protect marriage
Months after I decide to take my daughters back to church, the Mormon grapevine brings word that an announcement will be read from the pulpit on Sunday morning to congregations across California:
In March 2000 California voters overwhelmingly approved a state law providing that “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” The California Supreme Court recently reversed this vote of the people. On November 4, 2008, Californians will vote on a proposed amendment to the California state constitution that will now restore the March 2000 definition of marriage approved by the voters. . . . We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman. . . .
I feel as if my heart has been thrown to the concrete and a cinder block dropped on it.
The same way I felt when my church declared feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians its enemies in 1993.
My heart on the concrete, a cinder block on my heart.
That summer a vast and professionally orchestrated grassroots campaign grinds into action, mobilizing Mormon congregations. Mormons are asked to donate about eight hours a month to the Yes on 8 campaign, but especially in conservative Southern California, many Mormons volunteer to give two or three times more. They do so because heterosexual marriage holds a uniquely sacred place in Mormon theology: marriages performed in Mormon temples are a saving rite necessary to entering the highest levels of heaven. They do so because they fear that legalizing same-sex civil marriages will prove to endanger the Church’s ability to perform its own temple marriages. And they do so, most important, because they have been asked, and they have promised, always to obey, give, and serve. Although I do not believe that same-sex civil marriages pose a legal threat to the religious freedom of the Church, I understand and acknowledge the powerful pull of duty Mormons all around me are feeling, for I have felt it too. As the old pioneer hymn urges:
The world has need of willing men,
Who share the workers’ zeal,
Come help the good work move along,
Put your shoulder to the wheel.
Because Mormon congregations are usually organized by geographical districts that map very neatly onto voter precincts, the Church mobilizes with breathtaking speed and efficiency. Clipboards are circulated during Sunday meetings. Check the column: canvass, phone bank, data entry, child care. At the first statewide precinct walk on August 16, almost thirty thousand Yes on 8 volunteers fan out into neighborhoods, knocking on doors, identifying and recruiting likely voters to “protect marriage” by eliminating the civil marriage rights of gays and lesbians.
The man in charge of the vast Mormon Proposition 8 grassroots operation is Grant Jensen, my childhood bishop, the professional Republican pollster and strategist. Now Grant Jensen tells the world, “If same-sex marriage advocates win, the whole structure collapses: the family, the nation, and in time civilization itself.” Brother Jensen has a gay son.
Meanwhile, in Northern California, a Mormon woman named Laura Compton starts Mormons for Marriage, a website and social network to support marriage equality and connect Mormons who feel that for reasons of conscience they cannot support the Church’s Yes on 8 campaign. In 2000, when Mormons mobilized in support of California’s Defense of Marriage Amendment, a young gay Mormon man named Stuart Mathis killed himself on the steps of a California ward house. Laura Compton is the mother of two small children. Her goal: no more suicides this time.
In August, we learn that the Yes on 8 campaign has set fundraising goals for each Mormon congregation: higher goals are set for congregations in wealthy areas with higher monthly tithing receipts. Church leaders place donation forms in the foyers of Mormon ward houses to track how well congregations are meeting their contribution goals. Special phone calls are arranged between high-income California Mormons and high-ranking members of the Church leadership, who suggest that these families each donate $25,000 to the Yes on 8 campaign. Obedience follows. By the middle of August, dozens and dozens of $25,000 contributions begin to materialize on the California secretary of state’s election donation reporting website. We see it all there: Mormon first names like Rulon, Spencer, Lynn, and Brigham; Mormon last names like Christianson, Allred, and Rigby. Our parents, our siblings, our Sunday School teachers, our piano teachers, the boys we once kissed in the church parking lot.
• • •
I stay home most Sundays during the Proposition 8 campaign. Too raw. Too much. Too soon. But in September, when my newborn nephew is named and blessed back home in Orange County, I return to the very ward where I was a little girl. Orange County is ground zero for the Mormon Yes on 8 campaign. Grant Jensen stands in the foyer and shakes hands all around. I sit in the pews with my sisters and watch as a circle of men in dark suits—my brother, my father, my brothers-in-law—take the baby in their arms to bless him. After the prayer, my brother holds beautiful baby Evan aloft in his little white and blue suit.
Words about protecting marriage find their way into every prayer and talk that day. I shift in my seat. I feel the grind of concrete against flesh against cinder block. I devise a reason to leave the chapel: my two-year-old daughter Rosa is fussy and needs to be walked.
