex marriage rely upon a legal theory, “substantive due process”, that posits “fundamental rights” not found within the text of constitutions, which are given equal weight to those rights that are explicitly found in the text. This theory effectively allows the courts to amend constitutions to include whatever “rights” they see fit. When the electorate of California adopts a constitutional amendment to specifically disallow same-sex marriages, the substantive due process theory is pushed beyond its limit. The court cannot deny the explicit terms of the constitution in favor an implicit right created by the court. The Constitution has authority above the court, not the court above the Constitution.

    The challenge to Proposition 8 asserts that an explicit definition of marriage as between persons of the opposite sex works a fundamental change to the California constitution, and thus can not be enacted by referendum. It’s a weak argument, given that the California constitution says nothing about equal protection of the laws without regard to sexual orientation and doesn’t grant a right of same sex couples to marry. It does, however, contain the explicit right of the electorate to amend the constitution by referendum, a right that the electorate has exercised. The California Supreme Court will be hard pressed to explain how Proposition 8, which simply reverses a court decision that found an implicit right to same sex marriage, is a major rewrite of the California constitution, without admitting that its previous decision worked an equally major, and even less justifiable, change, as the electorate, and not the court, has the express power to amend the constitution.

    Considering your tone here, I hope you stay consistent and never, ever, write glowingly about a judicial challenge to a democratically passed law. Because “traditional marriage” advocates would never challenge “the will of the people” right? Right?

    A judicial challenge to legislation is appropriate when the challenge is based on the explicit terms of the constitution and is well-founded in previous legal authority. Opponents of the theory of “substantive due process” object to the court creating implicit “fundamental rights” that are not in the constitution. In the past, this same theory was used to strike down workplace and wage regulations, because they violated an implicit “liberty of contract”. (See Lochner v. New York) Critics of that decision rightfully pointed out that the Supreme Court Justices were imposing their own ideology of laissez faire capitalism on the text of the constitution when they created this right. That’s the same objection that critics of the California Supreme Court make–that the court is reading into the constitution its own ideology in favor of same-sex marriage.

    So, in short, its entirely consistent for Mollie to support court decisions that invalidate legislation because the legislation violates the express terms of the constitution, but to deny that the court has the constitutional power to create new, implicit rights like same-sex marriage.

    Consider the possible uses of “substantive due process” and implicit rights in other contexts. Think, for example, if abortion opponents placed five justices on the United States Supreme Court. Using the theory of “substantive due process”, the justices could not only reverse Roe v. Wade, but find in the Federal Constitution an implicit right to life, and use that new right to strike down any state laws legalizing abortion. There’s a danger to accepting legal reasoning just because you like the result.

  • Dan

    Today’s LA Times has an editorial lauding efforts of the “gay community” to end “the scapegoating of African Americans for the passage” of Prop 8. It says that since the election “tensions between gays and blacks have exploded on the airwaves,in newspaper columns and on the Internet.”

    What is odd is that Mormons have been far more harassed than blacks. What is disturbing is that the LA Times denounces criticism of blacks but is silent when it comes to persecution of Mormons. The editorial provides a hint of the basis for the distinction: “Gays need to know that they will find less ‘hate’ and religious dogma among blacks than they imagine…” In other words, blacks aren’t as much like the Mormons as you think so lay off the blacks.

  • Stoo

    Sounds like you need to re-assess what the fundamental rights are and update the consitution accordingl!

  • Dave

    [...T]he Los Angeles Times is offering a service to its readers where they can search for donors to both sides of the Prop. 8 battle and find out names, cities, zip codes, and employers. Is that ethical in this environment?

    No.

    Regarding judicial override of constitutional referenda: I understand there’s someting in the CA constitution similar to the 14th Amendment in the US constitution, and that the suits are pleading that Prop 8 violates this provision. That’s an implicit claim that the equal-treatment text is senior to the restricted-marriage text, or more entrenched, and prevails if the two conflict. That’s an uphill argument. My understanding of the Federal constitution is that new amendments take precedence over anything in the text prior to the amendment — that’s why it’s called an amendment — to the opposite effect. I wouldn’t bet on success for the challenge unless assumptions are quite different in CA.

