BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us for this special report on the most important religion and ethics news of the year that’s almost over. Our panelists are E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a professor at Georgetown University; also Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton, managing editor of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. We begin with a video reminder of the major events of 2010 assembled by Kim.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: It was a challenging year for interfaith relations, as American Muslims faced new tensions on several fronts. Plans for an Islamic cultural center near the site of Ground Zero generated a firestorm of debate and protest.

Protester: No mosque, not here, not now, not ever.

LAWTON: And the proposed construction of mosques in other communities generated opposition as well. A Florida pastor’s announced intention to burn the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11 set off an international furor, including violent protests in several Muslim nations. The pastor eventually backed off his plan, but controversy continued. Leaders from several faith traditions joined with Islamic leaders to denounce what they called “growing Islamophobia” across the country. Meanwhile, amid several high-profile arrests of American Muslims allegedly plotting terrorist attacks, US mainstream Islamic groups launched new campaigns to combat extremism within their communities.

Imam speaking to Muslim students: Nonviolence, the sanctity of life is valued, and it’s not the sanctity of Muslim life, it’s the sanctity of all life.

Despite some limited signs of economic recovery, many American families continued to face unemployment and foreclosures. Religious institutions were called upon to do more to help the needy even as they dealt with their own sustained budget cuts.

On the political front, religious conservatives appeared to be reenergized by the Tea Party movement and its campaign for limited government. Although the focus of the midterm elections was on economics, many religious right activists were hopeful a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives will provide momentum for their social agenda. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats were criticized for failing to reach out more to religious voters. Many faith-based moderates and liberals were disappointed that President Obama did not employ more religious rhetoric when he discussed issues like health care and the economy. And according to one survey, growing numbers of Americans, nearly one in five, believe incorrectly that President Obama is a Muslim.

Issues surrounding homosexuality continued to pose difficult challenges for many in the religious community. Faith groups were on both sides of the issue as Congress debated lifting don’t ask don’t tell, the 17-year-old ban on gays serving openly in the military. They also filed briefs on both sides in several court cases over gay marriage. The Episcopal Church installed its second openly gay bishop, Reverend Mary Glasspool, a lesbian.

The Roman Catholic Church confronted the ongoing clergy sex abuse crisis, this time centered in several European countries, and there were more questions about how high-ranking church officials dealt with the crisis. Pope Benedict XVI offered renewed apologies about the problem and promised new guidelines for handling allegations of abuse.

Faith-based charities scrambled to meet needs in the wake of several humanitarian disasters. Here in the US, social service groups tried to help people along the Gulf Coast after the devastating BP oil spill. In Pakistan, religious relief groups rushed to deliver aid after a summer of massive flooding that has left an estimated four million people still homeless. And for nearly a year now, faith-based groups have been actively working in Haiti, providing emergency aid and helping to rebuild after the January 12 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and displaced almost two million. A rising cholera epidemic is complicating those efforts.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. To you and to Kevin Eckstrom and to E.J. Dionne, welcome. I want to get to churches and politics and economics, jobs in just a minute, but first, Kevin, what do you make of all this Islamophobia?

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): It’s an extraordinary place for us to be in 2010. The most extreme example you can think of on this was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where a zoning dispute over whether or not to build a mosque, whether they had the right to build a mosque, turned into a debate over whether Islam is actually a religion or not. And we saw it in New York in Ground Zero with the Park 51 mosque that Kim referred to in her piece. And what you saw this year was a fundamental debate over whether or not American Muslims are in a separate category or should be in a separate category from everyone else in terms of their rights, their responsibilities, and their place at the American table. And, you know, when you have a Florida pastor who can come out of nowhere and threaten to burn a pile of Qurans and get a call from the secretary of defense you know that we are not in …

LAWTON: … asking him not to do it …

ECKSTROM: That’s right. You know that we are not in an ordinary year when it comes to American Muslims.

ABERNETHY: But meanwhile there were legitimate threats. There was a Time Square bomber and others.

