Introducing the Church and State Documentary

Holly Tuckett [00:00:11] Your mom and me, we've seen this life with eyes that only see in black and white.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Holly Tuckett [00:01:03] Tune me out if you must

James Huntsman [00:01:09] I

Holly Tuckett [00:01:09] know you've heard enough

James Huntsman [00:01:14] But I sing

Holly Tuckett [00:01:15] this song Just because I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy was I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy

John Dehlin [00:01:28] was it is June 28, 2018 and as always, I am so very excited to be interviewing the people that we're interviewing today. Just to give you a little bit of background, we have a new LGBTQ themed documentary that's come out and it may not be the one you think I'm thinking about. The documentary is called Church and State and it's a documentary about the role that Utah played in same sex marriage becoming legalized across the United States. I watched the movie last night and I loved it and to be honest, you know, I've been studying LGBT stuff for quite some time. I've been involved in my little ways for many, many years. I wasn't sure how interested or excited I would be about an LGBT themed documentary and I was super enthralled from the very start. I thought it was a very high quality movie, very well done, very, very thought professional and given the people that were involved in it, I'm not surprised. But today we're going to be interviewing three of the main people involved in this wonderful documentary again called Church and State. Before I introduce our guests, I want to let you all know that on July 18, 2018 there will be a screening of this movie that's a Wednesday night 7pm at the Broadway Theater in Salt Lake City. What I would love is for everyone in the Salt Lake area who supports Mormon Stories podcast who supports local art cinema to show up and we are going to do a screening of the movie support. Very well done local art. And then we'll do a Q and A with some of the participants of the movie after the screening and we'll just have some fun and we can hang out, eat popcorn, maybe even have a lemonade. And so we Want to make sure you all come to that. So I'll announce that again at the end. You can go to mormonstories.org events to get the details, but please join us there. We're gonna skip the normal announcements for today, and I am very excited to welcome three new guests to Mormon Stories Podcast. These three. None of these three guests have ever been on Mormon Stories before, and the three people are. I'll just introduce them one at a time. So first, James Huntsman. Welcome to Warmer Stories.

Mark Lawrence [00:04:01] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:04:02] Tell us a bit about yourself and your role in the movie.

James Huntsman [00:04:06] Well, thank you. Pleasure to be here. Longtime listener, first time participant, as you say. My wonderful wife Marianne is here with us. We are the proud parents of five children, and I got involved in this film a couple of years ago as a producer on the film. And also my company, Blue Fox Entertainment, is the company behind distributing the film nationwide. In August, we're having a short theatrical run here locally because of the nature of the film, but my company, Blue Fox Entertainment, will be handling the distribution of the film nationwide.

John Dehlin [00:04:47] And just really quick, what was it about the topic? What was your personal interest? Did you have a personal interest in the film? And if so, what was it?

James Huntsman [00:04:55] Well, yes, at the time, we weren't living in Utah when this issue was happening in 2012, 2013, 2014. And it was just by accident that I came in contact with the actual footage. I was actually attending a fundraiser for Ben McAdams at Lazee's Restaurant, which is operated by Derek and Moody, who are two of the plaintiffs in the film. And I was just during that fundraiser, I was in the back of the room having a conversation with Moody, and

John Dehlin [00:05:26] he said, who appears in the documentary?

James Huntsman [00:05:28] Who appears in the documentary?

John Dehlin [00:05:30] And he makes great hummus. He makes great hummus, as does Derek

James Huntsman [00:05:33] appear in the film. And he asked what I did, and I just said, I'm in film distribution, and the rest is history. So we came in contact with footage of the film, and that's where I met Holly, one of the co directors of the film. And. Geez, that was over two years ago.

Holly Tuckett [00:05:49] Two years ago. It was November of 2016.

James Huntsman [00:05:55] Yeah.

Holly Tuckett [00:05:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:05:56] And is this a topic near and dear to your heart, James?

James Huntsman [00:05:59] Yes, it is. But as a distributor of content, it needs to do more than just have relevance to the distribution company. There needs to be an element in the film that actually you think is going to connect with the public. And in this particular film, we felt that there were three elements. One, just the case law, just the legal journey, that this. That the film covers, number two, the LGBT issue, of course, and that in the state of Utah, and something obviously that's that I'm passionate about.

John Dehlin [00:06:34] You're on the board of Equality Utah?

James Huntsman [00:06:35] I'm on the board of Equality Utah, yes. And lastly, of course, the fact that the Mormon Church was involved and the state of Utah was involved and advocacy. You had all these interesting players that create an interesting backdrop to this story. So we felt that there were multiple elements that would be interesting to an audience, which is why we felt compelled as a distribution company to get involved with the film.

John Dehlin [00:07:01] Excellent. Well, welcome back. Welcome again to Mormon Stories.

James Huntsman [00:07:04] Thank you.

Meet the Filmmakers Behind Church and State

John Dehlin [00:07:06] Okay, Holly Tuckett, tell us about yourself and your role in this movie.

