The Mormons Can Dish It Out...

...and they bloody well better be able to take it.

My contempt for organized religion has never burned hotter than now. The fact that a tax-exempt organization like the Mormon church sees fit to dump millions and millions of dollars into a purely hate-based initiative like Prop 8 is enough to get me seeing red.

And now -- oh, the hilarity! -- they cry foul when peaceful protesters descend upon their precious churches? Fuck them.

Dan Savage is also pissed:

When political attacks are launched from churches, political responses will be delivered to churches. If goddamned McDonald's had organized and paid for Prop 8, we'd be marching on goddamned McDonald's.

Andrew Sullivan elaborates:

I strongly support civility in this struggle. Religious services and practices should be scrupulously respected. But when a church, like the Mormon church, makes a concerted effort to enter the public square and strip a small minority of basic civil rights, it is simply preposterous for them then to argue that the Mormon church cannot be criticized and protested because they are a religion. I have never done anything - nor would I do anything - to impede or restrict the civil rights of Mormons. I respect their right to freedom of conscience and religion. In fact, it is one of my strongest convictions. But when they use their money and power to target my family, to break it up, to demean it and marginalize it, to strip me and my husband of our civil rights, then they have started a war. And I am not a pacifist.

I do not intend in any way to remove a single right from Mormons. I do intend to protest their imposition of their own religious dogma - that marriage is always between a man and a woman and it is eternal and will be replicated in heaven by the couple physically present - on civil rights protections vested in a civil constitution.

I should add that I dated a Mormon man for a few months a while back. What he told me about the LDS church's psychological warfare on their gay members, the brutality and viciousness and intolerance with which they attack and hound and police the gay children of Mormon families, would make anyone shudder.