LAWTON: And this put a lot of pressure on the American Muslim community, as we saw, as they were trying to portray this message that Islam is not the same as terrorism. They are not mutually the same thing. But yet there were these arrests, and so they were really having to confront their own ideology and how they get their message across, and that was a big challenge for them this past year.

E.J. DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, we as a country have gone through bouts of this before, and I think when we confront this now it’s worth looking back. We had a party in our country formed in the 1850s in response to the big Catholic immigration, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothings, and it took us a long time to work through anti-Catholic prejudice. It wasn’t until 1960 that John Kennedy was elected president. We had enormous fights over the Mormons and their role in our society. I think what may be most distressing about this year is that the issue of reaction to Islam has become politicized in a way that it wasn’t immediately after 9/11. You know, it’s worth remembering that right after 9/11 President Bush went out of his way to visit the Islamic center here in DC. It kind of took any political sort of edge off this. I think in this election you have more of it occurring on the right and among Republicans. It was used in the campaigns by some Republican congressional candidates, and I think you are going to need some spokespeople on the conservative side who are very much opposed to Islamophobia to speak out so we can sort of go back to the moment, oddly, that we had after 9/11 when their was a lot of opposition in the country to Islamophobia, because everybody understood our need for Muslim allies around the world.

LAWTON: Well I was just going to go on top of that to say that it’s also been a challenge for leaders of other faith traditions. Muslims are looking to them, saying some of you experienced this yourselves. Where are you? Are you supporting us? Are you supporting our religious freedom? And you have seen some high-profile press conferences and statements by some of the leaders of the national religious organizations. Some Muslims wish that there were more of that going on. But I also think in some local communities, as a response to this protest in the streets, there are more interfaith dialogues going on at the local synagogue and at the local church as people try to figure out what is going on within the religious community.

ABERNETHY: There’s a correlation, isn’t there, with what’s happening to jobs and the economy and the fear a lot of people have about everything. And E.J., I wanted to ask you to move from this into the election of 2010, the Tea Party, and how some of these things appeared in the election returns.

DIONNE: What was striking about the election overall is that it didn’t shift religious alignments very much. I mean the Democrats lost ground pretty well across the board, not only among more religious voters but also among more secular voters, partly because a lot of their people didn’t show up this time around. But the Tea Party is fascinating, because on the one hand the poll data makes it very clear that there is a substantial overlap between support for the Tea Party and support for the religious conservative movement. But there is also some difference between the two. The Tea Party is mildly more secular, but what I think it is even more than the Christian conservatives were is a kind of assertively nationalist movement, and that there is a feeling—I think there is a feeling in the country that we have lost ground as a nation in the world over the last 10 years. That feels part of it. There is certainly some uncertainty over the economy, and that feeds a kind of “let’s take care of our own first” feeling in the country. And so I think watching the relationship between this new Tea Party movement and the older religious conservative movement is going to be one of the most interesting stories between now and the 2012 election.

ABERNETHY: And there was this phrase that we heard often—“We want to take back the country.” How do you transpose that? How do you interpret that?

DIONNE: Many people interpret this depending on their own politics, you know. Some people look at it and say this is a reaction to immigration and it’s a reaction of traditionally white or Anglo-Saxon Americans to the growing diversity of America. I think some people might look at it in more economic terms and say, boy, did we feel more secure 30 years ago. There was less income inequality 30 years ago. Average people could count on sort of decently paying jobs no matter what their education level was. Some of it is connected to that, and I think some of it is this sense of who are in the world now compared especially to China, but to some degree compared to India, and a lot of politicians are speaking more about American exceptionalism, we are still an exceptional nation, and I think that comes from a desire to hold on to that sense and that it’s been threatened by the downturn, by a sense our power has been depleted by the two long wars we’ve been in. And so I think there is this spiritual element to what is a national discussion about our national standing.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, between the parties did we see a God gap again in this last election?

