‘8: The Mormon Proposition’: While Nobody’s Watching

Look, nobody’s watching. It’s time to spread some hate and put it in the Constitution.

— John C. Reilly, “Prop 8: The Musical”

The grainy video transmission that opens 8: The Mormon Proposition seems to have arrived from another planet. Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Mormon Church urges his listeners to action: “You are a mighty army,” he says, “Let us be strong in defending our position. And we do so in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” On its face, that position is simple: homosexuality is a sin. However, as the documentary goes on to show, that position is promoted with and premised on a set of complications — historical and cultural, legal and political. The “army” did its work swiftly and with a dramatically effective organization.

8: The Mormon Proposition (available on demand) recalls that on 4 November 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8 by a margin of 52 to 48%. The repercussions for some citizens were immediate. Consisting of just 16 words — “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” — the amendment to the state’s constitution undermined the status of those thousands of gay couples who had been married following California Supreme Court’s May 2008 ruling that they could. Now, Tyler Barrick and Spencer Jones, married 17 June, they were reminded that they were second class citizens, after all.

As the legal case against Prop 8 is now headed down its own lengthy judicial path, 8: A Mormon Proposition looks at how it started. According to Kate Kendall, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), the “very coordinated strategy” behind Prop 8 began with three components: money, volunteers, and “a message that resonates.” The film illustrates how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints assembled these components, using the research compiled by Former GOP political consultant Fred Karger, now a “specialist” in investigating political dirty tricks and founder of Californians Against Hate. As he describes meeting with a contact in Salt Lake City’s Hotel Monaco Bar, the film shows the boxes full of documents he collected, proof that the Mormon Church deployed the same tactics used by the “Hawaii Christian Coalition” its successful 1996 campaign against same-sex marriage in that state. In both instances, the Mormon Church kept its own profile low, understanding that it would attract unwanted attention. Instead, it drew on labor and financing from Catholic and fundamentalist organizations, the result being, as one memo from 1996 attests, “The miracle of this has been that the focus on the Coalition and not at any time has our Church or the Catholics been singled out.”

In California, Karger says, the primary coalition was called the National Organization for Marriage. Founded in 2007 (that is, anticipating the California Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling), NOM named conservative writer Maggie Gallagher its president, Brian S. Brown (of the Family Institute of Connecticut) its executive director, and Princeton professor Robert P. George its Chairman of the Board. As narrator Dustin Lance Black (an ex-Mormon) points out, the coalition quickly hired a professional signature-gathering firm to pull together the necessary petitions to get Prop 8 on the ballot in November 2008, and then set themselves to the business of getting out their vote.

This campaign was especially well organized (unlike the counter-campaign, which rather expected that Californians would support it as a matter of course) and well funded, in large part by Mormon Church members (in Utah) who responded to requests for “donations.” As an intertitle announces, “And then God spoke,” the scene cuts to a satellite dish: NOM got the word out via a savvy media campaign, TV and internet ads that proclaimed the good work of the “mighty army” against the enemy — funded, the film underlines with fanciful shots of cash flying through the air, by Mormons.

The film — which makes an important argument somewhat clumsily — submits that Mormon prophet Thomas Monson initiated the campaign, making his “commandment” in a speech using language that Church members would “understand.” As “former Mormon” Emily Pearson explains, “A call from the prophet is a call from God.” She goes on, “Gays interrupt the Mormon plan for heaven,” in which men are rewarded by becoming “gods with our own spirit wives and children.” (As the film notes, the Church’s campaign is not a little ironic, given its own history of feeling persecuted for its polygamous practices — officially disavowed in 1890.) The campaign itself — rather ingeniously, if not factually — convinced a majority of voters that their freedom of speech and religion were at stake, that “the gays” were intolerant of others’ rights.

Repeatedly, the documentary relies on “former Mormons” like Pearson for interpretations of LDS belief structures. She illustrates the Church’s persecution of gay kids with the story of Stuart Matis,: after he shot himself to death, his parents went on to write the pro-Mormon book, In Quiet Desperation, about his struggle with “same-sex attraction.” Another former Mormon looks back on his own difficult youth within the Church. Bruce Barton refers to medication regimes and lobotomies (tactics also employed in the past by secular organizations like the U.S. Navy), as well as the torture he personally endured. As he tearfully describes brutal interrogations and electrodes applied to his genitals, the film illustrates with grim reenacted close-ups. And, as a camera follows a couple of kids wandering through what looks like a menacing abandoned building, activist Melissa Bird says, “thousands of homeless youth” in Utah are those who “came out to their parents and their parents didn’t want them anymore.”

The film’s melodramatic and imprecise tactics aside, the case it makes against the Mormon Church’s canny political machinery is alarming. Because it is a Church, LDS doesn’t need to expose its finances or pay taxes, even as it mounts overtly political campaigns. The success of the covert campaigns is related to more overt appeals, such as those made by Utah State Senator Chris Buttars. In an interview for this documentary, he calls gays “the greatest threat to America going down.” Unlike the Mormons who campaigned for Prop 8, he’s at work while everybody’s “watching.”