The last time that Mormons were kicked out of the country for community organizing was back in the 1840s.  While historians can probably identify many causes for which Mormons were forced to leave the country, perhaps one of the most notable reasons was because their settlement, Nauvoo, on the Illinois bank of the Mississippi river had a larger population than Chicago.  As a voting bloc in Illinois, the Mormons pretty much had the ability to control elections and the rest of Illinois wasn’t too thrilled that such a strange bunch of people had this kind of power.  The people of Illinois dealt with this problem the same way that their neighbors in Ohio and Missouri dealt with this problem: Fire, tar, feathers, mobocracy, violence, terrorism, murder.  So the Mormons left, and settled the intermountain West from Canada to California.  It is pretty well-known that Mormons had to renounce polygamy for Utah to become a state, but most Americans were more worried about the political power that the church had in the Utah Territory.  For example: 

Idaho Senator Frederick Dubois sought to limit Mormon influence by taking on the easy target of plural marriage: “[We] were not nearly so much opposed to polygamy as we were to the political domination of the Church… We made use of polygamy.”

Once again, Mormons are demonstrating that they can exercise formidable political power, and once again, mainstream America is not too thrilled about this group’s community organizing activities.  Once again, mainstream America is targeting Mormons’ beliefs about marriage to disenfranchise them politically.  Time Magazine recently published an article called, “The Church and Gay Marriage: Are Mormons Misunderstood?”  Although the title of the article seems to suggest that Mormons are misunderstood, and the author of the article will help you understand them better, the tone and structure of the article mostly contribute to an increase in misunderstanding.  Where it would be easy to read this as yet another indictment of multiculturalism, (what does “understanding” another culture really mean anyway?) the point of this article seems to be to stereotype Mormons as homophobic automatons that do whatever the prophet tells them to do.  I will agree that the article is rhetorically subtle in how it makes this point.  After all, the author does paint with the sympathetic brush at times.

Nevertheless, due to editorial constraints, personal bias, editorial bias, dishonesty, or just the daunting impossibility of the task of “cultural understanding,” I would have to argue that this article falls short of it’s proposed intent, and so yes, David Van Biema, thanks to you, Mormons are misunderstood.  The cultural logic that informs this article, also informs this online hate brochure, that basically suggests that Mormon viewpoints should not be tolerated, and that through hatemongering and intimidation it might be possible to prevent Mormons from exercising their political will in the future.  Of course, this is a perfect example of the liberal, multicultural idea of tolerance: Tolerance is great as long as that which is to be tolerated is something you already agree with.

I am sure that most Americans agree that it is a good thing for young teenagers (from 12 years up) to attend a homosexual prom in Boston, where the chaperones were gay men handing out business cards to come to their kinky kamp summer camp and bondage and sado-masochist classes.  Most Mormons would probably agree with one of their leaders, Neal A. Maxwell, who said that Heavenly Father takes our agency more seriously than we do and would therefore agree that it is perfectly fine for young teenagers to explore various forms of sexual perversion, drug-use, and statutory gay rape.  When you stand for things that are so agreeable, it is hard to understand why simple-minded, provincial Mormons can’t be more tolerant.