James Huntsman [00:07:11] Okay.

Holly Tuckett [00:07:12] I am a local Utahn, born and raised. I've been a filmmaker since about 2006. I was originally brought onto the project as a producer. And we all picked up cameras right after Judge Shelby's ruling in 2013 December, and basically followed the case. And when we got done with, everything happened so fast for our case that we weren't sure where the story was going to go. And so being that we didn't have a budget, we didn't have, you know, the means to continue on editing, and everybody all had different things that they were focusing on. The team kind of disbanded for a little while. And, you know, in the meantime, everybody's kind of still asking and, you know, how are we going to get this film done? And Derek and Moody and I and Kendall Wilcox had a meeting together and talked about, you know, these are the things that need to happen. We need to find money to be able to pay somebody to help us finish it. And until that kind of happens, it's going to be a slow process. So if we want it to go faster, we have to find money. And, you know, one day in November, I get a phone call from Derek, and he said, I think I've. I think I found the person who's going to help us finish it.

John Dehlin [00:08:45] And Missing Piece, Blue Fox.

Holly Tuckett [00:08:46] Missing Piece, Blue Fox Entertainment.

John Dehlin [00:08:48] And your role in the movie is.

Holly Tuckett [00:08:49] I'm a co. Director. Co director and producer.

John Dehlin [00:08:52] Okay.

Holly Tuckett [00:08:52] And I also did not all the cinematography, but a large portion of the cinematography.

John Dehlin [00:08:58] And for Mormon Stories fans out there, Holly was involved in the Jeremy Runnels episode. In the filming of the Jeremy Runnels episode. At least it was in your house or something.

Holly Tuckett [00:09:07] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:09:07] Is that right?

Holly Tuckett [00:09:07] Yeah, I actually ran the camera. So I ran one of the cameras.

John Dehlin [00:09:11] We have Holly to thank for that epic, historic, top 10 Mormon stories episode.

Holly Tuckett [00:09:15] That was a good episode.

John Dehlin [00:09:17] Thank you for being involved.

James Huntsman [00:09:18] And can I just mention with that, when we mentioned Kendall Wilcox, he's the other co director.

Holly Tuckett [00:09:23] Yeah.

James Huntsman [00:09:23] He's not here with us today.

John Dehlin [00:09:24] I was going to bring him up. So.

Holly Tuckett [00:09:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:26] So we brought Kendall on shortly after he was fired from byu. We're generally Kendall Wilcox fans in terms of a lot of the cool work he's done. We were excited about Far Between. I even personally donated money to Far Between. It never happened. And so I was like, are we ever going to hear from Kendall again? So I was excited to see that you guys got him delivering a film and I think I could see his footprint in the film.

Holly Tuckett [00:09:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:54] So, Kendall, shout out to you. Nice work on the film.

Holly Tuckett [00:09:56] Yeah, yeah. I really think that the relationship between Kendall and I and the different views that we have about the state and Mormonism and just everything, I bet it

John Dehlin [00:10:11] provided a creative tension.

Holly Tuckett [00:10:12] Well, I, and, and, but I think it provided a very good film because we challenged each other, you know, to really give it balance, to really keep it balanced and fair. And, and I, and I. So I think that, you know, it was a good collaboration in that way. You know, it really, it really was. He's. He's been busy working on other things over the, over the last six months or so. And so, you know, he's. He's moving on to other projects.

John Dehlin [00:10:43] All right, thanks, Holly. Good. Welcome to Mormon Stories. Thanks. And Mark, Mark Lawrence, we're going to get to you in just a second, but just tell us just a tiny bit about yourself. Welcome to Mormon Stories, by the way.

Mark Lawrence [00:10:54] Thank you. I'm happy to be here. I don't know what to tell you. I'm here. And this was something that was. I don't know how it happened. It was crazy. It happened so fast. Everything was so unexpected and I just got used people chasing me around with cameras.

John Dehlin [00:11:11] Give us a quick, just like a 30 second bio of your life prior to. You know, what the film tries? This story the film tries to tell. So your background as a human being is what?

Mark Lawrence [00:11:21] Born and raised in Salt Lake City, lived in San Francisco, California from 1982 to 2000. Became very ill. Three years of chemotherapy and cancer. And now I'm fired. And I did something.

John Dehlin [00:11:39] Congratulations. Back in 2013, you were raised Mormon, right?

Mark Lawrence [00:11:43] I left the Mormon Church very, very early.

John Dehlin [00:11:45] Right.

Mark Lawrence [00:11:46] I never had what you would call a testimony. I never fell for the dogma. So it was very easy for me to walk away from the LDS Church.

John Dehlin [00:11:54] But you were gay, right? You are gay. And that was part of your journey. To San Francisco, right?

Mark Lawrence [00:12:00] Yeah, I moved there right at the beginning of the AIDS crisis when everybody said, you must be nuts. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:07] And the film talks about Mark, your early story, and we meet your parents in the film and.

