Mormons have a right to hate, but we have a right to call them on the hypocrisy of targeting us because of our alleged sins, while completely ignoring sins that actually do harm to families and society. We have a right to nail them for being judgmental, which is a mortal sin.

You asked if I knew any Mormons, and I gave you an overview of my personal encounters. Page and I have good friends who are French, but that hardly makes us experts on France, so I don’t quite get your point. My views on religion are based on study, analysis, reading history and reflection, so they’re technically not bigotry, which is a form of ignorance. I am not an adherent of any of the Abrahamic traditions, not because of what the dogma says so much as because of what has been done under their banners over the centuries. I read the Book of Mormon when I was about 12 and have casually studied the church’s history and evolution since then. Most recently, I studied the Burnt Over District, where Mormonism originated. I’m an armchair expert on Manifest Destiny and have read voraciously about the western migration, including, apparently, historical accounts that LDS leadership would prefer to have suppressed.

I see the current Prop 8 scandal as part of a continuum. Mormon culture was warped by its early persecution, a deformation that expresses itself in its desperation for secrecy and penchant for persecution. Over the last 30 years or so, the church has been successful in joining the mainstream, which has made it the fourth largest religion in the country. But by joining the evangelicals’ hate campaign, it has now left the mainstream and aligned itself with the fringe — a mistake that wouldn’t have happened if Hinckley were still in charge.

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes. Most Americans got their first impressions of Mormons this year, first from Mitt Romney, one of the most unprincipled and unappealing politicians on the planet, and then, with its over-compensating support of Prop 8, as just another ugly right-wing hate group. This is going to depress growth from new members among the generation now in very early adulthood and younger who have no use for this sort of bigotry. Even the evangelicals are getting that message from young members, and anti-gay hate groups like Focus on the Family are being forced to lay off staff members. History will show that the Prop 8 scandal has put the mainstreaming of Mormonism back at least a generation or two.

If the church continues this morality-police persecution agenda, it will invite scrutiny of its very dark legacy. (And if you think something as to be “true” to do damage, you have not been paying attention to the practices of the Republican Party over the past 16 years.) But at least one good thing will come from this scandal: Romney will never be president. The Prop 8 debacle has ruined the LDS brand politically, and the scandal will make his 180 degree flipflops on gay rights harder to square. He will enter the 2012 race on the defensive, which is a strong indicator for failure in politics.

I don’t speak for gay people, and I doubt you speak for all Mormons, but while we’re critiquing each other, I’ll say that you have confirmed what I suspected about Mormons. On this issue, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It’s obvious you have given it no study or introspection, you’ve just parroted here the lies and flawed analysis you’ve heard in church or on the radio. You are all deceiving yourselves about your motives — you are acting out of prejudice, not righteousness — and you have no idea, and don’t appear to care, what damage you’re doing to the real lives of real people. The idea that you can convince yourselves that Christ would endorse this sort of psychic and spiritual destructiveness is truly a blasphemy.

Who said I wasn’t saying we weren’t a cult, judging by the definition, and like I said, all religions are in fact cults.
And nice second-hand story. “I met a woman at work who said…” Once again your ignorance is showing each time you write back. You actually don’t know anything about the Mormons and you’ll probably never try to. But that’s okay because I guess ignorance really is bliss. Must be nice to go around blabbing nonsense without knowledge.

And I never tried to go about gay bashing, but since it came so easy to Mormon bash for you I thought I’d throw in a few facts your way to try and open your eyes a little bit.

You are truly a hypocrite of the worst form. You crave equality and yet think the Mormons shouldn’t be able to voice their political rights. Seriously Jon, Gays are not the problem you are the problem for them. You give them a bad name. You criticize me for gay bashing and yet all you do is trash Mormonism simply because we donated more money. We’re just an easy target. Did you think all this about Mormons before prop 8? Did you hate them so badly in 2000? We just have our views as well. Get over it.

I do know a bit about cults. A good friend of mine was deprogrammed out of the Unification Church, and I studied cult phenomenon then. I’d say Mormonism was a Christian cult in the early 19th century, just as Christianity was a Jewish cult in the 1st century.

Evangelicals view Mormonism as a demonic cult because they believe Mormon dogma says that Jesus and Satan are brothers, but it’s possible Mormonism has grown beyond a cult into a bizarre, bloated bully of a religion. The fact that Mormons are so desperate not to be considered cultists is curious.

I knew Mormons when I was a kid and had Mormon advertising clients once, but they did not know I was gay. I live in West Hollywood, one of the most liberal enclaves in the country, so we don’t get too many Mormons around here. There’s a huge temple about eight miles to the east, so I know they’re around. I met a woman through work who told me she had been engaged to a Mormon, but as they were planning the wedding, she learned there were parts of the temple where women couldn’t go, and so she ended the engagement.

