Mormon Bigots Slammed in Film for Anti-marriage Work

From Prop Eight Trial Tracker:

The Mormon Proposition

By Julia Rosen

This weekend the documentary “8 – The Mormon Proposition” has it’s limited release in 13 cities across the country. The movie which documents the LDS Church’s involvement in the passage of Prop 8 is being reviewed in newspapers across the country. Here’s the NYT take on the film.

The film dives angrily into the fray. It uncovers the classified church documents and the largely concealed money trail of Mormon contributions that paid for a high-powered campaign to pass Proposition 8. The Mormon involvement, the film persuasively argues, tilted the vote toward passage, by 52 percent to 48 percent, in its final weeks.

That involvement was concealed under the facade of a coalition with Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians called the National Organization for Marriage. Mormons raised an estimated $22 million for the cause. In the final week of the campaign, the film says, $3 million came from Utah. The money financed a sophisticated media barrage that involved blogs, Twitter and YouTube videos, as well as scary (and, according to the movie, misleading) television ads, and an aggressive door-to-door campaign whose foot soldiers were instructed on how not to appear Mormon.

Those who were following the Prop 8 campaign closely know most of this stuff, but I am told by those who have seen the film, that it is quite another thing to see this documentary.

After the passage of Prop 8 there was a lot of backlash against Mormons themselves, as opposed to the more accurate target the LDS Church. You can see how this line/distinction slips in this NYT article. The author writes “The Mormon involvement”, when it is more accurate to say “The Mormon Church’s involvement”. While, the vast majority of Mormons in California voted for the passage of Prop 8, they are not our opposition. The LDS Church is the one who organized all of those donations, broke the law by not reporting their in kind donations and recruited all of those canvassers. It’s a relatively small thing, but important as we all work to do outreach to those who opposed us in 2008.

How many of you have seen the movie already? What did you think? If you haven’t seen it yet are you planning on it?

I for one am curious to see it, even if I already know will happen.