The Book of Mormon Girl (16 page)

Oh, I am glad to see Ella do her irreverent dance, to see her bones recognize this music, to see her know the songs her ancestors sang. I am not the same kind of Mormon girl I was when I was seven, eight, or eighteen years old. I am not an orthodox Mormon woman like my mother. I am an unorthodox Mormon woman with a fierce and hungry faith. And I need Ella and Rosa to remember the words to the pioneer songs just like I need them to remember all that risks being forgotten in a Mormonism where telling unorthodox versions of our story is sometimes viewed as the work of enemies and apostates.

I am not an enemy, and I will not be disappeared from the faith of my ancestors. I am the descendant of Mormon pioneers. Sometimes, even in my own tradition, I feel a long way from home. But I will keep on crossing as many plains as this life puts in front of me. I drag along my Jewish husband, my two daughters, and a trunk of difficult questions. Through snow, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes, I reach the edge of the valley. I hunker beneath my wide-brimmed calico bonnet and wait for a sign. I look to my daughters. Ella does her joyful dance at the margins of the wagon train, a wild dance in the desert, a wild dance to bring the rain.

protect marriage

M
onths after I decide to take my daughters back to church, the Mormon grapevine brings word that an announcement will be read from the pulpit on Sunday morning to congregations across California:

In March 2000 California voters overwhelmingly approved a state law providing that “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” The California Supreme Court recently reversed this vote of the people. On November 4, 2008, Californians will vote on a proposed amendment to the California state constitution that will now restore the March 2000 definition of marriage approved by the voters. . . . We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating
of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman. . . .

I feel as if my heart has been thrown to the concrete and a cinder block dropped on it.

The same way I felt when my church declared feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians its enemies in 1993.

My heart on the concrete, a cinder block on my heart.

That summer a vast and professionally orchestrated grassroots campaign grinds into action, mobilizing Mormon congregations. Mormons are asked to donate about eight hours a month to the Yes on 8 campaign, but especially in conservative Southern California, many Mormons volunteer to give two or three times more. They do so because heterosexual marriage holds a uniquely sacred place in Mormon theology: marriages performed in Mormon temples are a saving rite necessary to entering the highest levels of heaven. They do so because they fear that legalizing same-sex civil marriages will prove to endanger the Church’s ability to perform its own temple marriages. And they do so, most important, because they have been asked, and they have promised, always to obey, give, and serve. Although I do not believe that same-sex civil marriages pose a legal threat to the religious freedom of the Church, I understand and acknowledge the powerful pull of duty Mormons all around me are feeling, for I have felt it too. As the old pioneer hymn urges:

The world has need of willing men,

Who share the workers’ zeal,

Come help the good work move along,

Put your shoulder to the wheel.

Because Mormon congregations are usually organized by geographical districts that map very neatly onto voter precincts, the Church mobilizes with breathtaking speed and efficiency. Clipboards are circulated during Sunday meetings. Check the column: canvass, phone bank, data entry, child care. At the first statewide precinct walk on August 16, almost thirty thousand Yes on 8 volunteers fan out into neighborhoods, knocking on doors, identifying and recruiting likely voters to “protect marriage” by eliminating the civil marriage rights of gays and lesbians.

The man in charge of the vast Mormon Proposition 8 grassroots operation is Grant Jensen, my childhood bishop, the professional Republican pollster and strategist. Now Grant Jensen tells the world, “If same-sex marriage advocates win, the whole structure collapses: the family, the nation, and in time civilization itself.” Brother Jensen has a gay son.

Meanwhile, in Northern California, a Mormon woman named Laura Compton starts Mormons for Marriage, a website and social network to support marriage equality and connect Mormons who feel that for reasons of conscience they cannot support the Church’s Yes on 8 campaign. In 2000, when Mormons mobilized in support of California’s
Defense of Marriage Amendment, a young gay Mormon man named Stuart Mathis killed himself on the steps of a California ward house. Laura Compton is the mother of two small children. Her goal: no more suicides this time.

