Thanks to Eric Ethington for providing what I feel is a very unbiased recap of the Sacred Ground Initiative meeting that took place down in Lehi last night. Here are just a few of the interesting insights.
On openness:
(T)he Sutherland Institute sent out an email to many of the prominent gay activist leaders in the community (Jacob Whipple and Michael Mueller) in the hours prior to the event letting them know they and their groups were no longer welcome to attend. This went so far as the young man who checked me in apologized for the extra security, saying, “there are supposed to be a lot of bad people trying to get in tonight, so we’re being very careful.” To enforce this decree, they pulled the list of attending people from Facebook, and listed them as banned from the event
On their political philosophy:
Paul (Mero, President of the Sutherland Institute’s) topic was “Marriage, Family, and Freedom.” He began by telling of the two great revolutions in history that stuck out in his mind, the American Revolution, and the French. “One of these revolutions went on to create the greatest nation in the world,” Paul stated, “while the other lasted only a short period… This is because of what the revolutions were founded on.. The French Revolution was built on liberty foreign to the natural man… that every person was born of natural and civil rights. While the American Revolution was built on the idea of inherited rights..that we do not invent freedom, we are given it by
God.”
On the Common Ground Initiative:
(T)he only topic heard all night was Gay Marriage. Over and over it was flaunted as the stain on the Earth, and completely and irrevocably immoral and wrong. What was most noticeably lacking, was there was not one mention of a single bill in the Common Ground Initiative. Not once did they elaborate on how protecting people’s jobs and housing was going to bring on Gay Marriage.
As I understand it, the Common Ground Initiative is about legislating the same equal rights that the Mormon Church spokesmen claimed to be in favor of, during the Prop 8 debate.
It’s time for the LDS Church to either admit they lied, or support the bills.
This is what bugs me about this kind of door policy: It allows the folks who successfully manage to keep their opponents outside to then pretend that they’ve somehow dodged a bullet, to congratulate themselves on having been admirably proactive and successful at avoiding some kind of unsightly and messy confrontation … when the reality is that all such a policy accomplishes is to eliminate the chance to take the full measure of one’s opponents.
Heaven forbid such opponents turn out to be peaceable folks who’re actually interested to sit through your presentation and glean whatever insight might be on offer?
The point, for Paul Mero and his crew, is to never allow opponents a free opportunity to conduct themselves in socially acceptable fashion, but rather to exploit the situation in order to promote the view that Paul’s side is, in fact, under siege by oppressive undemocratic forces.
Yawn.
Chino, we can always count on you to provide an eloquent response to what the loons at the Sutherland Institute are up too. But again I beg to ask why does the Gay community continue dialogue with SI, it’s like beating our heads against a brick wall.
http://www.gayleruzicka.com