Wolfe Video has just released “8: The Mormon Proposition,” a strong documentary about the covert role the Mormon Church played in the passage of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California two years ago.
Filmmakers Reed Cowan and Steven Greenstreet show us how the Mormons channeled upwards of $20 million into California from followers all over the country.
Like the other churches in this country, the Mormons are considered a non-profit religion and reap the benefits of tax-exempt status.
Although the movie serves as a rather eloquent defense of gay marriage — how “sacred” are traditional male-female marriages when half of them end in divorce? — the most interesting question the doc raises involves the Mormons meddling in politics without endangering their tax status.
Under Internal Revenue Service rules, churches are not supposed to collect money from their congregations and then spend it on political advertising, polling and door-to-door lobbying.
The movie claims that while only two percent of the California population is Mormon, more than 70 percent of the money used to lobby for Prop 8 came from the Mormon Church.
In a subversive plot worthy of a John LeCarre thriller, the Mormons were well aware of the church’s image problems — the bizarre support of polygamy (until recent times) and the fact that Mormons kept blacks out of their churches until 1978 — so the sect secretly channeled the Prop 8 money to front groups (such as the National Organization for Marriage) that had no seeming ties to their religion.
What does it say about a religious political action group’s self-image when it hides in the shadows and pays other people to do its dirty work?
Reed and Greenstreet deserve kudos for giving us 80 minutes of pure, old-fashioned muckraking.