In August, we learn that the Yes on 8 campaign has set fundraising goals for each Mormon congregation: higher goals are set for congregations in wealthy areas with higher monthly tithing receipts. Church leaders place donation forms in the foyers of Mormon ward houses to track how well congregations are meeting their contribution goals. Special phone calls are arranged between high-income California Mormons and high-ranking members of the Church leadership, who suggest that these families each donate $25,000 to the Yes on 8 campaign. Obedience follows. By the middle of August, dozens and dozens of $25,000 contributions begin to materialize on the California secretary of state’s election donation reporting website. We see it all there: Mormon first names like Rulon, Spencer, Lynn, and Brigham; Mormon last names like Christianson, Allred, and Rigby. Our parents, our siblings, our Sunday School teachers, our piano teachers, the boys we once kissed in the church parking lot.

•   •   •

I stay home most Sundays during the Proposition 8 campaign. Too raw. Too much. Too soon. But in September, when my newborn nephew is named and blessed back home in Orange County, I return to the very ward where I was a
little girl. Orange County is ground zero for the Mormon Yes on 8 campaign. Grant Jensen stands in the foyer and shakes hands all around. I sit in the pews with my sisters and watch as a circle of men in dark suits—my brother, my father, my brothers-in-law—take the baby in their arms to bless him. After the prayer, my brother holds beautiful baby Evan aloft in his little white and blue suit.

Words about protecting marriage find their way into every prayer and talk that day. I shift in my seat. I feel the grind of concrete against flesh against cinder block. I devise a reason to leave the chapel: my two-year-old daughter Rosa is fussy and needs to be walked.

Slowly, with Rosa in my arms or toddling down the hall in front of me, I circle the corridors of the church where I grew up. I see the cool-walled classrooms where I watched
Man’s Search for Happiness
, with longing pulling through the center of my chest. I see the rooms where Sister Tucker and Sister Williams taught us first-aid skills for Girls Camp. I see the cultural hall where Natasha and I practiced our dance festival routine. Then I turn a corner, and I see it there, in the foyer: a red milk crate on a table.

I walk closer. Inside the red milk crate, I see sign-up sheets, canvass instruction sheets, and clipboards full of information on Yes on 8 voters identified during the canvass the day before. I have canvassed. I know how painstaking and time-expensive the work is, how precious this data, the hours and hours of door knocking it took to collect.

My heart pounds. I look around. The hallways are clear.

It is not good to steal. It is not good to destroy the hard work of others. It is not good to be angry.

My heart pounds. I take the sheets from the clipboard and shove them in my pink-flowered diaper bag. I pick up Rosa, put her on my hip, and walk quickly, nonchalantly, outside into the parking lot. My high heels click against the asphalt. Should I keep the canvassing sheets safely hidden in my pink-flowered diaper bag or get them off my person? I spy a metal grate in the sidewalk of the church parking lot. Shielded by a row of cars, Rosa still on my hip, I squat in my high heels and shove the canvassing sheets under the metal grate.

Still, I feel the weight of the cinder block on my heart on the ground.

•   •   •

In September, word comes that a million plastic yellow Yes on 8 lawn signs scheduled to materialize on lawns across the state as a crucial element in the grassroots Yes on 8 visibility campaign have been inexplicably delayed at the manufacturing plant in China. Long dreading the day when the Yes on 8 lawn signs popped up in my own neighborhood, I feel a sense of relief.

Meanwhile, at the local No on 8 headquarters, volunteers parsimoniously dole out a few American-made, union-made No on 8 signs. “Where do you live?” they ask, brows
wrinkled. The real truth is that there is not yet enough money in the No on 8 campaign to give signs away to anyone who wants one.

