Into the West

This week I had the opportunity to see 8: The Mormon Proposition at the Newport Beach film festival. I wasn't that impressed with the festival itself, and they had several problems with the screening - the worst of which actually ended up cutting off the first 10 seconds of the film. If that was my film, I would have been livid. I went into the film with lowish expectations, but it was a pleasant surprise. A few thoughts:

1. A lot of people have complained about the distorted images and audio used to show parts of the fireside that the church broadcast all over southern California. For starters, the audio was not distorted on purpose. What you hear sounds like a recording someone actually made while sitting in a chapel. The quality is consistent with a low-end, portable, consumer device. They were simply limited by the original quality of the audio. I doubt the church is going to give them high-quality files, and that broadcast has not been made available to church members on DVD (as most of them typically are).
   
2. The distorted images were not as bad as I thought they would be. It would be one thing to distort someone actually talking on camera, but since there was no footage available for these clips, I don't really mind what the filmmakers did. What do people expect here - a slow moving image of church leaders with soothing music in the background?
3. I really liked the story of Tyler & Spencer. One of the last lines in the film is Tyler saying, "this is simple, this is just love." And really, when you see this couple, it makes you wonder how anyone could be so heartless as to inflict them with such emotional pain. One of the most powerful moments in the film was when they showed the persecution Tyler's great grandfather had faced as a polygamist, and then tied that discrimination to what he faces today. The church should know better. It faced serious discrimination for decades due its non-traditional marriage beliefs. To turn around and then perpetrate that same hatred on other people is simply inexcusable.
   
4. Of course, Buttars and Ruzicka were there, looking even more hateful than I thought was humanly possible. One of the more insulting and outrageous statements in the film came from Paul Mero, president of the Sutherland institute:

   "Your ideas about marriage and family are an illusion. The very nature of your relationships means that you only act out. You play house as only a dysfunctional household structure can allow, You think a piece of paper, magically bestows upon you a real marriage. You think calling yourselves a family, makes you a family, you think the state calling you a family makes you a family, and in a very immature, emotional frame of reference, you think love alone makes a family."

   
   How do you even respond to something so hateful? I can't help but think of what another blogger said in a recent post while talking about his upcoming marriage:

   "If you think my marriage is only about satisfying romantic love, you are dead wrong. If that's all we were doing, I'd be fine with cohabitation. Marriage is SO much more than about love.
   
   Marriage is about commitment, sacrifice, obligation, vows, making those promises in front of witnesses, legally and socially uniting two different people. It's about compromise and learning how to be part of a team--learning how to love another more than oneself--learning how to temper ones own urges and passions--mastering the art of "I'm sorry." And all of those things make me and my upcoming marriage more like God, not less.
   
   Marriage is about family--about children no matter how they join the family. We want to have children, and believe those children deserve the legal protections of married parents. So again, marriage is about loving others more than loving oneself.
   
   If marriage--or love--were about gratification, then there are a hellofalot more effective ways to gratify myself. This is actually the MOST difficult of all of them, but it is also the most meaningful."

5. I had to relive the pain of election night all over again. Watching people celebrate, rejoice, and jump with excitement over putting an end to thousands of marriages. I think that speaks volumes for their cause.
   
6. From what I could tell, there were not a lot of Mormons in the audience. It was interesting to pay attention to when there was laughter, chuckles, gasps of horror, etc. One thing that was pointed out to me by a friend was how unfazed we were by a lot of the material in the documentary. Having been poked with the needle of homophobia (and maybe even religion in general) we have become numb to a lot of its effects.

One of the last lines in the film was from Carol Lynn Pearson: