The View on Prop 8

From today's show (11/10/08 - clip via Good As You.)

Hearing the women of The View talk about Prop 8 is a demonstration of how intractable this issue can be. Whoopi and Joy deserve a hat tip for being clear-headed about all of this and for keeping the spread of mis-information to a minimum.

I will say this - Hearing one African-American woman talk to another African-American woman about the issue of gay marriage shows that race is really just a component of this problem. This "issue" of race is cloaking a more important explanation for this apparent bigotry -- the level and kind of faith of the people who voted for Prop 8. No reasonable person of color can argue for separate-but-equal without first hanging his or her reasoning skills on a religious hatrack.

But this does not mean that it's time to start attacking the Mormons. I will be attending the NYC protest at the Mormon temple in Manhattan, but I can't help but think that these marches are targeting Mormons because they themselves are easy targets.

Dale Carpenter agrees:

Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable with pickets directed at specific places of worship like the Mormon church in Los Angeles. It's too easy for such protests to degenerate into the kinds of ugly religious intolerance this country has long endured. Mormons, in particular, have historically suffered rank prejudice and even violence. Epithets and taunts directed at individuals are especially abhorrent.