LAWTON: Well, that’s what people used to talk about, the God gap—that Democrats appeared to be less friendly towards religion than Republicans, and President Obama and his campaign in the last presidential election and the Democratic Party had really seemed to make an effort to change that and had really reached out to the religious community. I’ve been surprised at the difficulty of President Obama’s relationship with the religious community over this past year. A lot of religious moderates and liberals have been very frustrated with him and some of his policies. They’ve been disappointed he hasn’t been speaking more about religion, and a lot of their community were frustrated that the Democratic Party didn’t appear to be reaching out to them in the past midterm election, so some of that separation still seems to be there.

ECKSTROM: I think the most interesting God gap you saw this year was the gap between perception and reality on whether or not the president is a Muslim or not.

ABERNETHY: What do you make of that?

ECKSTROM: I think when people say that he is a Muslim or that they think that he’s a Muslim, they are certainly not saying it as a compliment. It’s a way of smearing someone now in America in 2010. If you don’t like them, you can say that they are a Muslim. It’s a way of saying that he’s different, that he’s other, that he’s not like the rest of us. But you know, you have a president who speaks in Christian terminology, who went to church on Easter, who talked about finding salvation at the foot of the cross and all this. And yet there’s this gap, this interminable gap that they can’t seem to quite get over. As much as he talks, as many places as he goes, people still want to think that he’s not quite like us, and the Islam label or the Muslim label is a way of expressing that.

DIONNE: And I think there’s another side to it which Kim talked about in that excellent piece—more information per second that any video this year—and that is that President Obama talked quite a lot about religion and his own faith and his own views on the relationship between religion and public life from 2006 to 2008 when he was running for president. I think he’s done a lot less of that in the White House. Now he might defend himself saying I had awfully big problems to deal with out there. Nonetheless, I think that was a missing piece in the way he talked about issues. It was a missing piece partly, I think, on the grounds of persuasion; that providing an underlying philosophical rationale for what he was doing would have helped him, I think, in these two years. But also it’s a sort of a missing piece of who he is, and I think he does need to talk more about it. And it’s not just that minority that sees him as Muslim. I think there’s a minority that dislikes President Obama that would say almost anything about him. But there’s a larger group that just doesn’t have a sense of exactly who he is in this area, and I think he addressed it really well, I think, his critics believed that, from ’06 to ’08. I think he needs to address is again.

LAWTON: And it showed up in issues such as the health care debate or the economic issues, where a lot of times during the campaign trail he would use the phrase “we are our brothers’ keepers, we are our sisters’ keepers.” He would frame issues like health care as a moral issue and use sometimes religious language to talk about that, and he hasn’t done that as much in the Oval Office, and that has frustrated faith-based activists on the ground who believe that and who use that kind of language to mobilize their own people.

ABERNETHY: The recession continues and hurts everybody, and not least churches. Anybody want to talk about what the job problem has meant in churches?

LAWTON: Well, they’re having to do more to help people in their congregations. A lot of food banks and faith-based social services are saying they are seeing more and more people coming to them. People, middle-class people who’d never gone to a food bank before in their lives are now having to do that because of the ongoing economic problems, and at the same time religious institutions, like everybody else, are making budget cuts and slashing staff because of the difficulties.

ABERNETHY: Pastors, assistant pastors, associate pastors out of work.

LAWTON: A lot of congregations talk about that, really cutting back.

ECKSTROM: And what I’m hearing from clergy is that the recession that began in 2008 is actually now sort of catching up in reality with people as they are making their pledge payments for 2011 or going forward, where they are saying I’d like to pledge the same that I did last year but my husband just lost his job or we just don’t have as much money this year. So there’s going to be some difficult choices facing American congregations going forward from here about how they balance lower income from the pews with demand increase for services.