Mark Lawrence [00:12:11] Yeah, that was really fun. So my dad, unfortunately, he passed two years ago.

John Dehlin [00:12:16] Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry.

Mark Lawrence [00:12:18] No, he had advanced Alzheimer's.

John Dehlin [00:12:20] Yeah, it was good and really quick. Who can talk to us about the awards that this film has received just so that, yeah, people can know we're talking about a really good film here.

Holly Tuckett [00:12:31] Back in April, we were at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs, California, and we took the special jury award there for best feature documentary. And then just recently, we were at the Nice International Film Festival in Nice, France, where we took away the best feature documentary for the whole festival.

John Dehlin [00:12:53] So, yeah, this is a quality film. Has my endorsement. All right, so I've got, like a list of 30 questions. We're going to try and break a land speed record for Mormon Stories podcast today. So we're going to jump right in. All right, so one of the things I like about the movie is that it starts chronicling the LDS Church's involvement in the 19th century with sort of advocating non traditional marriage and religious freedom. Anyone want to talk just briefly about that part of the. Of the historical framing in the movie?

Utah's Culture and the Context for Amendment 3

Holly Tuckett [00:13:26] Yeah, for us, it was really important to put a viewer that might not be from here into the context of why it's so unusual that gay marriage got over, you know, that we were able to overturn the ban and actually have gay marriage happen in Utah. And so in order to kind of contextualize it, we really felt that it was necessary to go back and give people a little bit of a history lesson of the struggles that the Mormon Church went through just to move west, like the forces that were making them move west. And the irony, without basically telling the viewer this is the irony, they were moved west because of non traditional marriage. It was a big. It was a big linchpin. And we actually really, I think, do a great job of showing you how fervent that that hatred for Mormons was during that time.

John Dehlin [00:14:41] Shout out to Steve Urquhart, who is featured in this film along with Bob Reese, along with, you know, Taylor Petrie,

Holly Tuckett [00:14:50] David Knowlton, David Nolan there a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:14:52] Greg Prince, like a lot of cool people, a lot of cool people in this film. But I loved. I loved when Steve Urquhart said something like, the. The more the persecution, the truer the church is that the church got this Persecution complex from the way it was treated around polygamy. And it even had a Supreme Court case around marriage in the late 19th century.

Holly Tuckett [00:15:15] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:15:15] So there's a lot of interesting, I don't know. Parallels. Non parallels, right?

Holly Tuckett [00:15:19] Yeah, definitely.

John Dehlin [00:15:20] That's kind of what you're saying.

Holly Tuckett [00:15:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:21] So that's a fun thing to look for in the first place.

Holly Tuckett [00:15:23] And it's subtle. We don't. We don't like.

Mark Lawrence [00:15:26] We don't.

Holly Tuckett [00:15:27] On the nose it. Yeah, we leave. We leave it to the viewer to really kind of take in what they're. What they're seeing and make those connections on their own.

John Dehlin [00:15:36] It's classy and thoughtful that way. So when did the Church, the LDS Church, start to crystallize its rhetoric and its doctrine around homosexuality, as they called it? Mid-50s. Right. When kind of psychology started talking about homosexuality.

Holly Tuckett [00:15:53] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:15:53] Yeah. In the 70s, they started doing things like BYU was having a lot of issues in the 70s. They were going after LGBT people. The police on BYU's campus were going off campus making arrests, and they started their indoctrination program where they would basically, they would get gay students there and torture them. And they still haven't resolved that. That's still.

John Dehlin [00:16:19] That's what the electroshock therapy is going on. And the movie has great, you know, statements from general authorities in General Conference. Spencer W. Kimball, Boyd K. Packer. In fact, there was one. You know, one of the quotes that people may not be familiar with is this quote in General Conference where Boyd K. Packer is telling the story of two missionaries. And I guess there was a gay missionary and a straight missionary who wants to tell the story. It's not a fun quote, but he

Mark Lawrence [00:16:45] basically was for physical violence against the gay Mission.

John Dehlin [00:16:50] He basically says, I'm not advocating. I'm not necessarily recommending violence, but I'm not omitting it either. He's saying this in General Conference, I think, and there's like this chuckle where the audience all kind of laughs with him. And it's basically an apostle of God kind of advocating violence against LGBT people, which kind of takes your breath away.

Holly Tuckett [00:17:10] Yeah. And I think for us, the reason that we put it in the film is a lot of people have read that talk, but they have not seen.

John Dehlin [00:17:18] To see it is different and to

Holly Tuckett [00:17:19] see it is really visceral because you. You, for lack of. I'm just gonna call Boyd K. Packer out on it. God bless your soul. You know, you really get to see him kind of almost egg the crowd. He's enjoying what he's he's enjoying the responses that he's getting, and he's enjoying what he's saying almost. And so it just really speaks to where the Mormon Church was at that time frame on homosexuality and how they were treating homosexuals at that time.