  • Jerry

    Dave, you’re right about the state constitution. In an earlier post on the topic I provided a link to the legal question: does proposition 8 represent a substantial change to the state constitution or not. If it does, a simple majority vote is not sufficient for it to be adopted. That is the proper legal question in front of the court.

  • Martha

    Okay, Jason, I’ll bite: what is the difference?

    I know that one was a national and one a local election, so that’s a big difference right there, but if – out of all those eligible to vote – one got the 53% and one got 52%, how is one a “landslide” (which I take to mean an overwhelming victory, a huge margin, a massive outpouring of support, no possible way the losing side could have caught up) and one a “slim margin” instead?

    Granted, if more people eligible to vote turned out for the national than the local election, that too makes a difference. Did 100% of the electorate turn out for the Presidential election and only 40% in California? Has anyone any numbers on this?

    Suppose they get Propostion 8 overturned, or get a new ballot, and this time the anti-anti-same-sex ban gets defeated, oh, 52% to 48%: will that be brushed aside as a “slim margin”, or will it be heralded as a “landslide” for the forces of right?

    Being a veteran of the Irish divorce referenda, I know all about how a result for the anti-divorce side is called a tiny majority and the pro-divorce campaign vow to fight on, yet when the pro-divorce side get that same result, it’s the democratic will of the people and no further challenges need be made.

  • http://none Johnny

    The long and short of it is that the CA Supreme Court will overturn it because they have ‘Sandra Day O’Conner’ syndrome. This is an illness caused by to many politically correct conversations at fancy dinner parties. After becoming a justice, many weak justices succumb to this degenerative disease so that they can get invited to more dinner parties where they are popular. This also gets them politely mentioned by law professors about how well written their decisions are. This will dispositive of gay marriage and anybody who opposes it will be listed with George Wallace and Adolf Hitler in all the ‘good’ and ‘accurate’ history books.

  • FW Ken

    Sounds like you need to re-assess what the fundamental rights are and update the consitution accordingl!

    That’s more or less what’s going on: marriage, or more accurately, marriage to whomever I wish to marry, seems to be the right-du-jour, whatever it’s historical or constitutional status.

  • http://www.wildhunt.org/blog.html Jason Pitzl-Waters

    Martha,

    “Okay, Jason, I’ll bite: what is the difference?”

    I’ll be as succinct as possible. The Electoral College. Just about every mention in the press of a “Obama Landslide” is couched in terms of his 365 – 173 win there (heck, he even got Omaha). In fact, the article Mollie links to as “proof” of the press crowing about a 53% “landslide” never mentions popular vote totals. As for that 53% of the popular vote, I’ll bow to Dave G. here in the comments and say it was only “decisive”, and the biggest popular vote margin for a presidential run seen for some time (but not a “landslide” of Johnson/Goldwater proportions).

  • Martha

    “The Electoral College. Just about every mention in the press of a “Obama Landslide” is couched in terms of his 365 – 173 win there (heck, he even got Omaha).”

    Ah.

    Being an ignorant foreigner, it seems to be a convoluted system – but then again, we have proportional representation by single transferable vote, which other nations find incomprehensible, so glass houses and stones :-)

    The question then arises why the majority of the electors decided Obama/Biden were the ones to back, but that’s a problem for another day.

  • Ben

    A question I think is very basic, but have not seen asked or answered in any of the news stories I’ve read, is: Were there any challenges on revision/amendment grounds before the vote? Both sides knew the wording. Was there any attempt (before California and Californians spent millions of dollars on a vote) to ask the courts to decide whether this was a question that could be put before the people? If the courts were asked, what did they say then, and what’s different now?

  • http://paganmonist.blogspot.com/ Copper Stewart

    ” But what could be more mainstream than supporting an initiative that passed with a majority of the vote? What could be more mainstream than supporting an initiative to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman — something that has passed the 30 states where it has been proposed?”

    Isn’t that precisely the point? The LDS church is still legitimating its own religious marriages by attacking those of other people. As clergy, I regard marriage as a first amendment/free exercise issue as much as anything else, and what I see here is a suspect and marginal church with a racist and criminal history–apart from a polygamist history–trampling the religious rights of others precisely so that other theocrats will see them as kindred, when in reality their texts are demonstrably fraudulent and written to justify the perversions of their founders. The more Mormons point to the “perversions” of others, the less they will be seen as theological abominations. This is manifestly so, and a strategy of some decades duration. It’s a massive PR racket by a church administration that knows its textual and historical foundations are nonsense.

