Affirmation: Gay & Lesbian Mormons

Films

Reed Cowan

Radio West Explores “8: The Mormon Proposition”
Reed Cowan: “When a gay child enters the picture, it completely upsets the Mormon plan for heaven”

June 2010

Reed Cowan, the director of 8: The Mormon Proposition, was interviewed by Doug Fabrizio on Radio West, a popular program produced by Salt Lake City’s public radio station, KUER. The show is available for listening on this site.

Cowan told Fabrizio that deep LDS theology drives Mormons to fight marriage equality. “The root of Mormon theology... is man joining woman --or women-- in the afterlife and becoming gods and goddesses, and queens and kings, and priests and priestesses,” Cowan said. “So when a gay child enters the picture... it completely upsets the Mormon plan for heaven. You put yourself in the mind of a Mormon who believes this, who’s taught this in the most sacred place they know, the temple, and they are able to look at gay people, gays causes, gay issues, and see the thorn in the eternal side, and therefore they can get involved [against marriage equality]. And they did. And they do.”

Cowan stressed the help the filmmakers received from Fred Karger, who helped expose the deep involvement of LDS leaders in the Yes on 8 campaign. Karger helped leak a number of memos that Elder Loren C. Dunn sent to Apostle Neal A. Maxwell when Mormon leaders were getting ready to fight marriage equality in Hawaii from behind the scenes. “Initial work will be done as quietly as possible,” Elder Dunn wrote in one of the memos. Mormons leaders had other religious groups, such as Roman Catholics, front that coalition. The success in Hawaii led them to use the same strategy in California.

Morris Thurston, an LDS lawyer who wrote a rebuttal to the arguments used to support Prop 8, joined the Radio West interview by phone from his home in California. “The way that I became involved was to have seen a missive that was being sent out by church members and other members of the coalition that warned about all these horrible legal consequences that might happen if Prop 8 were defeated, and I looked at them and felt that that was a misleading document. Being a lawyer, I researched the cases that seemed to underlie it and wrote a rebuttal to it.”

“I received a lot of what I would call hate email, people within the church who accused me of being a fake Mormon, a false Mormon, of working against the gospel and the Brethren,” Thurston explained. “I kind of felt like I was in the middle of a bit of a firestorm. However, I never made a secret of my feeling about it. One of the first things I did was speak to my own bishop, who was very supportive and continues to be a good friend of mine. I also spoke to a couple of general authorities that I know personally and that I have a great deal of respect for, I told them my feelings.”

Said Thurston: “I was assured that even though the church regards this as a moral issue, the fact that it’s brought in the political arena means that I am free to vote my conscience on it; and vote my conscience I did.”