Look Out, Illinois. The Mormons are Coming.

Not content with their status as the majority donors to the anti-gay state constitutional amendment efforts in California and Arizona or the majority consumers of porn in the US, the Latter-Day Saints now have the Land of Lincoln--and its proposed civil-union legalizing legislation--in their sights.

The Civil Union Bill (HB 2234) has been scheduled for a hearing in the Youth and Family Committee this week on Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. in Springfield. If the bill is voted out of committee, it becomes eligible for a vote before the full Illinois House of Representatives.

This bill will legalize civil unions in the state of Illinois, and will treat such civil unions with the same legal obligations, responsibilities, protections and benefits as are afforded within marriage. In other words, civil unions will be different in name only from marriage.

To help defeat this bill, please call your state representative and state senator and ask that they support traditional marriage and vote against the civil unions bill.

I find it very odd that the LDS decided to go on the anti-gay offensive yet again after being so indignant at the outrage they spurred by their California Prop 8 meddling. Why, people called them bigots--bigots!--just because they very strongly suggested that their followers should pour millions of dollars into an out-of-state political campaign that had no direct bearing on their lives, and then initially lied about the enormous scale of their involvement with the Yes on 8 campaign. Oh, the huffing and puffing. And now they're gearing up to do the same thing all over again, after insisting that it's only about marriage, only about that sacred word, not about unions or other packages of civil rights protection not bearing that trademarked title.

The upside? They didn't leave themselves a lot of time on this latest call to action. The downside? They left us even less time to yank back the shades and let sunlight spill onto what they're trying to do. If you live in Illinois or know someone who does, it's time to spring into action.

You can debate whether Mormons are really Christians elsewhere--they have "Jesus Christ" on their letterhead, which is plenty for me, no matter how *ahem* improbable the rest of their additions to the fairy tale are--but I'd like the howling that Christians are being persecuted in the US to stop right now, please. I'm not mobilizing legions of gay people to badger the Utah state legislature to rescind any civil rights currently enjoyed by Mormons there. I would like them to similarly stay out of the business of my home state and the fair-minded peeps there--both straight and gay--who take that whole equal rights under the law thing seriously.

As usual, plenty more is available at Pam's House Blend, Box Turtle Bulletin, and Kos.

You're Not Paranoid if They're Really Out to Get You

By now you've probably heard about the Mormon memo, which starkly illustrates both the depth of the animosity toward gay people and the frighteningly patient long-term planning that has gone into the effort to relegate us to underclass status for ever and ever, world without end. If you haven't heard about it, the memo dates to 1997, when it was spurred by Hawaii's short-lived movement toward marriage equality, and outlines the Mormon strategy to prevent or rescind marriage equality--homosexual legal marriage, or "H.L.M." in LDS parlance; we have not seen such an affinity for acronyms in a grievously long time--wherever it might pop up, anywhere in the nation.

For at least eleven years the LDS has been plotting and planning, to borrow a phrase, the best way to eliminate civil rights from a group that had never done anything to the Mormons more offensive than simply existing. A couple things stand out here for me. First is the recognized need for the Mormon church to coattail with the much higher profile (at that time, at least) Catholic church on anti-gay activism. The second might seem like a throwaway bullet point, but it might be the most disheartening snippet in the entire memo for me.

That last bullet: "...in order to win this battle, there may have to be certain legal rights recognized for unmarried people such as hospital visitation so opponents in the legislature will come away with something." In other words, in order to take the big important rights away from the faggots and dykes we might need to cave and let them see each other in the hospital, but Xenu knows that if we could get away with it, we'd eliminate that right too. Hospital fucking visitation. It's been my own personal whipping boy, the reductio ad hospitalum bandied about by people who might not reduce our relationships to a sex act but most definitely are happy to reduce the huge sphere of marital rights and responsibilities to the single issue of ICU access. And now we learn that it's the fucking shriveled little carrot the Mormons grudglingly consent to dangle in front of us even as they prepare to whack us with the stick.

Kiss my giant lesbian ass, Mormon church. You forfeited any claim on my civility when you decided to launch a crusade to strip me and mine of full citizenship in this country.