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It is election day, which means this relentless, long, nasty, dispiriting campaign is at last coming to an end, and at least on that count we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. Nowhere will that sigh be more heartfelt than among Latter-day Saints in California who have stepped up to the line to support Proposition 8, the marriage protection amendment at the request of the First Presidency.

One Meridian reader from California wrote to say that Latter-day Saints who live elsewhere can scarcely understand the harassment, anger, and disdain they have faced as they have posted "Yes on Prop 8" signs, passed out brochures and stepped up to the plate to support marriage.

What Latter-day Saints who live in California have put on the line is not just their treasure, but their blood sweat and tears as they've found that neighbors suddenly won't talk to them because they have a "Yes" sign in their yard or that their private property has been damaged because they want to protect marriage or that their children are ridiculed at school.

If the mocking and pointing fingers (like those in the great and spacious building) bring a knot to the stomach, Latter-day Saints there have more than their share of knots. Nothing feels worse than to be personally labeled, smeared and called hateful and-that worst possible word in today's world-a bigot.

Hoisting the yellow signs on street corners and waving them before the traffic has been the equivalent for this generation of raising the title of liberty as Moroni did in the Book of Mormon, "in memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children."

A comforting email with the words of Elder Neal A. Maxwell has passed among Latter-day Saints in California with these prophetic words delivered in 1979 while he was a member of the Presidency of the First Quorum of the Seventy.

“Make no mistake about it, brothers and sisters, in the months and years ahead, events are likely to require each member to decide whether or not he will follow the First Presidency. Members will find it more difficult to halt longer between two opinions. President Marion G. Romney said, many years ago, that he had 'never hesitated to follow the counsel of the Authorities of the Church even though it crossed my social, professional or political life.'

“This is hard doctrine, but it is particularly vital doctrine in a society which is becoming more wicked. In short, brothers and sisters, not being ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ includes not being ashamed of the prophets of Jesus Christ. . . . Your discipleship may see the time when such religious convictions are discounted. . . . This new irreligious imperialism seeks to disallow certain opinions simply because those opinions grow out of religious convictions.

“Resistance to abortion will be seen as primitive. Concern over the institution of the family will be viewed as untrendy and unenlightened....Before the ultimate victory of the forces of righteousness, some skirmishes will be lost. Even in these, however, let us leave a record so that the choices are clear, letting others do as they will in the face of prophetic counsel. There will also be times, happily, when a minor defeat seems probable, but others will step forward, having been rallied to rightness by what we do. We will know the joy, on occasion, of having awakened a slumbering majority of the decent people of all races and creeds which was, till then, unconscious of itself. Jesus said that when the fig trees put forth their leaves, 'summer is nigh.' Thus warned that summer is upon us, let us not then complain of the heat."

Two Hard Realities

During this campaign, two hard political realities have been driven vividly home to those working in the trenches for marriage, children, and religious freedom. Defending family and any remnant of morality in this nation will demand courage and clarity-and it will not be just a single skirmish after which we can all put our signs down and go home with some relief.

This struggle for the heart of our nation does not allow for extended summer vacations or long-term retirement in an easy chair. We are not born into a time for easy chairs-and it is because as citizens we have been dozing for too long that our nation has arrived at this point of moral blight on every side where defending the right of a child to deserve a mother and a father is considered hate speech.

Win or lose this marriage protection amendment in California today, this should be a time when citizens have been awakened to the perilous ideas that are beginning to saturate our nation and our children's schools, the efforts to marginalize and ultimately trivialize religion, and the thrust to undercut parents' rights to guide the upbringing of their children.

We have heard the alarm, and it is no time to push the snooze button-no matter how tired we are or what names we are called. Closing our eyes and hoping it will all go away will not help it to all go away.

The Call for Courage

The first hard political reality that has become clear, then, is that in this ongoing battle for the family, our opponents often play a nasty hardball, hoping to embarrass us, frighten us, harass us, and make us cave on our convictions.

It seems many of them have been trained in the Saul Alinsky school of politics. He was a 1970's social agitator and community organizer who wrote Rules for Radicals, teaching groups how to organize for mass power and made the case that nearly any means could be used to justify the end. They do not seek to play fair, but work in the shrillest ways to intimidate those who oppose them in the marriage battle.

