In this week's column the iconic New Yorker political commentator Hendrik Herzberg does a post mortem on Proposition 8. He describes proposition 8 and similar ballot measures around the country, albeit successful, as having "the feel of a last stand." "The Field Poll, one of California’s most respected, found last month that while the state’s over-sixty-fives oppose gay marriage by a thirty-point margin, the under-thirty-fives favor it by thirteen points—and it’s hard to think of a reason that getting older should change their minds." Herzberg summarizes how in the past decade attitudes have changed. "Now large majorities of Americans favor laws under which same-sex couples have all or most of the same rights as couples of opposite sexes, and five states, including California, have enacted them. Gay marriage itself is legal, and not terribly controversial, in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1993, most Americans thought that open homosexuals shouldn’t be permitted to serve in the military; now three-quarters think that they should."
Herzberg suggests, but is too much of a gentleman to draw explicitly, the connection between lack of educational opportunities and a tendency to fall prey to the mendacity of Prop. 8 proponents. He summarizes some of the most dishonest Prop. 8 tactics such as representations that Obama supported Prop. 8 and that gay marriage would mean that churches would eventually have to start performing gay marriages.
The twice divorced, thrice married serial adulterer Newt Gingrich once again reveals his shamelessness and narcisism.
In the opening paragraph Herzberg summarizes LDS lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy this way:
"You might think that an organization that for most of the first of its not yet two centuries of existence was the world’s most notorious proponent of startlingly unconventional forms of wedded bliss would be a little reticent about issuing orders to the rest of humanity specifying exactly who should be legally entitled to marry whom. But no. The Mormon Church—as anyone can attest who has ever answered the doorbell to find a pair of polite, persistent, adolescent 'elders' standing on the stoop, tracts in hand—does not count reticence among the cardinal virtues. Nor does its own history of matrimonial excess bring a blush to its cheek. The original Latter-day Saint, Joseph Smith, acquired at least twenty-eight and perhaps sixty wives, some of them in their early teens, before he was lynched, in 1844, at age thirty-eight. Brigham Young, Smith’s immediate successor, was a bridegroom twenty times over, and his successors, along with much of the male Mormon élite, kept up the mass marrying until the nineteen-thirties—decades after the Church had officially disavowed polygamy, the price of Utah’s admission to the Union, in 1896. As Richard and Joan Ostling write in 'Mormon America: The Power and the Promise' (2007), 'Smith and his successors in Utah managed American history’s only wide-scale experiment in multiple wives, boldly challenging the nation’s entrenched family structure and the morality of Western Judeo-Christian culture.'"
Herzberg suggests, but is too much of a gentleman to draw explicitly, the connection between lack of educational opportunities and a tendency to fall prey to the mendacity of Prop. 8 proponents. He summarizes some of the most dishonest Prop. 8 tactics such as representations that Obama supported Prop. 8 and that gay marriage would mean that churches would eventually have to start performing gay marriages.
The twice divorced, thrice married serial adulterer Newt Gingrich once again reveals his shamelessness and narcisism.
In the opening paragraph Herzberg summarizes LDS lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy this way:
"You might think that an organization that for most of the first of its not yet two centuries of existence was the world’s most notorious proponent of startlingly unconventional forms of wedded bliss would be a little reticent about issuing orders to the rest of humanity specifying exactly who should be legally entitled to marry whom. But no. The Mormon Church—as anyone can attest who has ever answered the doorbell to find a pair of polite, persistent, adolescent 'elders' standing on the stoop, tracts in hand—does not count reticence among the cardinal virtues. Nor does its own history of matrimonial excess bring a blush to its cheek. The original Latter-day Saint, Joseph Smith, acquired at least twenty-eight and perhaps sixty wives, some of them in their early teens, before he was lynched, in 1844, at age thirty-eight. Brigham Young, Smith’s immediate successor, was a bridegroom twenty times over, and his successors, along with much of the male Mormon élite, kept up the mass marrying until the nineteen-thirties—decades after the Church had officially disavowed polygamy, the price of Utah’s admission to the Union, in 1896. As Richard and Joan Ostling write in 'Mormon America: The Power and the Promise' (2007), 'Smith and his successors in Utah managed American history’s only wide-scale experiment in multiple wives, boldly challenging the nation’s entrenched family structure and the morality of Western Judeo-Christian culture.'"
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