Slowly, with Rosa in my arms or toddling down the hall in front of me, I circle the corridors of the church where I grew up. I see the cool-walled classrooms where I watched Man’s Search for Happiness, with longing pulling through the center of my chest. I see the rooms where Sister Tucker and Sister Williams taught us first-aid skills for Girls Camp. I see the cultural hall where Natasha and I practiced our dance festival routine. Then I turn a corner, and I see it there, in the foyer: a red milk crate on a table.
I walk closer. Inside the red milk crate, I see sign-up sheets, canvass instruction sheets, and clipboards full of information on Yes on 8 voters identified during the canvass the day before. I have canvassed. I know how painstaking and time-expensive the work is, how precious this data, the hours and hours of door knocking it took to collect.
My heart pounds. I look around. The hallways are clear.
It is not good to steal. It is not good to destroy the hard work of others. It is not good to be angry.
My heart pounds. I take the sheets from the clipboard and shove them in my pink-flowered diaper bag. I pick up Rosa, put her on my hip, and walk quickly, nonchalantly, outside into the parking lot. My high heels click against the asphalt. Should I keep the canvassing sheets safely hidden in my pink-flowered diaper bag or get them off my person? I spy a metal grate in the sidewalk of the church parking lot. Shielded by a row of cars, Rosa still on my hip, I squat in my high heels and shove the canvassing sheets under the metal grate.
Still, I feel the weight of the cinder block on my heart on the ground.
• • •
In September, word comes that a million plastic yellow Yes on 8 lawn signs scheduled to materialize on lawns across the state as a crucial element in the grassroots Yes on 8 visibility campaign have been inexplicably delayed at the manufacturing plant in China. Long dreading the day when the Yes on 8 lawn signs popped up in my own neighborhood, I feel a sense of relief.
Meanwhile, at the local No on 8 headquarters, volunteers parsimoniously dole out a few American-made, union-made No on 8 signs. “Where do you live?” they ask, brows wrinkled. The real truth is that there is not yet enough money in the No on 8 campaign to give signs away to anyone who wants one.
I start putting in phone-banking shifts at the No on 8 headquarters in Hillcrest, San Diego’s gay neighborhood. “I am a Mormon,” I tell the room of volunteers whenever I am asked to introduce myself. I sit at a little table with Buddy and Tom, married five months. All three of us are wearing headsets plugged into laptop computers. The computer dials down old Democratic party lists. I read from a script. I talk to a few answering machines. Most of the numbers are bad. I read the names on my screen and imagine plumbers in Pacoima, schoolteachers in El Cajon. Someone in the next room gets an old man on the line shouting about Leviticus. He is an old man in a state where farmlands sit fallow for want of water, prisons have been built on farmlands, factories closed, and children of people who used to work in the factories have been sent to prisons. And old men shout about Leviticus. Put your shoulder to the wheel. Soon, the battery on my cell phone dies. There are extra laptop computers but no extra phones. I go to the bathroom and cry.
On Sundays during the Proposition 8 campaign, I sneak over to the great gray Episcopal cathedral across town. St. Paul’s stands on a palm-tree-lined avenue at the edge of Balboa Park. About half of the parishioners are gay. It is cool inside the great gray cathedral. Married old men in elegant suits present themselves at the altar for communion. My girls sit with me in the pews and color on clipboards while I stare at a wooden Jesus on the cross suspended above the altar. It is an unfamiliar sight: this Jesus, arms outstretched and bound, on a cross, suspended in the chapel. Mormons do not have crucifixes in our chapels. I cry. By now my girls are used to my crying. Five-year-old Ella wrinkles her face and sticks her fingers in my wet eyes, curious, compassionate.
Camellias bloom red in the St. Paul’s Cathedral courtyard. After services, I stop by a table for the No on 8 campaign. I sign up for another phone-bank shift. I tell them I am a Mormon. I always feel the need to tell them I am Mormon.
Hearing the word Mormon, the No on 8 tablers begin to chat vacantly, distantly, with bitterness.
“I know where a Mormon church building is,” says one.
“I am a Mormon,” I repeat myself, quietly. “That is why I am here.”
Another No on 8 volunteer, a clear-eyed African-American woman, understands me.
“Oh,” she says, nodding, returning my gaze. She understands what it means to be the only one in the room and why it matters.
