The Arizona Republic comes out against the Mormon Temple, but for the wrong reasons
An editorial says the plan, originally for a 48-foot-high building, “needs tweaking”:
The church deserves credit for lowering the building by 8 feet, to 40 feet. But more concessions are needed to make this project a nice fit for the neighborhood.
The Church still gets to add a spire of nearly 80 feet on top.
It’s good the paper, however delicately, is telling the city council to limit the church’s plans to what is currently allowed.
But it should have made clear that the Mormons vaporized any claim to religioso bonus points when it went on a jihad against gay marriage.
As PHXated has said before, the Mormons should be able to build what the current zoming allows—a thirty-foot building—and nothing more.
The Church’s hostility to gay marriage—and its funding of anti-gay marriage initiatives here and in California—is within its right. But there’s no reason the city should give special dispensation to an institution that spends its money persecuting those who are striving for equal rights under the law.
Phoenix has enough problems with its national image without having the Mormon Church’s profile be any higher than it is now—literally or figuratively.
12:00 AM
Mormon leader says the LDS is being persecuted as blacks in the Civil Rights Era were
… according to this AP story on AZCentral.com:
The anti-Mormon backlash after California voters overturned gay marriage last fall is similar to the intimidation of Southern Blacks during the civil-rights movement, a high-ranking Mormon said Tuesday.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks referred to gay marriage as an “alleged civil right” in an address at Brigham Young University-Idaho that church officials described as a significant commentary on current threats to religious freedom.
Oaks suggested that atheists and others are seeking to intimidate people of faith and silence their voices
I think there’s a flaw in his argument, but I can’t think of what it is …
… Oh, I just figured it out. The difference is that, in the 1960s, the blacks were the one being persecuted, and Bull Connor and his ilk were the ones doing the persecuting.
Today, gays are the ones being persecuted, and the Mormons are actively working to repress them, specifically by funding attacks on gay marriage across the country.
12:00 AM
Temples of bigotry
PHXated is lucky enough to own a house in northeast Phoenix. As homeowners know, there’s a lot of worries and anxieties that go along, and an owner can be forgiven for a neurosis or two. (Or three.)
But: What if I said it really bothered me that … Mormons owned houses. That Mormons’ owning houses affects my ownership of my house?
What if I said that Mormons shouldn’t be allowed to own houses?
Well, you’d say I was batshit crazy.
That whether a Mormon owned a house didn’t affect my homeownership a bit.
That I was being intolerant, a little bit crazy, and, frankly, something of a bigot.
We were thinking along these lines while reading some recent local news stories about how the Mormon Church wants some zoning variances to build two new temples in the area, one in Gilbert and one waaay up at 51st Avenue and Pinnacle Peak Road.
The Mormons were in the news last year because of the enormous financial support the church gave to two state ballot measures involving gay marriage. The church was on the anti side, both here in Arizona and in California. It’s been reported that the church spent literally millions of dollars to make sure the anti-gay marriage side won.
The church was successful in both cases, fairly narrowly in California. You could make the argument the church’s money tipped the balance.
We don’t have to point out to you the analogy we were making above. Just as it would be intolerant for us to try to deny a Mormon the right to buy a house, it’s intolerant for Mormons to try to stop gay people from marrying.
Whether a Mormon owns a house doesn’t affect me one whit, just as a couple of gays or lesbians getting hitched doesn’t affect Mormon couples one whit. That’s why it’s crazy, in both cases, to get one’s panties in a knot about it.
And finally, to go on a political campaign to deny other folks the right to buy a house—why, that’s bigoted.
And so is spending millions to dollars to make life more difficult for people who want to love and care for each other under the protection of the law.
A lot of the coverage of this issue, it seems to us, is just a little too polite.
Right now, the Mormons aren’t just building a couple of new temples, which is their right to do. They want the city in both cases to give them zoning variances. In Gilbert, they want to build to a height twice as high as is currently allowed.
In both cases, the cities should not give the Mormons any special rights to build that the current zoning doesn’t allow.
Let them built what they wish, under the laws in effect—but nothing more.
Why should the intolerant get special treatment from government?
Now, here’s the final point I want to make. What if I did get a movement going to deny Mormons the right to own houses. What if I played on people’s prejudices—and got a ban passed?
Then let’s let 100 years go by. A more tolerant age might dawn, and a movement might rise to ease those awful rules against Mormon house ownership.
Some however, would resist the change. They would demonize Mormon house ownership. It’s always been that way, they’d say. Mormons just can’t own houses.
Just because … that’s the way we’ve always done it.
How would Mormons feel? Probably a lot like the way gays and lesbians who want to get married today do.
They’d feel, in a phrase, like victims of a pointless and cruelly destructive prejudice that has no basis in reason or morality.
6:00 AM