Joshua,

How is it possible for you to support your church with it going against its own scripture? “We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members as citizens, denied.” (D&C 134:9)

United Church of Christ
The resolution “In support of equal marriage rights for all”, supported by an estimated 80% of the 884 General Synod Delegates, made the United Church of Christ General Synod the first major Christian deliberative body in the U.S. to make a statement of support for “equal marriage rights” for all people, regardless of gender.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Church_of_Christ The Unitarian Church also supports gay marriage.

The Mormon Church spearheading Prop 8 in Californian has denied equal rights of a minority. The LDS Churches position toward gays is totally at odds with mainstream psychology. See the American Psychological Association statements:

http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbc/policy/marriage.pdf

http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbc/publications/justthefacts.pdf

Answer:

The church is going against it’s own scripture or teaching. In this case it all depends on what you mean by the words “equal rights”. The way I see it, gays have the same rights I do in that a gay man has just as much right to marry a woman as I do. I have every much right to marry a man as he does. That’s equality. We both have the exact same rights. Now, if you change it to say “But no Josh, you have the right to marry whomever you want to because you only like women, and a gay man doesn’t,” that doesn’t change anything. If I were in love with a man, I wouldn’t be able to marry a man. Yes, I was able to marry the person I love, but only because I chose to love someone whom I could legally marry. If I made the choice to love a man, I would be restricted just as a gay man would be, or in other words, we are on equal footing when it comes to the law. The difference is not how the law applies to a gay man vs. how it applies to me, it is that the gay man who wants to marry his partner has made a choice to be in love with someone whom he can’t legally marry.

In fact, the church’s stance is completely in line with the scripture you quoted, because it is our fear, and there is plenty of evidence to substantiate it, that if gay marriage were legalized it would lead to lead to a denial of the rights of LDS Church members. For example, once gay marriage is legalized, it’s just one more step to say that speaking out against gay marriage is a form of legal discrimination. If I were to say on this blog that I think gay marriage is wrong, and a gay man applies for a job with my company and is turned down, he could sue me for illegal discrimination and he would stand a better chance of winning with a gay marriage law on the books. A member of the LDS Church who teaches in a lesson that gay marriage is wrong could be sued for hate speech. Don’t tell me it would never happen, it already has in other countries where gay marriage is legal. This would impinge on the free speech rights of church members, not to mention religious rights. In fighting against the gay marriage movement, the LDS Church is trying to protect the rights of its members, rather than remove a right from someone else (which we don’t believe they have in the first place).

As for the APA, they are, in fact, going against their own “scripture”, inasmuch as they used to officially define homosexuality as a mental disorder.