DIONNE: I was so struck in Kim’s piece that she kept coming back to what religious institutions are doing in the charitable sphere, whether it’s for the unemployed here or the suffering folks in Pakistan, and I think sort of one of the good news stories of the year was the publication of a book called “American Grace” by Bob Putnam of Harvard, David Campbell of Notre Dame, where they found that American—first of all, there is an enormous amount of charity that comes out of the religious community in America and that people connected to religious institutions seem to have more of a proclivity toward doing that, and that there is a kind of built-in religious tolerance in the country because of our religious diversity. It was actually a very optimistic book about the nature of religion in America, and I think Kim’s piece kind of underscored that.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, social issues. Don’t ask don’t tell was repealed. Proposition 8—I don’t know where that stands; maybe you do. Talk about those a little bit.

ECKSTROM: It was a significant year for the gay movement in all of its various forms. Gay and lesbian soldiers will now be able to serve in the military openly. On the marriage front, you had a federal court strike down California’s ban on gay marriage, and I think the most significant and often overlooked part of that ruling was that the judge said that religious feelings about homosexuality, religious bias if you will, is not enough to legislate on—that whatever your religious feelings are on the issue, that that’s not enough when it comes to civil rights, and that’s a fairly significant finding, and he found it as a finding of law, a finding of fact—that it wasn’t disputable, and that’s going to be going forward. But you also see in the sort of conservative resurgence that there’s a lot of resistance to going too fast on this issue. And so you’ll see, like in New Hampshire, where the Republicans have regained control of the legislature, they might try to repeal the gay marriage law there that’s a couple years old. You saw judges in Iowa who lost their jobs because they voted in favor of gay marriage last year. So it’s—this issue is always sort of two steps forward, one step back.

LAWTON: It’s been a difficult issue for a lot of people in the religious community whose religious beliefs teach that homosexuality is a sin, and that rubs up against civil rights and so you get to this very difficult place. So I was struck this past year by how people were examining their rhetoric, and you had the anti-gay bullying, the very tragic cases of young gay people committing suicide, and then people in the religious community looking at their rhetoric to say is it possible to oppose homosexuality without being a bully or appearing to be discriminating, and it’s a very difficult issue for a lot of people in the religious community, and how that gets worked out in society has been a challenge and will continue to be so.

ABERNETHY: And E.J., we had this interesting split within the Catholic Church this past year over the health care bill and the bishops on one side and the Catholic Health Association on the other—a lot of nuns.

DIONNE: This was a huge split. I just want to go back to the gay issue for one moment. The passage of don’t ask, don’t tell—it’s hard, I think, to fully appreciate how big a move that is. Think of where we were 15 years ago, and it passed because a number of Republican senators decided that a) they were for it on principal, but b) this is now the more popular position in the country. So we still have a lot of arguments over gay marriage, but the status of gay people has changed radically in this country in a very short time. To go to your question, this was a huge fight in the Catholic Church, and it’s going to have repercussions, where you really had a dispute over what the bill actually said. You had the Catholic bishops insisting that the language in the bill could still lead to federal financing of abortion. You had the Catholic Health Care Association, which is pro-life, and quite a large group of nuns who are also pro-life, saying we looked at this language; this bill does not finance abortion. And I think this has sort of implications for which side will the Catholic Church be on in a lot of other fights. Catholic social teaching, there’s always been a kind of amalgam: very pro-life on abortion but very much in favor of social justice. In this bill those two kind of collided. The Catholic Health Association said there is no conflict here, and I think you’re going to see a lot more arguments in the church about this in the coming several years.

ABERNETHY: And back to what you were saying before, Kevin. There’s a difference, isn’t there, between being for don’t ask don’t tell and on the other hand having that spill over into gay marriage. There’s a lot of resistance to gay marriage.

ECKSTROM: That’s right. There has been a 30-point shift in the last 15 or so years on the question of gays in the military. The shift on whether or not gays should be allowed to be married is somewhere more like in the five to ten range. It’s still very on the border of being a majority or minority of Americans who support it.

DIONNE: Although you still now have a substantial majority who support either gay marriage or civil unions. Civil unions in a very short time has gone from being a rather advanced or very liberal position to being a kind of middle-of-the-road position.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, quickly, are the Episcopalians still divided over gay bishops?