John Dehlin [00:17:57] I'm sure lots of religions were that way. But for those who think of it as God's one true church led by Jesus, you know what I mean? You might want to. You would think the church would have a higher standard for that kind of thing. Maybe, but is really fun and interesting. I mean, sad and terrible, but also.

Holly Tuckett [00:18:15] But also kind of, like, fascinating.

John Dehlin [00:18:17] See that kind of stuff? So I love that part of the movie. So let's start with just. It seems like Hawaii was kind of the big trigger for all of this. And I should just say part of what makes this movie so important is because it's not often that Mormonism in Utah plays a central role in a major Supreme Court victory for social progress. And I think that's kind of what makes this movie so important to Mormons and to Utahns and just to people who care about U.S. history. So just wanted to state that. But was it Hawaii that kind of kicks it off?

Mark Lawrence [00:18:49] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:18:49] Who wants to talk about kind of what happened in Hawaii? And.

Mark Lawrence [00:18:52] Well, it was in the mid-90s, and Hawaii was actually debating marriage equality in Hawaii. They would have been the first state to do it. And the LDS Church stepped right in and did everything they could possibly do to stop that. And so that's where it began.

John Dehlin [00:19:06] And was it legalized in Hawaii first?

Holly Tuckett [00:19:08] No, no.

John Dehlin [00:19:09] But. But. But the Hawaiian Supreme Court was considering it.

Mark Lawrence [00:19:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:13] And so that's when the church kind of like, said, oh, we got to get busy.

Holly Tuckett [00:19:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:17] And wasn't that right around the time that Don H. Oaks was made an apostle?

Mark Lawrence [00:19:22] Yeah, and he has a good, rich history of gay bashing as well. He's got lots of history with that.

John Dehlin [00:19:28] Okay, so wait, Hawaii was what, early 90s?

Holly Tuckett [00:19:31] Hawaii was early mid-90s.

John Dehlin [00:19:32] So I'm wrong about something. Oakes was made an apostle in the early 80s.

Holly Tuckett [00:19:36] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:19:36] And tell us what his first assignment was that you cover in the documentary.

Holly Tuckett [00:19:40] His. His first assignment that. That he was given was to. Because. Because he was a judge for the Utah Supreme Court. You know, he basically is very well versed in all legalese. And so his job was to basically craft a document that would allow the Mormon Church to insert themselves into the legal process that was going on in Hawaii. Because what happened is when they first started to try to get involved in Hawaii Hawaii's court system basically said, you don't have any legal standing to be involved. And they wanted to be involved. So they basically created a document which we all know now as the Proclamation of the Family. And it was a. It was basically a document to give the church legal standing to oppose gay marriage because it was not their way of marrying. And so it became a. It was a legal document that then became doctrine, so.

John Dehlin [00:20:52] Right, exactly. And one. I just think it's important to understand, in some ways, Oaks was really pressing it because his strategy memo in the early 80s became the roadmap for decades of the church's involvement through Hawaii through Prop 8, you know, all the way through this case. And it has to do with legal lobbying at the state level and all the sorts of things they do. But. But yeah, we think about the Proclamation of the Family coming down as a revelation from God to Gordon B. Hinckley or whatever. Really, it started out as a legal brief or a legal memo drafted probably by lawyers at Curtin, McConkey or BYU. And then it morphs into kind of a central document for our church when it really was a legal brief to give us standing.

Holly Tuckett [00:21:36] Yeah. And. And they basically were able then to be on every single, you know, legal brief across the country in every state that was trying to legalize gay marriage.

John Dehlin [00:21:49] And the films just thoughtfully points out the fact that homosexuality isn't mentioned anywhere in the document. So it's able to. It's able to address that issue without ever mentioning it, which I haven't thought about that. Right, yeah. Yeah, that was a good point. Okay, so Hawaii happens. Proclamation on the Family happens. Let's talk about Amendment 3.

Holly Tuckett [00:22:11] Amendment 3.

Mark Lawrence [00:22:12] It was one of several of them in 2004, wasn't it?

Holly Tuckett [00:22:16] I think so, yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:22:17] I think There were about 12 or 13 states that passed similar amendments. And it was something that the George W. Bush administration did to distract people from other things that were going on. They decided they were going to. To get constitutional amendments in all the states that would prohibit gay marriage. It was just somebody's great idea to go out and attack the gay.

John Dehlin [00:22:37] Kind of a Karl Rove strategy for George Bush.

Mark Lawrence [00:22:39] Right, right. And Utah was one of them. They jumped right on board with it too. And it happened overnight. It happened without any notice. It was just there. It happened in several states.

John Dehlin [00:22:49] So Utah prohibits same sex marriage in its state constitution around what year?

Mark Lawrence [00:22:54] 2004.

Holly Tuckett [00:22:55] 2003 or four.

John Dehlin [00:22:56] Okay. And that's kind of where the movie picks up that. Well, I don't know. That rally for the Family. What year did that. Was that footage taken?

Holly Tuckett [00:23:04] The.

John Dehlin [00:23:05] With the National Organization of Marriage and Brian Brown and all that? No, that must be later.

