Money talks

Whether it's oil company lobbyists, small town bribery of elected officials, or out of state Mormons financing the Proposition 8 campaign in California, money talks and influences results.

Former Mormon missionary Reed Cowan, has made a documentary film of the church's efforts to pass California's Proposition 8 to outlaw same-sex marriage. The film, "8: The Mormon Proposition," uses personal narratives to portray church leaders' role in raising money, including telling members how much they were expected to give based on their income and threatening their membership if they did not contribute.

The interesting thing is that California does not have a lot of Mormons -- less than 2% of its population, yet according to the film more than 70% of donations for Prop8 came from Mormons. A strategist for Protect Marriage said that, of the early volunteers who went door to door in California to promote Prop 8, 80 to 90% of them were Mormons. They know how to do the door to door thing.

That's not illegal, but it does raise questions about how much Prop8 really represented the true values of Californians. I'm not suggesting election fraud, but the amount of money that flooded into tv ads -- and the armies of volunteers knocking on doors to spread disinformation and outright lies -- all took its toll.

It's as if Georgia were voting on a civil rights issue in the 1960s and the Indiana Ku Klux Klan descended on the state, spreading the word that giving Negroes the right to vote would lead to the rape of our women, force schools to teach inter-racial marriage, and destroy the whole fabric of our society. That, in effect, is what the Mormons -- with the Catholics' Knights of Columbus joining them -- did with their massive anti-gay campaign.

Ralph