Joe Vogel wrote a recent article in The Huffington Post entitled “A Mormon’s Lament: Church Is On the Wrong Side of History Again With Proposition 8.” Where Vogel raises several controversial points and forces Mormons to ask some hard questions of themselves, Vogel doesn’t show any evidence of an ability to challenge his own assumptions. Writers who can’t rhetorically challenge their own assumptions while attacking another group’s beliefs and assumptions usually become guilty of committing the same sins of which they accuse those whom they are attacking.
For instance, Vogel’s title, and therefore you could argue the central argument of the article, is based on the erroneous belief in the idea that history is a linear, positivist project. Of course, movements that obsessively focus on civil rights and social justice need the idea of a linear historical narrative. When your ideas and beliefs are based on a linear historical narrative where society is continuously learning from past experience, then your understanding of history becomes teleological. A teleological historical narrative is essential for a movement such as the gay rights movement, because it gives them an overarching purpose to be working towards. This understanding of history also enables you to negatively label those who stand in the way of your teleological destiny as historically ignorant. It therefore isn’t surprising that of all the articles that I have read about the gay rights protests that have followed the passage of Proposition 8 have emphasized the belief of the gay rights movement that the LDS church is on the “wrong side of history.”
The problem with these ignorant statements from the gay rights community is that there is no empirical evidence that history is exclusively linear, and therefore to say you are on the right side of history and another group is not is a statement that doesn’t mean anything. History is a messy thing. There seems to be just as much evidence that history is cyclical as there is evidence that it is linear. History is also dynamic. In other words, history is a construct or invention of those who create it, and history changes as new groups reinvent their own historical narratives. Ultimately this all raises the question, “if the LDS Church is on the wrong side of history with Proposition 8, who is to say that the gay rights movement is on the right side of history?’
Where religious traditionalists used the socially enlightened means of a democratic vote to advance their ideas, the gay rights movement is joining the historical ranks of some of the world’s worst social movements. Therefore, they are demonstrating that history will indeed repeat itself in its true cyclical fashion. If history proves anything it is that your whole idea of history can be wrong. Having a flawed understanding of history is a lot more dangerous than being on any arbitrarial side of history.
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Forgive me, but I see a bit of a straw man in your generalization and feel you may be jumping to unnecessary, perhaps reckless conclusions.
To your first point, It is not that there is no ‘empirical evidence’ that history is not exclusively linear. The burden of proof does not rest on history being exclusively linear, but ‘generally’ linear. And even that’s being generous. (I might point out, there is in fact PLENTY of evidence. What is lacking is historical consensus—which actually puts it in pretty good company). I get the sense from your posting that, if there is no proof that history is linear or cyclical, (or anything else) it is therefore in a state of chaos, and nothing can be interpreted one way or the other. A bit anarchistic for a religious man such as yourself, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, I still follow your argument (flawed though it may be). But I couldn’t quite make your next logical leap: because your clause is true (big assumption), therefore the Gay Marriage movement has no footing. i.e. because ‘tone’ they invoke in their writing hints at a claim to a linear history, progress in the direction of more rights for a greater number of people (for which, I say again, there is a WEALTH of evidence). Just because history does not follow an exact trajectory does not mean it is rudderless. History is ‘largely’ linear, with aberrations and anomalies. And, a great many argue that the gay marriage ban with Prop 8 was one such aberration, as Proposition 8 was the first ballot measure ever enacted to remove rights already granted a segment of the population.
Let’s look at this another way. Sure, history is not entirely linear. But civil rights history in democratized countries, for the most part, is; at least since the enlightenment. As stated above, Prop 8 was the first measure in history to REMOVE rights already granted a people. So, if we are in favour of this as a general principle, we could be equally excited about disenfranchising women, or African-Americans. Your arguments are not new. They were floated by segregationalist in the 1870s, defenders of “separate but equal” in the 1950s (our friend Strom Thurmond ran on this platform for president… there may be a future for you in politics), or, if there were any, it could have been used by those fighting for a repeal of interracial marriage bans effective in the United States until the late 1960s.
Fun as your first idea was, your final conclusion is utter nonsense. Because a select few resort to vandalism, the entire movement has joined the ranks of some of the “worst social movements in history”. Really? are we playing the NAZI card for people who broke a couple windows in a California church? Hyperbole doesn’t begin to describe your leap. But this is to be expected. Hendrick Hertzburg of the New Yorker said, “Like a polluted swamp, anti-gay bigotry is likely to get thicker and more toxic as it dries up. Viciousness meets viscousness.”
And that’s not even to say that I disagree with you entirely! I only, humbly, request a bit more rigor in the argumentation.