Mormons investigated

Everyone knows that the Mormon church raised millions of dollars to try to defeat Proposition 8--gay marriage--in California.  Under the radar, they apparently also supplied phone banks and hundreds of volunteers, which, in violation of California law, they may have failed to report.  NY Times:

The complaint, filed by Fred Karger, founder of the group Californians Against Hate, asserted that the church’s reported contributions — about $5,000, according to state election filings — vastly underestimated its actual efforts in passing Proposition 8, which amended the state’s Constitution to recognize only male-female marriage.

Broadly speaking, California state law requires disclosure of any money spent or services provided to influence the outcome of an election.

Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker provides some perspective:

The original Latter-day Saint, Joseph Smith, acquired at least twenty-eight and perhaps sixty wives, some of them in their early teens, before he was lynched, in 1844, at age thirty-eight. Brigham Young, Smith’s immediate successor, was a bridegroom twenty times over, and his successors, along with much of the male Mormon élite, kept up the mass marrying until the nineteen-thirties—decades after the Church had officially disavowed polygamy, the price of Utah’s admission to the Union, in 1896.

Comments

[anonymous]

http://www.fairlds.org/Bible/Will_the_Real_Martin_Luther_Please_Stand_Up.html

This comment is not necessarily related to your post but have you read the Mormons take on Martin Luther? I'd be interested in your comments on the article.

[John Petty]

Thanks for your visit. I scanned the article, and the author makes some good point, though I don't really see how they relate to Mormonism. He's right, though, that Luther would not agree with modern evangelicals on much. For one thing, he was a Biblical scholar, and modern evangelicalism really isn't that much into biblical scholarship. (I'll probably get flamed for saying that.)

[anonymous]

I have to agree with you on the lack of scholarship in modern evangelicalism. I also think Luther would have objected to the article's implication that he had much in common with Mormonism. Equating theosis, for example, with the Mormon concept of eternal progression to becoming a god is a gross misunderstanding of theosis. I think Luther would have declared Mormonism a heresy and would have objected to the twisting of his words to make it appear he was in accord. Overall, I thought the article tried to make Luther one of the Mormons' own, a ludicrous idea.

[John Petty]

That's an interesting association. I had never before considered "theosis" in light of the Mormon "becoming a god" thing. I'd say that's a case of special pleading if ever there was one.