Last night I went, of my own free will and choice, to watch all the little California Mormons receive instructions (via satellite! Beat that, Scientologists!) from Church poobahs in their mountain Mecca. But John, you ask, wouldn’t it have been more fun to get that root canal you’ve always wanted? Or to give yourself bungie jumping wedgie? I went because it was my duty. For your sake, I would endure a wedgie from Dick Cheney himself.
I even took a super-secret spycam photo (by super-secret, I mean that I stuck my hand up in the air in a non-obvious way and nonchalantly aimed my Treo towards the pulpit. I think I had the shutter sound turned off.):
I’m sure that made you feel like you were there yourselves, but let me tell you, it’s not enough. I’ll provide more info so that like me, you too will want to stamp on your testicles to distract yourself from the insanity (or dance on your neighbor’s if you don’t have a pair immediately on hand).
Like many other Church meetings, this one involved a lot of lecturing by white guys in suits. One of them spoke directly to the young people of the church (which, from the perspective of most of the leadership, is everyone under mandatory retirement age) and asked them to use “YouTube” and “Podcasting” and “World of Warcraft (but only if you don’t use those lascivious elf harlots)” to “I believe you call it ‘go viral.’” If you received any Tweets or Facebook status updates encouraging you to cause your happily married gay friends to spontaneously divorce, that’s because Quentin L. Cook said that you’d love it if they did that! Someone may thank him by subjecting his home server to a “Denial of Service” or “SQL Injection” attack. Also, he said, “Our hearts go out to those who struggle with same sex attraction.” Then he couldn’t keep a straight face and burst out laughing: “I believe you young kids would say, ‘Psych!’” Then he added gleefully, “No marriage for you!”
The chairman for the LDS Prop 8 efforts, another white guy named Clayton–let’s just call him Chairman Clayton–talked strategy. He called for thirty volunteers in each ward in California (1200ish?) to show their love for gays by fighting hard to deny them marital bliss. Then he laid out a week by week plan of action, which included registering every Californian voter currently at BYU and putting pro-prop 8 signs almost but not quite in your yard. Six-pack Mos (that’s Sprite, folks) will also being doing lots of door to door canvassing, exchanging promises to keep the missionaries away from families for a year in exchange for Yes votes. Finally, Chairman Clayton rallied the troops, saying that if members were valiant, “California will still be yours” (exact quote, not kidding) and “your children attending public schools will not be sodomized in the halls” (not an exact quote, but sort of implied) and “God will make Sarah Palin the President of the United States” (not a quote at all, but you know that half the women and 75% of the men were fantasizing this).
After that, I kind of faded out. There was a video where another old white guy berated the California courts for going against the will of the people and heinously protecting the basic rights of his beloved gay brothers and sisters (but not beloved in the butt sex kind of way) and how tolerance means that God’s people have the right to tell others how to get married and how tolerance means that men and women must follow God’s example and have straight sex with their spouses even though for all intents and purposes God appears to be a male bachelor (and after all these centuries, his son still lives at home).
My impression of it all? Mormons are really fearful people. Maybe they’re afraid that they’ll try gay sex and they’ll like it! Or at least that their children will. Maybe they have every right to be. So, my dear gay friends out there, please exercise patience. Don’t convert their children or destroy their marriages until after Prop 8 passes.