• • •
By October, a few polls suggest that opponents of Proposition 8 have a small lead. The polls, I know, are wrong. Only a few newspapers have glimpsed the scale of the Mormon Yes on 8 campaign. All day, every day, I walk around in a daze, a head-to-toe state of alarm.
One October Sunday evening, the Church convenes a satellite broadcast to deliver instructions from headquarters in Salt Lake City on how to get out the vote on Election Day. Thousands of Mormons fill the pews in ward houses across California. It is the largest, most effective political volunteer training I have ever witnessed.
That same weekend, at a professional meeting, I see an old friend, a professor at the University of California who now spends most of his time in France. He is blond, handsome, political—an aging surfer boy with a copy of Le Monde tucked under his elbow.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he asks, sensing my distress.
“Proposition 8,” I tell him. “It’s going to win. You know what my people are doing?”
He smiles affectionately and kisses me on the forehead.
“Poor thing,” he says. “It’s okay.” Then, a pause, as if confidentially. “You know, there aren’t that many of your people.”
I stare at him blankly. I try not to think he is a fool.
I feel like I am coming down with a fever and go back to my hotel room, where for hours I pace the floor, then get on my knees and put my face down in the bed. I open a space in the middle of my chest and sob through it. If my prayer had words, they would sound like this: Dear God, I know you see all of this. I know you are on both sides of the story. Help me know what to do. Help me know how to feel. Soften everyone’s hearts, including mine.
• • •
As the campaign grinds into its final weeks, phone banks are mobilized up and down the Mormon corridor, at ward houses in Idaho, at Brigham Young University. Mormons are hustled to the phone banks. Emails fly: “Satan is trying to shut down the temples in California.” Across the United States, rank-and-file Mormons are being told that the legalization of civil gay marriage in California will require churches to sanctify gay marriages or else face massive penalties that will force them to close. They are being told that gay civil marriage rights threatens our freedom of belief and worship. Every newspaper, every legal analyst in the country has declared that this is a falsehood. But many believe. They obey. They fill phone banks. Rich Mormons across the country are hit up for huge last-minute donations: seven million dollars from individual donors in the last seventy-two hours of the campaign.
I start hearing from other Mormons that people have stolen their Yes on 8 signs, left dog feces on their front steps, and thrown bleach on peaceful Yes on 8 demonstrators. Thousands of Mormons line Pacific Coast Highway one night to demonstrate support for the proposition. The television cameras do not come.
Laura at Mormons for Marriage asks me to speak at a No on 8 event in Redlands, deep within the Inland Empire, Yes on 8 territory. Others on the program include a legal expert, a Christian minister, and a rabbi. “Can anyone else do it?” I ask her. Laura tells me most of her other Southern California contacts are unavailable. She says she could fly down, but she would have to leave her kids. It would be a very fast trip, and very expensive. I agree to help.
The Church has said that it respects the rights of its members with dissenting opinions. Still, as I write my speech, terror sits on my chest. I wrestle with the specter of excommunication that haunts every dissenting Mormon who writes or speaks in public. I wrestle with silence. I carefully arrange my words on the paper, trying to describe the exact shape and weight of the cinder block I feel on my heart. I have not spoken about matters like this to my own family in many, many years.
Encouragement comes from my friend Soledad, who is gay. On Wednesday afternoon, she sees me at the school where our daughters attend kindergarten together. She looks at my face and takes pity. “It’s time to come out of the closet,” she says. She holds my hand.
On Thursday night, I click the mouse to send my speech to my parents, brother, sisters.
On Friday morning, I get an email from my father.
“We want you to know we love you,” the email says. “You have wanted a more just and loving world since you were a little girl.”
Tears drop on my keyboard. My chest heaves.
My husband, my girls, and I leave for Redlands early Saturday morning. When we arrive at the church, as the minister, the rabbi, the legal expert, and I meet to prepare for the event, I can hear old men calling up and yelling about Leviticus into the church’s answering machine.
Among the crowd are many gay Mormons, including one of the paid staff for the No on 8 campaign. I recognize her blond hair, her clear and riveting blue eyes, her narrow features; I hear the remnant of a Mormon Utah accent rounding her speech. We embrace each other deeply. I can feel her ribs through her T-shirt. She tells me she is the niece of a prominent member of the church leadership. She once served an eighteen-month mission for the Church. She spent many years in deep depression, crying on her knees. When she finally came out of the closet, she tells me, she felt a burning in her bosom, an overwhelming feeling of peacefulness and love from her Heavenly Father. Her partner is here at the rally with her. Her family does not speak to her.
