While I personally support same-sex couples having the same legal right to marriage as heterosexuals, I also believe The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had the right to take a stand on the issue and counsel its members to do the same.

The church currently is taking intense heat for its statements at the pulpits encouraging support of California's Proposition 8 and for the $22 million or so its members contributed to the cause.

To church leaders and many of its members, the amendment banning gay marriage is a moral issue and, while I disagree, they have the right to push their agenda using any political means under the law.

Religious leaders like the Moral Majority fundamentalists have often used their substantial clerical influence to push for secular laws compatible to their faiths and help elect government officials who comply with their wishes.

Liberal organizations, too, use a commonality of belief or lifestyle to raise money and elect politicians who promote their agendas.

During the 1980s Democratic leaders, including former Utah Gov. Scott Matheson, put together a policy commission aimed at reconnecting with mainstream America.

They scheduled panel discussions featuring experts and party brass on a number of issues, and scattered those events across the country.

The "family values" panel discussion was set for Salt Lake City, and party leaders soon were faced with a dilemma when gay and lesbian organizations, responsible for a major portion of the party's financial contributions, insisted on having a seat at the table.

Utah was not the ideal place for having a gay-rights discussion on a family-values panel, but the party was stuck. It couldn't afford to offend a powerful funding faction.

It didn't help the party's image with "mainstream America," but the gay and lesbian groups appropriately exploited their pocketbook clout to further their own cause -- just like the Mormons did in California.

The church's political action has not always been as apparent as it was on Proposition 8, and that lack of transparency sometimes hurt its image.

The church went through an embarrassing period in the late 1970s when Equal Rights Amendment advocate and faithful Mormon Sonia Johnson claimed the church was sneakily trying to defeat the ERA ratification in Virginia. She said the church commanded LDS women to campaign against the amendment while not identifying themselves as Mormons to avoid the charge that they were just following orders from a patriarchal faith.

She eventually was excommunicated, becoming a martyr and opening the church to intense criticism.

Delegates to the monumental National Conference of Women held in Houston in 1977 also accused the church of getting ringers elected as delegates to the conference with the express purpose of defeating the majority's agenda of abortion rights and passage of the ERA.

On another issue in Utah, LDS officials were silent on a bill in the Legislature in the 1980s to allow passengers in rented limousines and "fun buses" going to Wendover to drink alcohol in the moving vehicles.

Then, on the last night of the session, last-minute and secret phone calls to two state senators resulted in those lawmakers conspiring to prevent a vote on the bill, even though the majority supported it.

That conspiracy was revealed and the church had some explaining to do. It handled the alcohol issue much better this year when its leaders publicly took a stand against flavored malt beverages being sold in grocery stores. The church again got its way, but with far less criticism because of its openness.