[Hopefully there’ll be another, more in-depth case file by the end of the week]
When you’re a religious group with a long history of intolerance and racial animus like the Mormons, interfering in the democratic process to legislate your sexual mores isn’t just something you do in the state next door. It now looks like the Mormon church is employing its financial resources to derail the Equality Bill in the United Kingdom, a broad piece of legislation to bring together several already-enacted anti-discrimination measures. They have retained a distinguished law firm with the aim of building a coalition of religious groups to protect every Englishman’s right to bash gays (or at the very least ensure exemptions for religious organizations).
Meanwhile, if you’re a Muslim-American charity founded to help children and families victimized by an illegal occupation, your government will distort evidence and make wild, unfounded assertions in order to convict you of “material support for terrorists”, a charge so nebulous and subjective it resembles a Rorschach ink blot.
So, to quickly review: Providing essential supplies to the victims of a brutal military siege? Illegal!
Funding cultural and sexual imperialism so you and your fellow bigots won’t catch the gay cooties? Hell yes!
The concept of Mormonism in the United Kingdom baffles me a bit. Not only is the UK extremely secular, but I can’t imagine there’s any sizeable population there, considering that Mormonism began in the United States and to my very, very shallow knowledge of it, the Church of LDS holds that Jesus’ second coming will take place in the USA.
Also, anti-gay legislation always strikes me in a poor way, mostly because of Clause 28 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28), which took an embarrassingly long time (read: near the end of the Blair years) to repeal.
It’s not even a harmful law, anyway. I can possibly understand (though heavily disagree with, except in an anti-assimilationist queer way) opposing something like Proposition 8 from a religious standpoint, but an anti-discrimination law? Really?