Mark Lawrence [00:23:09] That was.

Holly Tuckett [00:23:09] That was much later.

John Dehlin [00:23:10] Okay, so. So Amendment three happens, and then let's fast forward to. I guess this is where you come in, Mark. Is that right?

Mark Lawrence [00:23:18] Yeah, Yeah, I guess. Okay. I. I was off being sick and kind of trying to keep myself going. So I got really involved in kind of watching politics and what was going on. And it was in 2009, 2010, I started getting better, and I was paying a lot of attention to Proposition 8 in California. And it was just basically, I sat down one day and read Judge Walker's ruling and. And it really hit me. It really affected me. I read it over and over and over, and I thought, well, now we're in the same country here, we have the same federal laws. Why couldn't we do this in Utah?

John Dehlin [00:23:55] Tell us what that ruling said. Basically.

Mark Lawrence [00:23:56] It basically said. Yeah, the ruling basically said that there was no way you could argue against marriage equality without bringing religion into it. And that does not belong in our. In our laws.

John Dehlin [00:24:09] And that thus the title of the film.

Mark Lawrence [00:24:11] Right, right, right.

John Dehlin [00:24:12] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:24:13] So there is no logical way, there is no intellectual way you can oppose marriage equality without introducing religion into it.

John Dehlin [00:24:24] Right. And that got you thinking?

Mark Lawrence [00:24:26] That's what got me thinking, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:27] And I should just say, Mark is Mark. I'm going to just be honest. I've been in circles here and there. You know, I've been around a bit. I'd never heard of Mark Lawrence. Like, I'd been to, you know, Utah pride parades, where I'm sure you were waving at me as you were driving by, sitting in your convertible, but I didn't know who you were. But Mark plays this super important role in making all this happen. I had heard of some of the plaintiffs, but I'd never heard of you. So that's one of the really cool things about this movie, is it tells Mark's story from kind of beginning to end. And he's kind of, for me, was an unsung hero for others. He may be a bit of. Not of a hero. And that's part of the fun of the movie, too, right?

Mark Lawrence [00:25:09] Yeah. I did not expect the film to take that direction. I did. Not at all.

John Dehlin [00:25:13] But it kind of. You're kind of the axle for the film a little bit.

James Huntsman [00:25:18] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:25:18] And I don't know how to take that well, so.

John Dehlin [00:25:21] So what did you do? Just tell us, like, in the summary.

Mark Lawrence [00:25:24] We started off as a little discussion group On Facebook, me and a couple of other people. And then we started meeting at a coffee shop down on for south. And we started talking about it. We went, well, let's go for it. So I just actually started going out and talking to lawyers, and I got laughed out. What was your goal was to find a law firm, a legal team that wanted to handle it, that would do what that would take, make a federal challenge. We knew we could not do this in a Utah state court. We knew we couldn't take it into a state court where we would have no chance.

John Dehlin [00:25:54] So a federal challenge to.

Mark Lawrence [00:25:56] To overturn Amendment 3. Amendment 3, yes.

John Dehlin [00:25:59] And this is in what year you started this?

Mark Lawrence [00:26:01] Right? At the end of 2012. By July of 2012.

Building the Lawsuit to Challenge Utah's Marriage Ban

John Dehlin [00:26:04] So 2012, you're meeting a little restaurant, coffee shop with a few other people, and you're saying, let's take. Let's take on Utah's constitutional amendment.

Mark Lawrence [00:26:13] And I talked to quite a few law firms, and one day I just sat down and sent out a mass email to a whole bunch of legal firms. And one of them responded back to me. Navy and Greenwood responded back to me. They said, what you talk about?

John Dehlin [00:26:26] You weren't some rich power broke necessarily super well connected. You're sort of just.

Mark Lawrence [00:26:31] No, I went and sat down. I said, we will do fundraising. We'll have bake sales and baked cupcakes. We'll still figure out a way of paying you.

John Dehlin [00:26:38] Yeah, because the lawyer says we're not doing this for free. Right?

Mark Lawrence [00:26:42] Right. Yeah. But they wanted to do it. Peggy Tomsuk was very, very animate about taking the case because it was very personal to her. And it was in November of 2012. We hired the law firm. And then all I had to do was go out and find Plintus, Derek and Moody. It was a lot to get them in. I had to go out and hide in their bushes. And no, I really. I had to convince them that it would be okay, that they would do well. They had a business they were running, and they were.

John Dehlin [00:27:17] Tell us just briefly about some of the main plaintiffs and how you picked them and why.

Mark Lawrence [00:27:21] Well, one of them was Kate Call, who was on my board, and she was just somebody. We were talking about this on the Tribune website, comments. And that's where we found her.

John Dehlin [00:27:30] And what was her profile that you liked?

