Some of my best friends...

Let me start this out with saying, some of my best friends are, well, uh, Mormon. It's a pretty controversial thing to say these days, what with the bad flak they've been getting lately. Not entirely undeserved, mind you.

Having said that, today is now two weeks since the election. I still have problems sleeping at night. I still find myself dwelling on it, doing things like washing my hair twice or forgetting to shave. It's the little things.

Yes, I'm deeply disappointed at the black vote, that Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God almighty we (but not you) are free at last.

And that being said, I lay the blame very much on the Mormons. Not all Mormons, or even all their followers, of course, but definitely the church itself.

And let me say as well, they are completely allowed to express their beliefs. What they do in the ballot box is entirely between them and the ballot box.

Having said that, they completely crossed a line. And let me put this extremely succinctly: When you donate to a campaign, you cross the line from voting to campaigning. You're not merely expressing your beliefs, but attempting to influence others.

Again, there's nothing wrong with that. But I have every right not to like it either. In fact, the Yes on 8 campaign intended to do exactly that, sending out letters to No on 8 supporters threatening to extort them and publish their names on their web site if they did not donate at least as much to the Yes effort. Of course, those records are already public, so the effort failed.

So don't get all high and mighty with me when you're offended that we're attempting to influence you. It was your idea, and turnabout is fair play.

No, what really burns me is the fact that they realized late in the game that if things kept going the way they were going, they would lose. Fighting fair wasn't winning. They had to get ugly.

And ugly they got.

For here in California, they realized there was a huge middle. A set of people that didn't care. In fact, several of my friends are opposed to same sex marriage because of their religious beliefs. But as far as what other people do, that's they're own business.

As Wanda Sykes puts it, if you don't like gay marriage, don't get gay married.

So what burns me is that the Mormon church was called in to save the day, to make sure Proposition 8 passed at any costs. The extortion tactics were just the beginning. They blatantly told people they would teach gay marriage in schools. (Mind you they don't teach marriage at all in schools.) They said they would take away tax exemptions to churches, or force them to marry same sex couples in churches, or that free speech would become hate speech. All lies.

If that's not bearing false witness, I have no idea what is.

And that's why we're mad. If they didn't lie, they wouldn't have won, and because they lied, my rights were taken away.

I am completely fine with people voting with their beliefs. But once they lie, cheat or steal in order to do it, that doesn't seem to me to be very Christian.

And like the irony of the many blacks voting against civil rights, Brigham Young once argued it was no business of the government defining marriage for the church. Apparently now his followers believe it is the business of the church to define marriage for the government.