  • Dave

    Jerry (#11), aha, this is the sort of thing I meant by “entrenched.” I’ve scanned the table of contents of the petition, provided by a UU link — I decided not to invite a migraine by trying to read the whole thing — and it does seem to pivot on whether a deprivation of equal treatment can be enacted as Prop 8 was. That might have legs. So the UUA is not wasting my money by backing the suit.

  • Rathje

    “It’s a massive PR racket by a church administration that knows its textual and historical foundations are nonsense.”

    This from a clergyman!

    Of course it has to be nonsense!

    It had better be, or YOU are in the wrong profession my friend.

    I think this comment demonstrates that any attempt by Mormons to cozy-up to other Christians is going to be of dubious effectiveness. Any gestures of support from the Christian Right for their embattled Mormon surrogates has been slow in coming, and usually, when they do speak out against the attacks on Mormons, it is watered-down with a lot of caveats about how much Mormons still suck theologically.

    No chance of the social agenda trumping the theological agenda there.

    The media seems to be attempting to frame this issue as the Christian Right gaining a new wealthy ally in its national agenda in the Mormons.

    This ignores almost irreconcilable theological differences and also ignores the fact that the LDS Church rarely, RARELY ever speaks out on political issues. I think there were a couple of instances where someone wanted to legalize gambling in Utah were a statement was issued. There was also a statement when the Reagan administration wanted to paint a nuclear bulls-eye next to Temple Square with its failed MX Missile program.

    But aside from that, deafening silence.

    Certainly, there has never been an organized push from the top down like there was on Prop 8. Usually a mere statement read in Sacrament Meeting is the most the First Presidency ever gives us – when they do pick a side. Never organized fundraising via Church functions and infrastructure. This is an anomaly.

    Yet the media is treating it like some new threatening unholy alliance.

    I don’t think they need to worry. The gay marriage issue is unique among LDS concerns. Our entire theology is centered around the idea of male and female united in family bonds. LDS notions of deification are based on the male-female union and our idea of heaven is family-based. It’s not even remotely similar to the doctrinal issues the Church faced over race in the 1960s and 1970s (which was all based on some rather unsupported traditional reading of Mormon scripture). So thinking that just because the Church has championed a pet issue of the Christian Right this one time is no reason to conclude that the Mormons are going to jump on board with the entire agenda.

    For instance, most LDS really don’t give two straws about the whole evolution-in-schools problem and would be highly unlikely to back up Young Earth Creationists in that quadrant. LDS often don’t generally care one way or the other about stem cell research. Our position on abortion is much softer because, while we generally oppose it, we don’t usually try to label it as “murder,” and allow a number of exceptions where it is permissible for a woman to have an abortion. Nor do we usually care about the whole push for prayer in schools (in fact, one of the key lawsuits striking down school prayers was brought by a Mormon family that was sick of putting up with Baptist prayers in school). Nor are we pushing for government funding of faith-based organizations (the LDS Church turned down the offer from the Bush administration).

    No, the Mormons are not the “new financial and grass roots organizational arm of the Christian Right.” Once this Prop 8 thing has blown over, the LDS authorities will most likely resume their quiet stance on politics, and Mormons and Evangelicals will go back to shooting spit-wads at each other.

  • Dave2

    Mollie wrote:

    I think it’s funny how mainstream publications describe the victory of Barack Obama (with 53% of the national vote) as a landslide…

    Either I’m missing something, or this is manifestly unfair. Presidential ‘landslides’, after all, are a matter of the electoral vote.

    But what could be more mainstream than supporting an initiative that passed with a majority of the vote? What could be more mainstream than supporting an initiative to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman — something that has passed the 30 states where it has been proposed?

    I doubt the Times is suggesting that opposing gay marriage is out of the mainstream. Quite the contrary, as revealed in the sentence you quote: “The church, which has long sought to be seen as mainstream, joins other religious organizations to back California’s gay-marriage ban.”

    What the Times is suggesting, I’d wager, is that the LDS movement’s non-mainstream origins might help explain why it, as opposed to other religious organizations, is drawing so much fire for its involvement in pro-Prop 8 politics.