Marty Beaudet

If you happened to read the latest issue of Dialogue (Fall 2000, Vol. 33, No. 3) you will have seen Mike Quinn’s essay on California’s Proposition 22, and Armand Mauss's subsequent response. The following is a letter to the editor of Dialogue written by Marty Beaudet, a member of Affirmation, responding to Mauss’s remarks.

In your Fall 2000 issue (Vol. 33, No. 3) Armand Mauss responds to Mike Quinn’s essay on LDS Church involvement in California’s Proposition 22 battle. Mauss rightly recognizes Quinn’s emotional involvement in the issue. It is clear that Quinn has a vested interest in the matter, and his tone does depart from a strictly scholarly one at times.

However, to dismiss Quinn’s arguments on that basis, as Mauss does, is a leap we need not make. Consider Martin Luther King, Jr.: Despite his own minority status and clearly “emotional” arguments for Black Civil Rights, his position was sound and his cause was legitimate.

While Mauss eventually concedes that there exist “deplorable” attitudes among Church leaders and members regarding homosexuality, he implies that since such thinking is not “monolithic” Quinn is wrong to assail it as such. In this, Mauss fails to recognize that when Church leaders decided to organize a “moral crusade” (one in which it directed member participation) against a gay and lesbian rights issue, the Church—leaders and obedient members alike—became monolithic, individual opinions notwithstanding.

To say that one should not attack the Church on this issue because its members hold diverse opinions on the matter, is akin to suggesting that the German army in World War II was not a legitimate target because its conscripts didn’t all agree with Nazi policies. Perhaps Allied troops should have stopped and engaged each German soldier in a scholarly argument to determine his position before deciding whether to shoot him?

The fact of the matter is that when the Church entered the political arena on this issue it became a legitimate—and yes, monolithic—target. Members who have enlisted in the Church’s cause—whether out of obedience or heartfelt support—can no longer expect noncombatant status simply because they may hold divergent opinions.

Furthermore, Mauss dismisses the Church’s unequivocal bigotry in decades past because it was “well within the national consensus” of the time, as though this absolves it of any accountability. Does Mauss mean to suggest then, that Mormons can easily ignore selected counsel of the General Authorities because they are simply parroting secular attitudes?

The Church has set itself above the secular fray; it claims to speak for God. An error as grotesque as its earlier campaign against African-American equality taints all of its subsequent pronouncements and makes the morality of its “moral crusades” highly questionable.

Marty Beaudet
Boring, Oregon