Minnesotan recalls how the Mormon Church blackballed gay Nebraska couples from marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships

Initiative 416 amended the Nebraska Constitution to "provide that only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in Nebraska, and to provide that the uniting of two persons of the same sex in a civil union, domestic partnership or other similar same-sex relationship shall not be valid or recognized in Nebraska." 

From AmericaBlog:

Prop 8 wasn't the Mormons' first time to the hate dance.  They've been bankrolling anti-gay legislation for at least two decades. Here is one Mormon's story about how they helped push DOMA in the state of Nebraska.

I lived in Nebraska when a petition drive was held there to get DOMA on the ballot. At church we were not even asked if we wanted to gather signatures. We were handed packets (which I did not take) and several hours of our usual meetings were taken up with our bishop and stake president rallying the troops, so to speak – even sending people out on a Sunday to gather signatures at the College World Series. I didn’t speak out against it. I just murmured with my like-minded friends about our disgust over the church getting involved. Hell, damn near running the whole thing. And happy, oh so happy, to join forces with evangelicals who agree with Mormons on nothing other than the so-called moral decline of society.

Here's more information about the Mormon Church's dominant role in amending Nebraska's constitution in a way that ruthlessly has made gay couples strangers to the law for 11 years and counting. The following excerpt is from a much longer 10/4/2000 piece by Leslie Reed published in the Omaha World-Herald. (We were going to email this to John Aravosis, but after 10 minutes of trying to find a damn email address on his web site, AKSARBENT gave up.)

A coalition of Mormons, Catholics and Protestant evangelicals appears to be pushing aside the grassroots committee that gathered 160,000 petition signatures across Nebraska to ban same sex marriage.

     ...Guyla Mills, who managed the successful initiative petition drive, said she refused an offer by two Nebraska members of the Mormon Church to join the coalition, even though they told her they would be able to raise $600,000 to promote the amendment .
     The two men, Arthur Taylor of Omaha and Robert Valentine of Lincoln, were active in the petition drive. Taylor is the president of the Omaha stake of the Mormon Church.
     "The package presented to me was outside the parameters set by the DOMA committee," Mills said.
     "It would be an entity apart from the DOMA committee, it would be funded by outside money, and it would be controlled by one entity."
     She said the entity she referred to was the Mormon Church...
     About one - fourth of the [petition] drive's 3,200 volunteers were Mormons, Mills said. They collected about half the 160,000 signatures.