Eight Is Enough.(The Talk of the Town)

Changes California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California., --Ballot summary, Proposition 8.

You might think that an organization that for most of the first of its not yet two centuries of existence was the world's most notorious proponent of startlingly unconventional forms of wedded bliss would be a little reticent about issuing orders to the rest of humanity specifying exactly who should be legally entitled to marry whom. But no. The Mormon Church--as anyone can attest who has ever answered the doorbell to find a pair of polite, persistent, adolescent "elders" standing on the stoop, tracts in hand--does not count reticence among the cardinal virtues. Nor does its own history of matrimonial excess bring a blush to its cheek. The original Latter-day Saint, Joseph Smith, acquired at least twenty-eight and perhaps sixty wives, some of them in their early teens, before he was lynched, in 1844, at age thirty-eight. Brigham Young, Smith's immediate successor, was a bridegroom twenty times over, and his successors, along with much of the male Mormon elite, kept up the mass marrying until the nineteen-thirties--decades after the Church had officially disavowed polygamy, the price of Utah's admission to the Union, in 1896. As Richard and Joan Ostling write in "Mormon America: The Power and the Promise" (2007), "Smith and his successors in Utah managed American history's only wide-scale experiment in multiple wives, boldly challenging the nation's entrenched family structure and the morality of Western Judeo-Christian culture."

"MORMONS TIPPED SCALE IN BAN ON GAY MARRIAGE," the Times headlined the week after Election Day, reflecting the views of proponents and opponents alike. Six and a half million Californians voted for Proposition 8, and six million voted against it--a four-point margin, close enough for a single factor to make the difference. Almost all the early canvassers for the cause were Mormons, but the most important contributions were financial. The normal political pattern is for money to get raised in California and spent elsewhere. This time, Salt Lake City played the role of Hollywood, rural Utah was the new Silicon Valley, and California was cast as flyover country. Of the forty million dollars spent on behalf of Prop. 8, some twenty million came from members or organs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Some conservative commentators, who didn't have much else to gloat about, dwelt lingeringly on what they evidently regarded as the upside of the huge, Obama-sparked African-American turnout. "It was the black vote that voted down gay marriage," Bill O'Reilly, of Fox News, insisted triumphantly--and, it turns out, wrongly. If exit polling is to be believed, seventy per cent of California's African-American voters did indeed vote yes on Prop. 8, as did upward of eighty per cent of Republicans, conservatives, white evangelicals, and weekly churchgoers. But the initiative would have passed, barely, even if not a single African-American had shown up at the polls.

Still, this was a fight that should have been won, and after the initial shock--which tempted a few gay and lesbian voices to blame blacks for what O'Reilly credited them with--California's gay activists and their straight allies, judging from their online postmortems, have begun to direct more criticism at themselves than at their opponents. They were complacent: early polls had shown Prop. 8 losing by double digits. Their television ads were timid and ineffective, focussing on worthy abstractions like equality and fairness, while the other side's were powerfully emotional. (Also dishonest--they implied that gay marriage would threaten churches' tax exemptions, force church-affiliated adoption agencies to place children with gay couples, and oblige children to attend ...