It appears that Christiane and I are alternating posting, so I guess it’s my turn.

Much has been blogged and reported on the ongoing Prop 8 controversy and I feel no need to repeat everything here. I will post if I think I have something new to add, or some personal experience to share.

There is one thing about the stance of the opposition to Prop 8 that I find interesting, but first a bit of background. During the campaign, the Yes-on-8 side claimed among other things that if Prop 8 didn’t pass, the free-speech rights of the religious would be threatened, churches could lose their tax-exempt status, and the homosexual lifestyle would be taught in public schools as equally normal and acceptable as heterosexual marriage. The pro-gay side claimed that these were all lies, that none of these things would or even could happen.

Of course, now that the proposition has passed, the pro-gay lobby wants the tax-exempt status of the LDS Church revoked, and it goes without saying that they don’t want the views of church-going folks to count in equal measure with their own, discounting them wholesale as old-fashioned, ignorant, intolerant (or even hateful and bigoted), misguided, mistaken, and/or irrelevant.

What I find especially notable is that, on the one hand they claim that there is absolutely nothing wrong with their lifestyle, that it is good and they are not ashamed of it, yet when the public is told that school children will be exposed to it, they say, “That’s not true!” and “That’s just a scare tactic!”. I might expect them to say, “What’s wrong with that?”, but they don’t. They claim that a small minority of religious fanatics was responsible for getting Prop 8 passed and that mainstream Americans no longer have a problem with homosexuality, but in fact their response seems to demonstrate that they know this really isn’t true.