• • •
I give my speech, voice shaking. I ask the crowd to sign up for an election shift with the Mormon No on 8 organizers. I sing the crowd our old pioneer song:
Put your shoulder to the wheel; push along,
Do your duty with a heart full of song.
We all have work; let no one shirk.
Put your shoulder to the wheel.
After I finish, an old man stands at the back of the crowd, hollering about Leviticus and calling out each of us speakers with an angry pointed finger. “He’s not a real rabbi,” he screams at the rabbi. “You’re not a real Mormon,” he screams at me. One of the gay Mormons in the crowd, a broad-shouldered lesbian, quietly walks over and places her body between the screaming man and the crowd. The minister leads us in singing “This Little Light of Mine.” The old man walks back to his pickup truck in the parking lot.
After the meeting, people confess with tears in their eyes how difficult it has been to bear the unthinking self-righteousness and cruelty of some of their Mormon coworkers and neighbors. They tell me that their No on 8 signs have been stolen from their front lawns, dog feces left on their doorsteps, and acid thrown on No on 8 demonstrators. The crowd at the church in Redlands is small. Television cameras do not come.
• • •
On the eve of the election, on Monday night, in Salt Lake City, Mormon mothers of gay children organize a candlelight vigil. “Stop saying mean things about our kids!” brave white-haired Millie Watts tells the television cameras.
Across the West, the Yes on 8 phone banks burn all night long, turning out the vote, while gay people and their allies line the streets and hold candles.
Candles is how we ask for mercy when we know very well what is to come.
It is not good to be angry. Put your shoulder to the wheel.
• • •
When it is all over, Proposition 8 passes by a margin of 52.3 percent to 47.7 percent.
It is the most expensive ballot initiative fight over a social issue in California history: eighty-two million dollars. Mormon individual donors account for at least 50 percent of the money raised in support of Proposition 8.
An oral rehydration packet for a child with diarrhea costs about 10 cents. Diarrhea is the second leading cause of death among children worldwide. Diarrhea kills five thousand children each day, almost two million children each year. Eighty-two million dollars buys almost one billion oral rehydration packets, enough to provide life-saving treatment for every child on the globe with diarrhea for a decade to come.
• • •
A few days after the election, outraged gays and lesbians and their allies rally by the tens of thousands at Mormon temples in San Diego and Los Angeles.
I do not attend the rallies. I read news coverage, and I laugh at some of the picket signs: “You have two wives, I want one!” Other signs are more ugly, angry, hurt: “Liars burn in hell.” Would have been nice, I think, if you all would have been out in August and September, canvassing eight hours a month.
It is not good to be angry. Put your shoulder to the wheel.
The protesters do not understand that picketing at Mormon temples inflames a centuries-old persecution complex: deep memories of mobs amassing in Missouri, of temples abandoned and destroyed in Ohio and Illinois. More reason for Mormons to circle the wagons and to feel like an embattled righteous minority.
Women stand in a little cluster at my sister’s ward house in Utah. “I never thought I would live to see the last days,” one says, hanging her head, tearful. “I never knew it would look like this.”
A few weeks after the election, Grant Jensen publishes a glossy coffee-table book: How Americans View Mormonism. The book is full of little colored bar charts and pie graphs, like the ones I used to print out at his office when I was fifteen. His findings? Forty-nine percent of Americans have unfavorable impressions of Mormons; 37 percent have favorable ones.
My dad relays even more specific elements of Brother Jensen’s findings to me: in our Orange County, he relates, surveys show more people would rather vote for a Muslim than a Mormon. His chest is tight with surprise, a knot in his throat. He recedes a bit against the world he inhabits.
I look up Grant Jensen’s son Mark. I haven’t seen him since we were both children in the same Orange County congregation. We reconnect by email. How are you? I ask. Okay, he says. He is living with his boyfriend in San Bernardino. He recounts the day he stumbled upon stacks of Proposition 8 campaign materials in his father’s office and realized the magnitude of what was to come. He and his parents haven’t spoken since.
• • •
Three months after the election, I bring myself and my daughters back to church. I generally opt out of the adult meetings, preferring instead to sit in the back of my daughters’ primary classes, where the talk is about God and Jesus and prayer and pioneers and not about the adult business of protecting marriage.