LAWTON: Many, many mainline Protestant denominations have been very divided over issues surrounding homosexuality/ Not just gay bishops—whether gay clergy can be in the pulpit, and gay marriage, whether their clergy can actually perform a same-sex marriage. So this has been and will continue to be a very difficult issue for many religious groups.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up. I wanted to ask each of you as you look back on the year whether you see something that we didn’t pay enough attention to—underreported. Who wants to begin? Kim?

LAWTON: Well, I was very struck by the Gulf oil spill and how that was an occasion for many conservative religious people to get a little more environmentally friendly. You saw Southern Baptists and others very struck by that tragedy and taking a look at some of their environmental positions.

ABERNETHY: Kevin?

ECKSTROM: I was struck by the change in rhetoric from the Mormon Church, actually, on the gay issue, where after the Prop 8 ruling came out and the gay bullying came, the church said, you know, we’ve been discriminated against in the past. We need to be much more careful about how we discriminate.

ABERNETHY: E.J.?

DIONNE: The decline of traditional culture-war politics on the one side and the rise of a different kind of cultural fight around immigration, Islam, Hispanics. I think that’s a shift we are going to be thinking about for a long time.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to you, many thanks. Our time is up. Many thanks to E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton of this program.

Tweet

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: As we mentioned earlier, another presidential nominee is in the spotlight this week, Sonia Sotomayor. The news of her nomination to the Supreme Court has dominated headlines, along with the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on same-sex marriages. Joining us now to discuss those stories are Dan Gilgoff, senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, and Tod Lindberg, research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Welcome to both of you. Dan, you’ve described the nominee’s record on abortion as “inscrutable.” What do we know about her record on that particular issue?

DAN GILGOFF (Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report): Not much. She’s ruled on a handful of cases related to abortion, but none of them directly related to Roe v. Wade. The one case that some in the pro-life community are citing as a hopeful sign for their cause is that she ruled against plaintiffs who are seeking to overturn the Mexico City policy, which bans federal funds from going to family-planning providers abroad that either endorse or promote abortion. Other than that she seems to be, you know, a black box on this issue, which is kind of fitting, because David Souter, the justice who she’s replacing, was also promised to be a conservative when George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Court in 1990, then of course voted to uphold Roe v. Wade a couple of years later. And so what’s happening this week is that some abortion rights groups are getting rather nervous. That’s kind of unexpected.

Dan Gilgoff

POTTER: Well, Tod, is this actually good news for conservatives who may have been concerned that the president would nominate a true liberal to the Court?

TOD LINDBERG (Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Washington, DC): Well, I think that it’s still very much up in the air. It’s hard to see at this point. We all know that people who are hoping to be nominated to the Supreme Court are very cautious about what they say in their private lives and in their public writings, apart from what they are doing on the bench with regard to the abortion issue. I know people who aspire to be judges who would tell you, “I would absolutely never discuss that with you” for that precise reason. You want to be opaque, because if you have a position, I mean a discernable position, then you put yourself at substantially greater political risk. It’s kind of kabuki drama in its own way, but it’s one that we’ve been playing in Washington for a long time.

POTTER: And yet Hispanic voters traditionally are sort of much more anti-abortion than the rest of, say, the Democratic electorate. Is that — does that give you any clues, that fact that she’s Hispanic?

Mr. LINDBERG: You know, you’re talking about making a conclusion based on statistical evidence, polling, etc. and applying it to a particular person. It’s just not going to work for us. We’re not going to be able to know that. The test will be once she’s confirmed, and I think everybody assumes that she will be, when the cases arrive.

POTTER: Dan, what do we know about her record on issues of religious freedom, separation of church and state — other issues that really matter to voters of faith groups?

Mr. GILGOFF: Well, we know that she has a record of siding with those who are alleging violations of their religious liberty. And I think that’s been another bright spot for conservatives. It’s interesting in that conservatives came out roundly against her as soon as her nomination was announced this week, and at the same time, I mean, in the analysis that they were releasing before Obama made his choice, she kind of received the warmest treatment. And I think some of that was because of her rulings over the religious liberty cases.