Thus, ironically, while same-sex proponents claim they are for tolerance, they lash out at Prop 8 supporters vilifying them and calling them intolerant and offensive. Thousands of "Yes on Prop 8" signs have been stolen or defaced by roaming vandals. Property has been vandalized and cars keyed. Businesses where an executive donates to protect marriage have been targeted for boycott. Donors have been listed on websites so they can be harassed. See this two minute film prepared by the Protect Marriage campaign which describes some of the abuse. http://protectmarriage.com/tell

The Bob and Michele Sundstrom family unhappily made the news when their San Jose yard became ground zero of the culture war. When their Prop 8 sign was stolen from their yard, they put a bigger sign over their garage. In response two women drove an SUV in front of their house with a sign painted on the back windshield that read, "Bigots live here." "Stop Bigots,'' one window read. "God Hates Haters,'' read another.

At Meridian we get lots of letters from people who describe their experience supporting Prop 8 in California . One mother, Linda Forman, wrote a note to fellow Prop 8 workers warning them to please be careful and described the experience of her two sons, Daniel, 18, and Joseph, 14, who had a couple of dozen signs in the back of their truck and decided to post them along the frontage road on their way home.

After they had posted a couple, a car pulled right on their bumper with the bright lights on and then followed them when they got back in the car. They didn't want to go home, so they lead them through another neighborhood going in and out three times with the car following on their bumper. Finally, they turned into their own neighborhood and the car left them.

The boys waited a few minutes and then started for home via the frontage road. Near a gas station, they pulled over, and Joseph took two signs to post. He walked 20-30 feet back behind the truck when further down the road headlights came on, the car gunned its engine and started barreling toward them. The car swerved onto the shoulder and headed straight for Joseph, who ran as fast as he could and jumped onto the truck. The car slammed on its brakes inches from the truck. Daniel called his parents and 911. The boys couldn't get the license plate because the car always had its brights on.

Another Meridian reader told of this experience: "On Friday, Oct. 17, our pro-Proposition 8 sign was stolen from our yard. At 9:05 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 22, our doorbell rang…We found all our outdoor security lights on and a letter taped to our front door, but no humans were visible." The letter was a crude, rambling anonymous. At 1:32 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 26, our doorbell rang again, disturbing and frightening our household, but once more the security lights revealed no one.

"Obviously these anonymous perpetrators care nothing for our right to express our views or to live harassment-free and are, in addition, too cowardly to speak openly."

While some of these examples are extreme, what they share is the opponents' desire to intimidate Prop 8 supporters. The politics of intimidation is meant to silence and cow those who would support marriage, shut us up and keep us timid, make us concede--whether it is in California or in all of the future battles for the place of family and religion in our nation. Anyone during this campaign who has tried to give a brochure to a house where they were thrown off the front porch or called a hate monger understands the politics of intimidation. Anyone who has had an eyebrow of disdain lifted toward them because they are not politically correct knows the politics of intimidation.

This means to stand for family and religious freedom in this new, intimidating atmosphere takes gumption and courage, reaching down to find what we are made of. A quote from Abraham Lincoln captures the need of our times:

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it."

Samuel Johnson put it this way: "Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other."

The kind of courage that the ongoing struggle to preserve family entails also calls for the compassion not to return sometimes harsh treatment in kind. While we won't allow intimidation to make us ever give up, we will also not allow it to poison the way we would ever treat another.

Some among us have felt to oppose Prop 8, sometimes in the name of compassion for a homosexual family member or friend. Just as we do not want to be marginalized because we support marriage, neither do we want ever to be responsible for marginalizing any one else.

Nonetheless, this is the season to stand up, step forward and be counted, however difficult, or we will not recognize the nation we bequeath to our children.

The Call for Clarity

The other tough thing that we've seen clearly in this election is that we can't count on the press to be honest or objective. Once we thought the press was giving us the facts, an objective evaluation of an issue or an event. We thought they would dig for the truth no matter where it led.

On the national level regarding presidential politics, some pundits are calling the obvious bias, the death of journalism. Can we trust the press when they are so clearly advocates of a viewpoint? If the media mirror through which we view the world is distorted, how can we rely on what we see?

One way the mainstream media manipulates our view is in the events and issues they choose to cover or ignore, whether something is the headline or buried in the 27th paragraph of the story on page nine.