Mark Lawrence [00:27:33] She just came to one of our meetings. I said, the meeting's open. We were meeting at the Salt Lake Library in one of the boardrooms, and people who were interested in what we were doing started coming to these meetings. And we put our original board together, about six people, and Kate Cole was one of them, and she told us her story. She said she had a wife. They were married in Iowa. They wanted their marriage to be recognized here and the state of Utah.

John Dehlin [00:27:56] What else do you look for in a plaintiff? That they're nice, that they're pleasant. No drama. Like, what do you look for?

Mark Lawrence [00:28:01] Yeah, no drama. But something I was looking for in all the plaintiffs is I didn't want anybody with kids. I wanted to keep kids completely out of this because I knew that that's where. How they would defend Amendment 3 and defend this is by bringing kids into it. And I wanted. I don't want to spend two or three weeks in trial trying to. To disprove all the stuff that was gonna be thrown out there about gay people having kids. So none of the plaintiffs were to have kids. Okay. I've met Derek and Moody at a function, and I started talking to them about it.

John Dehlin [00:28:34] What'd you like about them?

Mark Lawrence [00:28:36] They were cute.

John Dehlin [00:28:37] Cute.

Mark Lawrence [00:28:38] They were the couple. They were the ones that you could put in front of the cameras and everybody would love them. And it absolutely worked that way. So Derek and Moody became the face of the whole. The whole cave.

John Dehlin [00:28:49] Let's give them a plug. They have a restaurant or a hummus business. What's that called? How do you spell it?

Holly Tuckett [00:28:54] L, A Z, I Z, I believe,

John Dehlin [00:28:57] buy their hummus to support good local stuff.

James Huntsman [00:29:00] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:29:00] And Derek just recently won the. The Democratic primary for senator.

John Dehlin [00:29:06] Right. Jim debacas. Wasn't there a third couple?

Mark Lawrence [00:29:09] Yes, there was a third couple. That's Cody and Lori. Peggy brought them in. They were friends of Peggy Tomczyk, so she's the one who brought them in.

John Dehlin [00:29:17] Okay. So you start this case and maybe just briefly talk about how it became successful.

Mark Lawrence [00:29:29] We hired the law firm in November of 2012. In March 25th of 2013, we filed the lawsuit, which became known as Kitchen v. Herbert.

John Dehlin [00:29:37] Kitchen v. Herbert Herbert, meaning Governor Herbert of the state of Utah.

James Huntsman [00:29:41] Okay.

Mark Lawrence [00:29:42] That was the very same day that Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I believe, was being overturned by the Supreme Court. Right.

John Dehlin [00:29:52] Okay.

Mark Lawrence [00:29:53] And up to that point, Peggy had tailored most of the case towards what was going on in Proposition 8 in California. But then shortly after that, Edie Winter won her case with Robbie Kaplan, her attorney. And that's when it started changing the direction of our case, and that's when it really started getting interesting. But we were. Up to that point. We filed in March. We were at that point expecting this to be a two or three year project. We thought there would be the summary judgment hearing and then the judge would say, okay, we'll take this to trial. We expected a trial to begin in September of 2013 and then there would be a year long appeal and then another appeal. If we were planning two to three years for this case. And that's what our strategy was. We were thinking about professional witnesses to bring in, laying out the whole thing. My biggest concern was I didn't want the case to have to go to that new federal courthouse downtown because there's no decent self respecting homosexual is going to walk into that ugly damn building.

John Dehlin [00:30:55] Why?

Mark Lawrence [00:30:55] It's so ugly.

John Dehlin [00:30:59] It had the wrong aesthetic either.

Mark Lawrence [00:31:00] Water good in there? No, I, I just. We didn't expect it to happen the way it happened. And that was what we were joking about. We're going to have to go in that building, the one that looks like the big board cube. What happened was it was on December 4th in 2013.

John Dehlin [00:31:15] I was going to say what you didn't envision in your strategy was Judge Robert Shelby. Right, right. Talk about him for a second. I've actually met him.

Mark Lawrence [00:31:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:22] Super nice guy. Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:31:24] We had the summary judgment hearing, which is just a standard procedure. That's when the state came and said, this is ridiculous. Marriage equality is not going to come to Utah. They just wanted to have a hearing and let the judge decide how to go from there. And that's a standard procedure. So the summary judgment hearing was on December 4th in 2013. And I sat there and watched Peggy Thompsick engage with Judge Shelby. And she was brilliant. Now you also have to remember the Attorney General's office was at. It was a disaster. This was during the John Swallow thing. So they were, they were out of control.

John Dehlin [00:31:59] So the Attorney General's office in Utah was being investigated for corruption.

Mark Lawrence [00:32:03] Right, right, right. Okay. So we watched Peggy engaging with, with the judge for about 45 minutes. And then we, we watched these three guys, I call them Larry Curley and Mo from the Attorney General's office make complete asses out of themselves in front of the judge for about a half an hour.

John Dehlin [00:32:18] Tell us what you really think.

Mark Lawrence [00:32:22] We were sitting there. You should have heard the things.

John Dehlin [00:32:25] Wasn't it because they were trying to not bring religion in and the base. They were doing something impossible.

