Towards the end of the exhausting battle over California’s anti-gay marriage initiative Proposition 8 in 2008, documents came to light suggesting the Utah-based Church of Latter Day Saints abused and exceeded the limits of their tax-exempt status. The documents showed that the Mormon Church had been calculatinga California referendum as early as 1997. But now, in preparation for a challenge to the church’s status with the IRS, gay activist Fred Karger (pictured)—former candidate for the 2012 Republican presidentialnomination—is revealing a document-based smoking gun showing the referendum the Mormons were actually shooting for was California’s Proposition 22 in 2000.
Karger went public with a batch of the leaked documents at a news conference in Salt Lake City in February 2009, calling the church’s secret political machinations “Mormongate” and challenging the church’s claim that it fully disclosed its financial involvement in the Prop. 8 campaign. After all, LDS spokesperson Don Eaton told KGO-TV in San Francisco, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints put zero money in this.”
LDS spokesperson Michael Otterson concurred, showing (Mormon-owned) KSL TV a copy of a filing indicating $190,000 worth of “in kind” contributions but no actual cash donations. Otterson called Karger’s news conference “grandstanding” and a “publicity stunt” that “confuses” the conversation about traditional marriage, KSL reported.
In June 2010, however, the California Fair Political Practices Commission found the church guilty on 13 counts of late campaign reporting connected to Prop. 8 and reached an agreement whereby the church admitted to spending $2,078 in an amended filing and had to pay $5,538 in fines. Some have estimated that the church raised $30 million from Mormon families for the Prop. 8 fight, along with “in kind” services such as phone banking, direct mail and more.
But, as the leaked documents show, the church learned how to raise and hide money in the run-up to successfully passing Prop. 22, which became a blueprint for other anti-gay marriage initiative battles.
Church spokesperson Scott Trotter would not say whether the documents were real, valid or leaked. “We are unconcerned about these documents,” Trotter told the Salt Lake City Tribune in March 2009. “The church’s position on the importance of traditional marriage has been consistent over the years.”
The church has not yet responded to a recent request for comment from Frontiers. (Update: a Church spokesperson did call back but well after the story was filed.)
Karger says the new documents are even “juicier” than the ones he released over Prop. 8, showing a highly adept, political organization within the church’s complicated, authoritarian hierarchy and vast business holdings. Karger contends the documents prove the Mormons exceeded the percentage of time and money allowed by the IRS for a nonprofit such as a religious organization to participate in politics.
“These documents show how the Mormon Church is such a political machine that they singlehandedly wrote and orchestrated this initiative,” says Karger. “Prop. 22— they made it happen. And that’s what’s so revealing. I was aghast at how much influence they had.”
In 1996, the California Family Code already limited civil marriage between a man and a woman, but anti-gay conservative Republican Sen. Pete Knight of Palmdale proposed legislation to close a “loophole” permitting recognition of gay marriages from other states, such as Hawaii, where the issue was hotly working its way through the courts.
As early as Aug. 20, 1996—a month before President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act—Elder Loren C. Dunn took a lead on the marriage issue as President of the North American West Area and as a new member of the First Quorum of the Seventy in the LDS hierarchy. He wrote a memo, “Re: Status Update on California HLM [Homosexual Legal Marriage] Legislation,” on Church stationary to Elder Neal A. Maxwell, a member of the Presidency of the First Quorum of the Seventy.
“If the legislation dies on the floor of the California Senate, one alternative would be to organize an initiative to bring the issue before the people of California in a general election,” Dunn writes. “Judging from past initiatives, it would take about $1 million to get the necessary signatures to get the initiative on the ballot and another $2-3 million to help insure its passage.”
Subsequent faxed letters and memos from Dunn reveal that he and Richard Wirthlin, a former strategist and pollster for Ronald Reagan and a high-ranking general authority in the church are “in California in order to develop names that could head a coalition established by ourselves and the Catholic Church.”
In April 1997, Knight’s legislative aide, Andy Pugno, asks Brigham Young University Professor Lynn Wardle to testify on Knight’s bill. After the bill was killed by Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 5-4 vote, Wardle notes that several people approached him about “doing a referendum.”
By May 12, the California Defense of Marriage Leadership Group that now includes Sacramento-based political consultant Sal Russo asked Wardle to “distill and polish the concept” of the initiative, which was favored over a constitutional amendment.
The initiative simply reads, “Only marriage between one man and one woman is valid or recognized in California.” The language is changed in February 1998 to “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,” presumably to alleviate questions about whether divorced people could remarry, though Karger believes the change was made to avoid any allusion to the Mormon practice of polygamy. The simplicity of the initiative, too, becomes a template for other referendums.
By the summer, the church called for an all-hands-on-deck effort. An Aug. 19, 1997, a letter from the North America West Area Presidency asked for “Brothers and Sisters” to do whatever they could to help.
“The Proclamation on the Family issued in 1995 by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve [Apostles] states that ‘Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God [and] is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.’ The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve have also encouraged Church members to oppose every effort to weaken marriage or family ties,” the letter said. “The guidance these statements provides is very important because a viperous campaign is now being pressed in several states to legalize so-called same-gender marriage. Legalizing marriage between two people of the same sex is a perversion of true marriage and threatens to undermine the concept of marriage and family, which is at the very heart of the plan of salvation.”
Wardle prepared a number of memos looking at possible outcomes for the marriage case in Hawaii, analyzing state initiatives in terms of DOMA and discussing whether the referendum should be put on the primary or November ballot in 1998.
The coalition missed the primary, and in July Wardle sent a memo to his Catholic friend David Coolidge, founder of The Marriage Law Project, warning about the timing. “If the issue is on the ballot at the wrong time and loses in California, that will have an even greater, very profound, national ‘ripple’ effect that could damage the movement opposing SSM (same-sex marriage) generally,” he said.
After missing the 1998 ballots, the church took a lead in preparing for 2000. On May 11, 1999, the LDS North America West Area Presidency issued another alert, with a message to send to every member: “Do all you can do. … It is imperative for us to give our best to preserve what our father in heaven has put in place.”
On March 7, 2000, Prop. 22 passed by a margin of 61% in favor to 39% against. It proved that an anti-gay marriage initiative could pass, even in California, green-lighting the spate of anti-gay initiatives that followed.
Karger is asking for help in his challenge to the church. “If anyone knows of excess political activities by the church, or information about their various business holdings, please email me at [email protected]”