Posts Tagged ‘Proposition 8’
Separation of church and eight.
California voters passed Proposition 8 in Tuesday’s election, amending the state constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. The proposition campaign was the second-most expensive of 2008 – to the presidential race.
Contributions to the proposition battle exceeded $73 million: $35.8 million for it and $37.6 million against it. The difference between those figures – besides $1.8 million – is contributors to the “No on 8″ campaign are individuals and secular groups. Nearly $15 million, or 42 percent, of the “Yes on 8″ campaign’s contributions came at the urging of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its members to “support in every way possible the sacred institution of marriage as [the church] know[s] it to be.”
Sure, there was a phone campaign organized for the Protect Marriage Coalition, but the group also asked for members to contribute in “whatever way they can to the effort to pass Proposition 8.” Apparently, that included six- and seven-figure donations from Mormons not living in California.
If we can get around the fact that non-Californians were contributing millions of dollars to a campaign that wouldn’t directly affect them, we can focus on the more troubling aspect of this: the absolute disregard for the separation of church and state.
The separation of church and state is a doctrine Americans have enjoyed since the founding of our nation more than 200 years ago. The state doesn’t tell us which religion to practice or bother us for practicing one that’s not normal. Our religions don’t get muddled up trying to influence state affairs. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson said it best in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
Now, there are people who believe Jefferson meant a one-way wall, a separation that prevents government from affecting religion but allows religion to participate in government activities. Obviously those people have never seen how a wall works. Maybe they’ve only seen those invisible dog fences and believe it works like that. (The boy in the red shirt represents government.)
We’ll never know what the vote would have looked like had the “Yes on 8″ campaign had $21 million instead of $35.8 million to work with. But when gay marriage comes to a vote again, I hope we’ll find out what happens when a single religious group doesn’t provide 40 percent of the contributions. If members of religious groups want to contribute to a cause, they can do it individually, not with any push from their church.