Mark Lawrence [00:32:29] Exactly. They were trying to leave the religion out without mentioning. Exactly. We just sat there. But they were so bad. Judge Shelby, we won. Then at the summary judgment hearing, Judge Shelby said, no, these people are right. We don't have to take this to trial, and we weren't expecting to even have a decision from him until January. And this came out on December 20th. The rumor has it that he accidentally put his ruling in the wrong thing and his clerk got it out.

Holly Tuckett [00:32:59] Oh, is that.

Mark Lawrence [00:33:00] Is that the ruling wasn't. Yeah, we don't know that for sure.

Holly Tuckett [00:33:02] We don't know.

Mark Lawrence [00:33:03] But it was a Friday afternoon, the weekend before Christmas, and there it was. People were downtown or down at the clerk's office getting married.

John Dehlin [00:33:12] I remember that day. People just rushed the county.

Mark Lawrence [00:33:15] We didn't expect this. We had no idea. We had no idea that was going. That was as big of a shock to us as it was anybody else.

John Dehlin [00:33:21] And one of the. One of the things the film talks about is how the. The Attorney General should have filed some sort of stay to keep the marriages from happening, but they didn't.

Mark Lawrence [00:33:31] Procedure.

John Dehlin [00:33:32] If you.

Mark Lawrence [00:33:32] If you have a chance of losing in a hearing, you file a stay early.

John Dehlin [00:33:36] But they didn't do it.

Mark Lawrence [00:33:37] They didn't do it. They.

John Dehlin [00:33:38] Why did they do it?

Mark Lawrence [00:33:39] They had no idea this was going to happen. They actually thought they were going to.

John Dehlin [00:33:42] Hubris.

Holly Tuckett [00:33:43] Yeah, they had a lot of hubris. Yeah, I think they really did.

John Dehlin [00:33:45] They were overconfident.

Holly Tuckett [00:33:46] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:33:48] Who expects Judge Shelby.

Holly Tuckett [00:33:51] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:33:52] Yeah, I.

John Dehlin [00:33:53] Was that Sean Reyes. Is that who the person.

Holly Tuckett [00:33:55] Sean Reyes was? Actually, he came in. He came in, like, aft just after December 20th.

John Dehlin [00:34:03] So that's not his fault that the state wasn't.

Mark Lawrence [00:34:05] Yeah. The first thing that Sean Reyes did was he went to the appeal in Denver.

John Dehlin [00:34:08] Okay.

Mark Lawrence [00:34:09] And that was the first time that we saw him. Okay. But, yeah, this was all during that whole catastrophe at the Attorney General's office. We don't know who was actually in charge of this. Yeah, somebody. They did not file the stay, so they got on an airplane Friday afternoon and flew to Denver to talk to the appeals court about getting a stay in. The appeals court says, no, we don't do that. You got to go back to Utah and ask them. And on Monday morning, the 23rd, we had a hearing with Judge Shelby, and he just sat there and said, no, I'm not going to stay. It. It took them 18 days to get

Holly Tuckett [00:34:41] a state to figure out how to file the state.

Mark Lawrence [00:34:44] So during that period, about 600 couples got married.

John Dehlin [00:34:47] That's awesome.

Mark Lawrence [00:34:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:48] And there were some counties that refused to issue licenses, Right. Utah county, four or five.

Mark Lawrence [00:34:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:54] Utah county was one.

Holly Tuckett [00:34:55] Utah county was definitely one of them. Imagine that.

Mark Lawrence [00:34:59] I think Cache county was one.

Holly Tuckett [00:35:01] It was Cache. It was like some smaller counties to the south.

John Dehlin [00:35:05] Definitely One of the, One of the most interesting parts of the whole movie for me was there's some sort of town hall and there's some dude who stands up and he's like, I want you to know to all you homosexuals, we mean you no harm. And then he goes on to talk about, like, how homosexual marriage is not innate. Don't trample on our God given rights. We don't watch your dang parades and teachings in our schools. That was really great footage.

Holly Tuckett [00:35:33] Yeah, yeah, he was, he's. He was a very, very passionate human being.

James Huntsman [00:35:40] His red shirt said it all.

John Dehlin [00:35:42] Yeah, he had a red shirt.

James Huntsman [00:35:45] So remember, John, when I first saw that footage, you and Kendall would probably recall the question I had for you, which was, is this footage cleared to be in the dock? Right. Because you have to. And my second question was, was he even aware that this was being filmed? Because I found the whole meeting and the, and the rhetoric so outrageous. I thought, this is. I mean, did you have cameras, like hidden in your glasses or something? And Kendall. And you said, no, they were there. The cameras were there. The cameras were there, no problem. And I was, I was blown away. I said, great. What great footage.

Mark Lawrence [00:36:22] Kendall went places with his camera. I would never have gone.

John Dehlin [00:36:25] Yeah, so shout out to Kendall, right? Yeah.

