Utah Helps California Prevent Marriage--Again

Prop 8 backlash: Gay marriage backers to protest outside Salt Lake LDS Temple
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_10918202?IADID=Search-www.sltrib.com-www.sltrib.com

Mormons reached across state borders to fight marriage equality in California. According to this article which appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune last week, the "LDS Church got into the thick of the California battle when officials issued statements encouraging members to actively support the ban. All told, Latter-day Saints are estimated to have given, by some counts, as much as $22 million to the effort."

That's a huge amount of money invested in taking away our rights.

And it's not the first time that Utah has helped California prevent marriage.

Back in 1933, Filipinos(1) were added to the list of people who could not marry white people in California (so-called anti-miscegenation laws, which were really about preventing non-white men from marrying white women). But this did not stop mixed marriages. No, those determined couples just went over to Utah and other states to marry. The California legislature did notice, so in 1938 they passed a strongly-worded resolution urging Utah to "stop the practice whereby citizens of the state of California and members of the non-assimilable alien race [that's us] have been defeating California marriage laws by resorting to subterfuge of transient residence in the State of Utah." A year later, Utah added Filipinos to their anti-miscegenation laws.

I don't know enough about Utah or Mormon history to know if Mormons were involved in that 1939 decision, but the parallel is obvious enough. Utah has twice now helped take away the right of marriage.

Reference
(1) Staff, “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Pilipino.” In Letters in Exile: An Introductory Reader on the History of Pilipinos in the United States, ed. Jesse Quinsaat. UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1976, pp.63-71. The actual term used was "Malay." The legal fight had been over whether Filipinos were Malay or Mongolian. It was resolved by adding Malay to the law. This story is one of several examples of "just-us" in Filipino American history.


It's Veterans Day. Thanks to all veterans everywhere and especially to the Filipino WWII veterans. From just-us to justice...we will have it.