Proposition Hate

Let’s talk about lies for a moment. Specifically, let’s talk about liars. When I say liars, I don’t mean people who have told a lie, or even people who lie often. A lie does not a liar make, just as a theft does not create a thief. I don’t even mean people who habitually lie, and have only told the truth maybe once or twice in their entire lives, so long as they do it for entirely selfish reasons. No, a true liar, a filthy, goddamn, piece of shit liar is someone who lies to impose their will on others.

I can understand the people who lie for self-serving purposes, their true motives are clear, but the fucking Liars-with-a-capital-fucking-L, who knows what the hell they’re thinking. The idea that someone can see another person and think, “I need to protect this person from themselves,” simply confounds and repulses me. It’s an entirely new level of self-serving attitude, and it’s evil on a level that even puts most murderers to shame. After all, most murderers act out of passion or for personal gain. But deliberately misleading people to try to bring about your own vision of an ideal world, it’s social manipulation at its most twisted.

This past election day, a ballot measure was passed in the State of California revoking certain rights to a certain group of people. This measure was backed, in secret(note: see Addendum below), almost in total by the Mormon Church. While it’s despicable enough that they hid behind a token list of other names despite being the driving force behind the campaign, the campaign itself also hid behind wall of lies. Ironically, they portrayed their campaign to take away civil liberties as a defense of their own civil liberties. Their case was, of course, entirely made up.

The Mormons spent 80 million dollars to cover the state with lies. And it worked. Of course it worked, because how do you counter such a thing? Who could ever imagine that someone would spend 80 million dollars promoting hate? You simply can’t match that figure to oppose it, because in sane society people don’t go around spending millions of dollars to destroy something that offends them and causes them no harm whatsoever. I’d like to think that people would spend a good deal more than 80 million dollars promoting love, but that’s a far different animal than opposing hate. People just can’t conceive of that amount of hate, because it’s an inconceivable amount. It’s crazy. It’s something only a sociopath would do. It’s Nazi-like in its conception, though admittedly much smaller in scope. But at least Hitler was upfront about what he was doing.

This tears me up inside, not least of all because I was raised by people who to this day continue to count themselves as Mormons. Betrayal is perhaps the wrong word, as I didn’t have any faith in the Mormon church to begin with, but on some level I do feel betrayed. For good or for ill, Mormonism remains a large part of my childhood, and much as I’d like to I can’t just shut it off. That church gave me some wonderful friends, and it did much to help me find my identity, to shape me as a person, even though the shape that took form was in opposition to everything the church stood for. So when it goes out of its way to stomp on the dreams of people I care about, and thousands more, I guess that does in fact read something like betrayal.

Joseph Smith started a religion so he could have sex with teenage girls. That’s bad, but it doesn’t make me hate the religion. He led a bloody coup against the United States, but that doesn’t make me hate the Mormons. Brigham Young ordered THE MASS MURDER OF OVER A HUNDRED UNARMED INNOCENT PEOPLE, yet I still cannot hate him for it, because it was done out of ignorance and fear. But this, this is too much. This is enough for me to finally say, I hate the Mormon church.

I hate the Mormon church. Earlier I mentioned how the majority of murderers are better than this breed of liars, but I left out one class of murderer. The final type of people who kill are those that think that their victims would be much better off dead. And that’s what it boils down to, that the logic of these people who are out to save the world from itself is the logic of a psychopath. And there’s really no defense against that. In the same way that a serial killer can terrorize a city for years without being caught, organizations like the Mormon church can continue to pour money into deceptive campaigns for whatever stupid, crazy act of intolerance takes their fancy. Because there is no motive, no good reason for them to be doing what they are doing. You cannot outmaneuver them because they are not maneuvering. It’s a mental illness, and there is no logical way to counter it.

Usually, I like to end these with an idea to change something, to bring about some glimmer of hope. But I honestly see no solution here. You can’t win an argument with a crazy person, you can only hope that eventually everyone else will see that your opponent is crazy. And since everyone is so worried about trampling on anyone else’s feelings, it could be a long time before people start to see that. So instead of trying to find the good in this situation, because damned if I can see any, I’m just going to say one final thing to make myself feel better.

Fuck you, Mormon church.


ADDENDUM: Since writing this, someone has made the point to me that their stupid fucking church wasn't acting in secret. I disagree. The Mormon church never issued any sort of public statement backing the proposition, and the despite encouraging their members to dig deep for donations, not a single cent was donated by the leaders at the top. They obviously didn't want their role to be known because the church would be flooded with bad press, like it is right now. Just because they failed completely and utterly at covering it up does not mean that they didn't intend to keep their influence in the matter a secret.