I start putting in phone-banking shifts at the No on 8 headquarters in Hillcrest, San Diego’s gay neighborhood. “I am a Mormon,” I tell the room of volunteers whenever I am asked to introduce myself. I sit at a little table with Buddy and Tom, married five months. All three of us are wearing headsets plugged into laptop computers. The computer dials down old Democratic party lists. I read from a script. I talk to a few answering machines. Most of the numbers are bad. I read the names on my screen and imagine plumbers in Pacoima, schoolteachers in El Cajon. Someone in the next room gets an old man on the line shouting about Leviticus. He is an old man in a state where farmlands sit fallow for want of water, prisons have been built on farmlands, factories closed, and children of people who used to work in the factories have been sent to prisons. And old men shout about Leviticus.
Put your shoulder to the wheel.
Soon, the battery on my cell phone dies. There are extra laptop computers but no extra phones. I go to the bathroom and cry.

On Sundays during the Proposition 8 campaign, I sneak over to the great gray Episcopal cathedral across town. St. Paul’s stands on a palm-tree-lined avenue at the edge of Balboa Park. About half of the parishioners are gay. It is cool inside the great gray cathedral. Married old men in elegant suits present themselves at the altar for communion. My girls
sit with me in the pews and color on clipboards while I stare at a wooden Jesus on the cross suspended above the altar. It is an unfamiliar sight: this Jesus, arms outstretched and bound, on a cross, suspended in the chapel. Mormons do not have crucifixes in our chapels. I cry. By now my girls are used to my crying. Five-year-old Ella wrinkles her face and sticks her fingers in my wet eyes, curious, compassionate.

Camellias bloom red in the St. Paul’s Cathedral courtyard. After services, I stop by a table for the No on 8 campaign. I sign up for another phone-bank shift. I tell them I am a Mormon. I always feel the need to tell them I am Mormon.

Hearing the word
Mormon
, the No on 8 tablers begin to chat vacantly, distantly, with bitterness.

“I know where a Mormon church building is,” says one.

“I
am
a Mormon,” I repeat myself, quietly. “That is why I am here.”

Another No on 8 volunteer, a clear-eyed African-American woman, understands me.

“Oh,” she says, nodding, returning my gaze. She understands what it means to be the only one in the room and why it matters.

•   •   •

By October, a few polls suggest that opponents of Proposition 8 have a small lead. The polls, I know, are wrong. Only a few newspapers have glimpsed the scale of the Mormon Yes
on 8 campaign. All day, every day, I walk around in a daze, a head-to-toe state of alarm.

One October Sunday evening, the Church convenes a satellite broadcast to deliver instructions from headquarters in Salt Lake City on how to get out the vote on Election Day. Thousands of Mormons fill the pews in ward houses across California. It is the largest, most effective political volunteer training I have ever witnessed.

That same weekend, at a professional meeting, I see an old friend, a professor at the University of California who now spends most of his time in France. He is blond, handsome, political—an aging surfer boy with a copy of
Le Monde
tucked under his elbow.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he asks, sensing my distress.

“Proposition 8,” I tell him. “It’s going to win. You know what my people are doing?”

He smiles affectionately and kisses me on the forehead.

“Poor thing,” he says. “It’s okay.” Then, a pause, as if confidentially. “You know, there aren’t that many of your people.”

I stare at him blankly. I try not to think he is a fool.

I feel like I am coming down with a fever and go back to my hotel room, where for hours I pace the floor, then get on my knees and put my face down in the bed. I open a space in the middle of my chest and sob through it. If my prayer had words, they would sound like this: Dear God, I know you see all of this. I know you are on both sides of the story. Help me
know what to do. Help me know how to feel. Soften everyone’s hearts, including mine.

•   •   •

As the campaign grinds into its final weeks, phone banks are mobilized up and down the Mormon corridor, at ward houses in Idaho, at Brigham Young University. Mormons are hustled to the phone banks. Emails fly: “Satan is trying to shut down the temples in California.” Across the United States, rank-and-file Mormons are being told that the legalization of civil gay marriage in California will require churches to sanctify gay marriages or else face massive penalties that will force them to close. They are being told that gay civil marriage rights threatens our freedom of belief and worship. Every newspaper, every legal analyst in the country has declared that this is a falsehood. But many believe. They obey. They fill phone banks. Rich Mormons across the country are hit up for huge last-minute donations: seven million dollars from individual donors in the last seventy-two hours of the campaign.