Mr. LINDBERG: I think you’d also have to draw the distinction between the conservative commentary crowd and actually the members of the Senate, who have taken a very cautious view of this. I mean they promised, the Republicans promised full scrutiny, full assessment, but certainly no one has leapt out to be an opposition figure. Certainly no one has said this nominee is unacceptable where it really matters, which is in the Senate.

POTTER: So the presumption at this point is that she will be confirmed?

Tod Lindberg

Mr. LINDBERG: I think the presumption is exactly that, in the absence of some unknown, unexpected revelation or disclosure.

POTTER: And that would leave us with six justices out of the nine being Catholics for the very first time. Is that important? Does that have significance?

Mr. GILGOFF: I think that it really speaks to the diversity ideologically of the Catholic community in this country. I mean, you talk as though, or people talk as though there’s a Catholic voting bloc, for instance. But Catholics really have voted for every winning president going back to Richard Nixon, and so it’s hard to see them — you know, they’re conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics — as a distinct bloc. But so far on the Court they’ve supplied the conservative side — the [five] Catholics are voting with the conservatives on the Court. So what I think this will do is kind of reflect more broadly the Catholic diversity that exists in the country on the Court. I also think it tells us something important about the administration politically in that they’ve taken the Catholic community very seriously. This is really a nod — Sotomayor — to the new Latino complexion of the United States. I mean, the Catholic Church is losing, you know, four Catholics for every person that’s signing up for the Church, and if it wasn’t for this huge infusion of immigration, the Church would have a real problem on its hands, and I think they’re really acknowledging that in this pick.

Mr. LINDBERG: I think the conclusion that we have to draw from this six-out-of-nine thing is that Catholic is always a plus in terms of your political calculation of who you are going to put on the Court.

POTTER: Now, let’s talk a little bit about the ruling in California that upheld a ban on same-sex marriage there.The Republicans, I gather, put out some talking points this week on Sotomayor, and one of their talking points was that she could impose a federal right to same-sex marriage. Does that have the chance of holding water, that argument, or no?

Mr. GILGOFF: I don’t think so, and I also think that the timing of this is actually very serendipitous for the White House. There was even some speculation that the White House expedited the announcement of Sotomayor to get ahead of the California Supreme Court ruling, because had the California Supreme Court struck down Proposition 8 you would have had this conservative uproar, largely directed at the Court, saying this is really the threat. The threat is that there will be Court-imposed same-sex marriage.

POTTER: Activist judges?

Mr. GILGOFF: Exactly. And so I think that the California Supreme Court ruling was really a lucky break for the Obama Administration in getting, you know, in sort of clearing a path for Sotomayor.

POTTER: What do you make of the next steps for the opponents of same-sex marriage? What do they do now? Where is their next step?

Mr. LINDBERG: Well, you know, I think there will be a continuation of initiative kind of processes. It is also interesting to look at what, you know, the next steps for the proponents are going to be. I think there’s a pretty strong indication that they do not want this matter, really, in the federal courts at this point. They would rather spend some time building up a case both politically and in terms of kind of the state court rulings that they’re able to obtain with the hope that California is more of an outlier than an indication of the trend, and take that then eventually into the federal courts. So I think, you know, conservatives will be looking to try to win in state courts where possible to show, however strongly, you know, the emotions run on this issue, that there is a principled case for defense of marriage as between a man and a woman, and that that is where most of the American people are.

POTTER: Are the statutes in the 29 states that have already banned same-sex marriage basically safe, because you’d have to go after them through some kind of referendum process, which is really hard to do?

Mr. LINDBERG: Well, safe is — no. I mean, I think if there’s ever a majority on the Supreme Court that wants to change the law on this then those statutes are precisely not safe, and I think that everybody’s aware of that and what the stakes are. But, you know, what I don’t see is a quick resolution of this issue. I think it’s one that unfolds over possibly ten years or maybe longer.

