Pre-Screening "8: The Mormon Proposition"

Tonight's we're going with friends to see "8: The Mormon Proposition" at the Boston Indie Film Festival at the delightful Somerville Theater in Davis Square (those of you who are unfamiliar should go if only for the Museum of Bad Art in the basement). According to the IFF, "Reed Cowan’s and Steven Greenstreet’s documentary scrutinizes and intrepidly confronts the Mormon Church’s involvement in funding the promotion of California’s Proposition 8, a bill that revoked same-sex couples’ right to marry and the benefits afforded legally in tandem with that union."

As you may have guessed if you've read the first post to this blog, Prop. 8 was an incredibly painful political event. Election Night 2008 really took my head for a spin -- as a person of color, the euphoria of seeing our nation elect the first Black man as president was offset by the pain of realizing that many of my own family and friends in the Mormon Church had donated money and voted to take away my right to marriage equality as a gay man in California. While most of the East Coast went to bed happily after seeing Obama's victory speech, I stayed up late first sitting in front of the TV and then later in bed with my laptop, obsessively pressing the "refresh" button on 2 different newspaper websites and the California Secretary of State's election results portal. I woke up in despair and with a sense of rage that has still to subside completely, if ever. It felt strangely personal, even though I had long since moved away from California, because -- as I told my brother one month before the election in a last-ditch attempt to sway his vote -- it was the only time then and since when my rights as an individual were being subjected to a referendum by millions of voters who didn't know me or know my life. I made a vow after Prop. 8 never again to step foot inside a Mormon building because of the heinous ignorance and bigotry that was applied in the Church's support of Proposition 8 and its attacks on GLBT families everywhere. Even if it means missing a family member's wedding or graduation or baptism.

I have to admit that, while I'm very interested in what "8" has to say about the Church's involvement in Prop. 8, I'm also afraid to see it. In some ways, I'm afraid that the movie won't be effective by focusing too much on the human-interest impact of Prop. 8 rather than confronting and exposing the discriminatory and flawed logic behind the Church's efforts. I'm afraid that the movie actually gives the Church a platform to broadcast its sugar-coated hate to a wider audience. Most of all, I'm afraid that the movie will be hard to watch just because it hurts too much to remember back to November 2008. I almost feel like a documentary on this very topic might reopen wounds without speaking to the audience -- Dick and Jane Mormon and their numerous children -- that needs to hear this message the most.

The Mormon Church may be stupid, but most Mormons as individuals aren't. I've observed this first-hand in my conversations with Mormons both before and after the passage of Prop. 8. There were lots of Church members who felt that Prop. 8 was wrong, and some even had the gumption to speak up about it publicly (a la Steve Young's wife). But so far we haven't heard their stories of courage. How did they come to believe in marriage equality? Was it a conversation with their best friend or coworker or sibling? How did they speak up in their own little way against injustice? What consequences did they feel and experience from the Church's official apparatus? The Mormon Church is too big to fail; to really make change, I firmly believe activists will have to work from within to build coalitions around those basic human emotions of love and a desire for fairness that we all share regardless of our faith. I have to believe that somewhere out there, there are Mormons who would be willing to look into a camera and confess their conviction that, when Jesus preached "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," he wasn't just talking about straight people.

Now that's a documentary I would pay to see.