Mormons moved into towns in the Midwest where the men would lure under-aged girls into the cult. Imagine having grown men come into your neighborhood and seduce young teen-aged girls and then make them their fifth or 15th or 49th “wives.”

Marriage back then was mostly a business arrangement. The men in those towns viewed the Mormon men as coming in and poaching the girls they’d raised with the intent of trading them for land or livestock when they married them off. They saw the Mormons as leches and thieves.

HIV disease is devastating heterosexual families worldwide, mostly because of adultery. In this country, adulterers are much more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases than monogamous people. (And HIV is almost nonexistent among gay women.) But Mormons and Christians have made it clear that they are happy to let adulterers remarry, have children and not get fired or evicted because of their status as sinners. That is hypocrisy.

The easiest, most logical and, yes, most conservative way to slow the spread of AIDS among gay men is to encourage them to get married and become monogamous. Instead, Mormons and Christians are desperate to put every possible roadblock in the way of that, not because of morality, but because of their own inner demons. That is evil.

Re-read your last comment, Ryan, and tell us you’re not consumed by homophobia — and that you’re not violating Jesus’ commandment to “judge not.” Tell us why you’re not just as hellbound as any gay person. Tell us why, as a hate-filled, judgmental sinner, you deserve civil rights but gay people don’t.

That’s the conundrum that always comes with joining the morality police. You have to be completely without sin yourself. And we know what the Bible says about that.

In the 1960s, it was decided that while segregationists — a group that was comprised of guess who? Christians as well as Mormons — may have had a right to their bigotry toward blacks, they didn’t have a right to codify their hatred into law. Similarly, Mormons and Christians today have the right to be homophobes, but they don’t have the right to turn their homophobia into law.

If Christians and Mormons are allowed to make gays a separate, unequal class in the U.S. Constitution based on a few obscure references in the Bible as they have done in 30 state constitutions now, the United States will cease to be the democratic republic that was formed by the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, and instead will become something closer to the theocratic republic founded in Iran in 1979. That’s what is really at stake here.

Why don’t you actually get some real facts and bring them to the table because fiction isn’t quite as interesting. You should know this at your age.

You keep mentioning “morality police.” Well, I guess someone has to do it because it’s not going to be people like you who fall into the category of “most likely to get HIV infection”. It would seem to me that that would be a choice in it of itself not to do something with that kind of risk. You know that 1 in every 70 males in America has HIV or aids. Women: 1 in every 700. You wonder why your way of life is so frowned upon. Get a life.

And Mormons were hated because their leaders were serial seducers of under-aged girls, which led to their being tarred and feathered and driven from town after town in the mid-1800s. This is one of the things about Mormons that 99 percent of Americans don’t know, but what they will learn now that Mormons have decided to join the morality police.

When Mormons advocate taking away the civil rights of adulterers, I’ll believe they’re truly driven by morality. Until then, nothing you’ve said has convinced me that religion is not being used as a cover for bigotry, which is hatred.

But, once again a moot point. I believe that if I were in your situation I would probably feel close to the same, who knows. But adultery happens to be against civil law as well, but nothing really ever happens because it still falls under our freedom of exercise. Yes it has to do with religion, but that is exactly why nobody ever really touches it. Same goes for gays. People look the other way because it’s too touchy of a subject.

But in any case, are homosexuals immune to adultery, divorce, or causing mental scarring for children. Of course not.

And by the way, it’s not about hatred, or bigotry, get off the, “everybody hates me” bandwagon and grow up. Mormons did. You don’t see Mormons asking for handouts, constantly crying to the government for equal anything. If you read the Book of Mormon you would know how much hatred and bigotry was shown toward us in New York, Missouri, and many other states before finally finding Salt Lake. My people were killed, raped, murdered, tarred and feathered on a regular basis. I don’t remember Mormons going out to a gay community gathering and rallying around them writing hateful remarks on streets in front of them. That doesn’t happen because I guess you could say we were being a little more Christ like than you pretend be.

Oh yeah, homophobia? Once again, the only person portraying the gay community as a plague is yourself. I’m from Idaho. And before you think “oh no wonder, he’s a ‘redneck’ that doesn’t understand diversity” take a step back and remember who’s really being closed minded here. I happen to have a very close lesbian friend. She happens to be in the Military with me. I have accepted her from the beginning and everything about her. Hell, she even thinks my wife is hot. How many really great Mormon friends do you happen to have? Do they hate you now and not accept your way of life now? Seriously, quit your cryin’ and move on. You got married to your husband, now just spread your acceptance of loss to the rest of the gay community and understand Mormons don’t hate gays, we just happen to believe the choice is wrong, just as strongly as you think it is right.

And I happen to be a “victim” of a divorced family. It happened when I was 2. But guess what, it made stronger as a husband and is the driving force in all the things to do as a husband and father of 3 at 27 years old.