POTTER: Alright, thank you both very much. Thank you to Tod and thank you to Dan for joining us for that conversation.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: California’s gay marriage law remains in legal limbo. The state’s Supreme Court judges have less than two weeks to either uphold or strike down the gay marriage ban known as Proposition 8. Prop 8 passed last Election Day, in large part because Mormon churches mobilized for it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints withstood blistering criticism from outside the faith. Now resentments are festering inside the Mormon community. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Dr. Pam Chan is an OB/GYN and a lifelong Mormon living in San Francisco. She found herself deeply conflicted when she got the message that her church was going all out in support of Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California.

Dr. PAM CHAN (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): There would be little announcements made here and there, announcements about how we might be able to volunteer our time to, you know, go door-to-door, to hand out flyers, to stand on street corners with signs, and these little announcements, you know, I’d hear and I’d look around and wonder, “Is everyone okay with this? Does anyone besides me see a problem with this?”

Pam Chan

SEVERSON: Ron Packard is a lawyer, a former Mormon bishop and former mayor of Los Altos, California. He is now a councilman who supported Proposition 8 and says it’s extremely rare for the church to get involved in ballot issues.

RON PACKARD (Former Mormon Bishop): I think that they made an exception to their general policy of not getting involved because they have a core concern about the protection of families and the possible disintegration of families in modern society.

SEVERSON: The church’s official position is that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God, and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for his children. Mormons believe they are led by a modern-day prophet who receives revelations from God, and when the prophet speaks members usually follow. But with this issue Dr. Chan discovered that other active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were also strongly opposed to the church’s position on gay marriage.

Dr. CHAN: Our church is the church of Jesus Christ, first and foremost, and my understanding of the Gospel of Christ is that it’s a Gospel of love and acceptance. So it seems like a policy that’s about discrimination, which often goes hand in hand with fear and hatred, not about love and acceptance, and that for me is really troublesome.

SEVERSON: Bob Rees is a retired professor of literature at UCLA, a former Mormon bishop and a church scholar.

BOB REES (Former Mormon Bishop): In reality, this is an issue which has divided our society. It’s divided churches. It’s divided families, and some individuals are divided within themselves.

LISA FAHEY (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): So during the rallies I had some signs that said “Straight and Active Mormon for Marriage Equality” because I wanted to let people know, and I got a lot of attention for that. People came up and shook my hand and hugged me and told me, “Thank you very much.”

SEVERSON: Lisa Fahey and Kim McCall are also active Mormons, also conflicted.

Ms. FAHEY: That’s my whole point for speaking out — letting other people know that you can vote “no” or you can be for gay marriage and still be an active Mormon.

Ron Packard

Mr. PACKARD: The church has a long tradition of encouraging thinking members to not be afraid to speak up — beginning with Brigham Young. He said doesn’t want blind allegiance. He wants people to pray about it, think about it, and come to their own conclusions.

SEVERSON: In the year 2000, a majority of California voters approved a proposition stating that only a marriage between a man and a woman was valid. Eight years later, the California Supreme Court ruled that the ban on gay marriage violated the state’s constitution, and that’s when the drive began to amend the constitution with Proposition 8, and that’s when church leaders sent out a letter to its members calling on them to donate their time and money to an unequivocal moral cause. Although many churches and a majority of Californian’s supported Proposition 8, Mormons were probably the most organized and donated almost half the $19 million generated for the campaign.

Mr. REES: And I think there’s no question that the church’s involvement in this was determinative. Many people were unprepared for the effectiveness of the church in doing what it does. I think the church was probably unprepared for such a strong negative response to its involvement.

SEVERSON: The church may also have been unprepared for the number of members who opposed the church’s proclamation. Members who are still active like Laura Compton, a church organist and mother of two, who operates a Web site called Mormonsformarriage.com. She says the site still gets lots of attention and in the run-up to Proposition 8 was getting thousands of hits a day.

