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 calculating a 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 presidential nomination—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—ElderLoren 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.”
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