Eventually, though, I do venture back into Relief Society. The teacher, a dark-haired woman in her fifties, has outlined on the chalkboard the lesson plan straight from the Salt Lake City–issued manual. But her talk keeps veering sharply away from the lesson plan, to the strain of Proposition 8, flak taken by Mormon high school students during the Yes on 8 campaign, the anti-Mormon sentiment of the television show Big Love, Tom Hanks’s recent talk show declaration that Mormons are “un-American,” and a searching postelection feature on the Church in the pages of Time magazine.
The campaign has taken a toll on every one of us.
I try to distract myself by checking my text messages, then I start keeping score. Fifteen minutes into the lesson: stories relating to Proposition 8 or anti-Mormon sentiment resulting from Proposition 8, 5; stories relating to Jesus, 0.
The air is heavy with defensiveness, and man, how I miss Jesus. I consider getting up and leaving the room just to spare myself the frustration. I think about sitting in my car and having a cry. But I don’t. I hold my tongue, but I also hold my seat. This is a church inhabited by people willing to give up their own children for being gay. This is also the church of Millie Watts and the church of my grandmothers. This is a church of tenderness and arrogance, of sparkling differences and human failings. There is no unmixing the two.
• • •
There is no way around Proposition 8: being a Mormon in California will mean dealing with its legacy of hard feelings, in our families, in our churches, in our neighborhoods, for years and years to come. Yes, like it or not, by putting ourselves front and center in the battle against gay civil rights, we Mormons have married ourselves to gay folks for a long, long time.
I consummate my own personal relationship to the marriage equality movement in March when I attend Camp Courage, a weekend-long event where they train activists to tell our own stories about why equality matters and to use our stories as we phone bank and canvass, to change the political landscape of California, one conversation at a time. This is the same door-to-door, face-to-face grassroots strategy used by the Obama presidential campaign. Put your shoulder to the wheel!
At Camp Courage San Diego, I see a few familiar faces from the No on 8 campaign—Buddy and Tom from the phone bank, and Richard, a tall slender gay man in his late sixties wearing round Michel Foucault–style glasses and an Angels in America T-shirt. Richard has been married to his husband Tom for thirty-one years.
I tell him that I am Mormon.
“Brigham Young University did things to our people,” Richard tells me, his face long and pale, but without blame. “Electroshock therapy. If they found out you were gay, they’d threaten to tell your family, kick you out of school and the church unless you did the electroshock aversion therapy.”
Yes, I nod. I know.
To begin the training, Camp Courage attendees gather in small groups where, under the guidance of Obama campaign veterans, we scribble the elements of our personal stories on preprinted handouts.
My page fills quickly. The other folks in the group notice. “Look at the star student over there,” a pretty brown-haired woman kindly teases me.
After we write, we tell our stories to one another. Everyone in the circle has a story worth telling: stories of being disowned by families and beaten up by classmates, stories of running away and starting over, stories of consciously choosing a life of dignity and fulfillment. But I am the only Mormon girl. To them, my story is a revelation. When the Camp Courage organizers call on each group to choose one member to tell her story to the entire camp, my group pushes me forward.
Lisa, the woman leading Camp Courage, puts her arm around my shoulders and brings me up to the stage. “Now, this is Joanna,” she tells the crowd, with a giant smile. “And we are gonna show her the love.” Two hundred gay rights activists come to their feet.
“My name is Joanna,” I say. “And I am a straight Mormon feminist.”
(The crowd cheers.)
“I grew up in the orange groves of Republican Orange County. I was raised to believe in a loving, kind, and powerful God—”
(A voice comes from the front row—“Yes!” Someone is testifying along.)
“In 1993, one of the leaders of my church declared feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians enemies.
“I felt as if someone had thrown my heart to the concrete and dropped a cinder block on it.
“In 1997, my church started giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to antigay marriage initiatives.
“I felt as if someone had thrown my heart to the concrete and dropped a cinder block on it.
“For years afterward, I cried almost every time I set foot in a Mormon church.”
“But I went back to church so that my daughters could know the same loving, kind, and powerful God I was raised to believe in.
“Just a few months later, my Church mobilized a huge campaign for Proposition 8.
“And again I felt as if someone had thrown my heart to the concrete and dropped a cinder block on it.
“I did what I could. It wasn’t enough. But I am a Mormon. And I am not giving up.”
No one boos. No one makes me feel ashamed. Everyone shows Mormon girl the love.
Courage.
I tell my story. The cinder block lifts, and my heart comes up off the ground.