LAURA COMPTON (Mormonsformarriage.com): The comments that we have gotten are a lot of members who say, “Thank you so much for creating this community. I felt so alone.” A lot who said, “Because you have this site, I’m able to continue going to church.” A lot of people who have called us to repentance for what we have been doing, and a lot of outside people who’ve said, “Thank you for showing us that not all Mormons, you know, want to take away our rights to marriage.”

Ms. FAHEY: It’s been really difficult to be a member of the church during this time. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that possibly I should be excommunicated, and that’s really hurt me, because I feel like I’m really a very loving, forgiving person.

Kim McCall and Lisa Fahey

Mr. REES: The most unfortunate thing for me in all of this thing that happened over Proposition 8 was the divisiveness, the acrimony. Each side began in some sense emotionally and spiritually dis-fellowshipping or excommunicating the other side.

SEVERSON: Ron Packard says the most fierce opposition has come from gay rights advocates that have rallied against the church around the nation. He’s says he on a blacklist because he supported Proposition 8.

Mr. PACKARD: There’s some people who’ve lost their jobs because they supported Proposition 8.

SEVERSON (to Mr. Packard): Really?

Mr. PACKARD: Yeah.

KIM MCCALL (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): So one of the dynamics of the church over the last hundred years is to move more and more mainstream. Okay, we looked very sort of un-American. You know, Brigham Young was opposed to the Pledge of Allegiance [Editor's Note: Mr. McCall's statement about Brigham Young is in error. Brigham Young died in 1877. The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892], and we looked really outside the mainstream, and there’s been a, you know, more American than thou now we’re the most patriotic people. Okay, we weren’t very monogamous. Now we’re more monogamous than everybody else. You know, we’ve got to be. You know, we’re so worried about polygamy in our history and how odd it makes us look that maybe we need to overreact.

Mr. REES: I think there is little question that a from a public relations point of view the church has suffered over its involvement in Proposition 8, and I know of people who have had second thoughts about joining the church over this issue. I know some of our missionaries have had a difficult time finding open doors and open hearts because of this.

Mr. PACKARD: A majority of the people of the United States don’t want same-sex marriages. So for the majority we may have, instead of getting a hit we get a halo. Whenever any organization gets involved in the political process, there’s going to be some who consider it a hit and others who feel that they’re a hero.

SEVERSON: Ron Packard says the church does not discriminate against gays, that his niece and some of his friends are gay, and that the church does not have a policy of denying the sacrament to homosexual members. But Lisa Fahey says there are still members who don’t understand what it means to be gay.

Laura Compton

Ms. FAHEY: I even had some friends say that they still think that homosexuality is a choice. I don’t think the church leadership feels that way but members — some members feel that way, wrongly of course.

SEVERSON: Bob Rees says as a bishop he counseled gay and lesbian members who felt they were not wanted in the church.

Mr. REES: We have congregations who are not inclusive of the homosexual members of their congregations. We have families in which brothers and sisters don’t speak to one another over these issues, and I as a Christian, I can’t understand that. It breaks my heart.

SEVERSON: Laura Compton says since Proposition 8 the church leadership has become more flexible, making it known that members can still be in good standing even if they oppose the church’s position.

Ms. COMPTON: This has not challenged my faith, no. My faith is independent of the morality or the politics of gay marriage. It’s deeper. My faith is in a Christ who loves everybody and wants everyone to come to him, and a God that loves the world no matter whether they are Mormon or Muslim or Jewish or Catholic, and wants all of us to be there and all of us to treat each other like we’re brothers and sisters and not like we’re them and us.

Mr. REES: The function of faith communities is to make a home a for us, and I think that many of our Latter-day Saint brothers and sisters feel homeless, because we haven’t created a home for them. But I see that changing. I think there is much more understanding.

SEVERSON: As other states take up the issue of gay marriage, Mormon church leaders this time around have not asked members to get involved. Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court is once again considering the constitutionality of the ban on gay marriage. Their decision is expected soon.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.