Last Tuesday, 1000 supporters of Prop 8 gathered at the state capitol in Sacramento hoping to have their voices heard, and not one mainstream media source ran a story. This was 1000 people including Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, a demonstration of how widely this issue cuts across ethnicity, and the press ignored it. One conservative talk show host, Eric Hogue, broadcasted from the event, but other than that, it was as if the event hadn't occurred. However, 50 protesters showed up at the LDS Oakland Temple , and, of course, that was picked up in the mainstream press.

The result, of course, is to make people supporting Prop 8 think that they are alone, that no one is rallying to the cause. I saw the same thing happen last spring when 27 national organizations rallied together to hold a press conference asking the Department of Justice to more aggressively prosecute pornography. This is not a popular issue with the press, and not one press outlet covered the event. It was as if it didn't happen.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? In our culture, without press coverage, issues and events make no sound.

The press never calls Prop 8, a marriage protection amendment. They define the terms and call it an amendment to ban same-sex marriage, casting it as an issue that would deny rights-even though with domestic partnerships which are the law in California , the same rights are granted as are granted in marriage. None of these will be taken away with the passage of Prop 8.

In a Nov.2 editorial endorsement urging citizens to vote no on Prop 8, the Los Angeles Times was disingenuous, likening the legitimate concerns about the religious freedom implications of same-sex marriage and its affect on the curriculum at school to a magician's trick, something to misdirect the voters to the real issues at hand.

The real magicians here were the editorial board of the Times who chose to ignore the findings of constitutional scholars who call same-sex marriage and religious freedom a train wreck. The Becket Fund has just published a book Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Freedom: Emerging Conflicts. With contributors who range across the spectrum of opinion about same-sex marriage, these scholars all agreed on one thing, same-sex marriage and religious freedom are on a collision course. Editorial magicians at the Times made these legal concerns disappear.

In that same endorsement the LA Times opined, "Californians must cast a clear eye on Proposition 8's real intentions. It seeks to change the state Constitution in a rare and terrible way, to impose a single moral belief on everyone and to deprive a targeted group of people of civil rights that are now guaranteed. This is something that no Californian, of any religious belief, should accept. Vote no to the bigotry of Proposition 8."

What? The paper dare calls a proposed amendment full of bigotry (and by implication its proponents bigots)? This is more than just taking a stand on an issue, and discussing its pros and cons. It is throwing the newspaper's considerable weight behind name-calling.

And then what is this line about changing the state Constitution "in a rare and terrible way"? Defining marriage as between a man and a woman is not rare or terrible. It is how the California constitution has always been understood. It is how three of the justices on California 's liberal Supreme Court still understood the Constitution before the Court by only one vote imposed same-sex marriage on Californians. The biggest lie here, of course, is that any civil rights are taken away from anyone with Prop 8.

The LA Times recently ran an opinion piece from a woman who talked about picking up an LDS child in her car pool. She wrote, "Out of respect to Amy's parents and their beliefs -- they belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- I had not expressed my opposition to Proposition 8 in front of their daughter. Francesca, however, had no such inhibitions. When Amy said her family would have to leave their church if they voted against Proposition 8, Francesca replied, "In our church, we can vote the way we want to." When it was Amy's mom's turn to deliver the girls to soccer practice recently, Francesca also apparently explained that our family was against Proposition 8 because "people should be able to do what they want in California."

Even in an opinion piece, that the LA Times let something like that into print is breathtaking.

Examples abound, but the point is already clear. One of the sad realities that we have learned during this election is that in certain matters the mainstream media is more propaganda than press. Thus, what we have heard is not only a call to courage, but also a call to clarity. We have learned that we have to dig deep to find out what is really happening and that just because something is oft-repeated does not make it true, factual or insightful.

Just as we cannot be intimidated by hostility, neither can we be duped by bias against ideas. Freedom cannot be served in ignorance or blindness.

Why bring this all up today? After all, in California this battle is over. Indeed, this has been a big skirmish that has national ramifications, win or lose, but the philosophical issues that are clashing here will continue to play out. We will need courage, compassion, and clarity in order to play our part.

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Maurine Jensen Proctor is the Editor-in-Chief of Meridian Magazine.

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