Holly Tuckett [00:36:28] Kendall Torben, myself, Andrew James, all four of us went to many, many tasty rallies just like that one.

Mark Lawrence [00:36:39] Well, there was the big talk. I mean, this is what I experienced, what I went through myself as I was standing there in the county clerk's office. And there were all these people in a line getting married. Now these are people who had no idea that morning what was going to happen to them and how their lives were going to change. These were people who had no idea. They were thinking about going out and shoveling the snow in their driveways and finishing up their Christmas shopping. And here they were, people who have been told all their lives, no, you can't. No, you won't. You are not good enough. You cannot have this. Their lives have changed and they're all there. The energy in that room was so overwhelming. I'm just saying there was people. You can't describe it, but you capture it. You capture the movie. Yeah. And then you have the people who are supposedly the religious community down there at the Oak or the county building. They're down there like the enraged villagers with pitchforks and torches and they are screaming and calling names. Lynn Wardle.

Holly Tuckett [00:37:46] Yeah, Lynn Wordle was speaking out.

Mark Lawrence [00:37:48] He's attacking Judge Shelby. He's not attacking the decision. They're going after the judge and all of them. These are the people. This is the religious community down there. Full of nothing but pure hate.

John Dehlin [00:38:00] Yeah. Kind of with the veins popping out of their neck and the trembling. Yeah.

James Huntsman [00:38:04] And so I was their world.

Mark Lawrence [00:38:05] I think I was in there on the other side. So all this happened. I mean, there was a chain. It's like a factory, a marriage factory going on there. And it's all like mayors down there marrying people. And it's not. I've never experienced anything like that in my life.

John Dehlin [00:38:23] There's a. There's a quote that really beautifully summarizes that moment. It's. Kids are going to wake up. Finish the quote for me. Kids are not going to wake up.

Mark Lawrence [00:38:32] That's someone that came up to me. Remember when I said that I didn't want to bring kids into this? That's when I realized I was wrong, because that's what it was all about. I was standing there watching this, and a friend of mine says, you. Do you know how many kids are going to wake up tomorrow morning and their families are going to be normal and equal? The parents are going to be married. And that really hit me. I knew that's exactly what it was about with kids. And I was wrong to feel that way. And that was. It was a. It was an emotional. And it was a very, very difficult day. But I'll never forget it.

John Dehlin [00:39:08] I remember.

Holly Tuckett [00:39:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:39:09] I wish I wasn't in Cache Valley at the time, going to grad school. I would have been there. So something that was interesting. Utah emerges victorious. But then. But then, like, external to Utah, LGBT groups start getting mad at Utah. Like, that was a surprise. They're basically saying, you guys shouldn't have done this. Talk about, why did that happen?

Mark Lawrence [00:39:28] Well, that didn't happen until before the ruling.

John Dehlin [00:39:32] Yes.

Holly Tuckett [00:39:32] Right after.

Mark Lawrence [00:39:33] After Judge Shelby's ruling, all of the people who had been trying to stop us had been begging us to. To quit. All of a sudden, we had all these new friends crawling out of the woodwork.

Holly Tuckett [00:39:45] Before the Dec. 20 ruling, Peggy and Jim got heavily inundated with calls from all sorts of organizations, basically saying, you're messing with our national strategy. We have a strategy that's reasonable, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but Kate Kendall says it best. She's like, you know, even the smallest towns, or the people most unlikely want to be a part and want to want to change their community. And what Peggy and Jim decided is they didn't care about the national strategy. They cared about this case, their couples, and the state of Utah. And They. They didn't. They decided, we're not gonna. We're not gonna bother with.

Mark Lawrence [00:40:39] We never considered that. We never considered this. We made this about Utah, and we never thought about what was going to go outside the state. I didn't even realize till we were halfway through this case that since it was a federal case, that we affected four other states as well. Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas. This ruled for them as well, because

Holly Tuckett [00:40:58] they're in the same circuit.

John Dehlin [00:41:00] Circuit.

James Huntsman [00:41:01] Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Mark Lawrence [00:41:02] There's actually. Well, New Mexico had actually passed marriage equality in the Supreme Court.

James Huntsman [00:41:06] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:41:07] So they. They weren't half in on this, but we didn't think about that. We did not consider that at all.

Legal Twists and Key Moments in the Case

John Dehlin [00:41:13] So one of the unexpected turns in the movie is that the attorneys that got you the victory with Judge Shelby were sort of dismissed after, you know, going to the next level. So what was the next level after Judge Shelby?

Holly Tuckett [00:41:29] Judge Shelby was. That was where Peggy argued. Peggy still argued.

John Dehlin [00:41:34] What was that level?

Holly Tuckett [00:41:36] So the district certificate. So district court here, Circuit circuit, and then Supreme Court.

John Dehlin [00:41:43] Okay.

Mark Lawrence [00:41:44] So.

Holly Tuckett [00:41:45] So when. When they won at the district court level, when Judge Shelby made his ruling and overturned Amendment 3, the appeal happened, and NCLR called and said, we.

John Dehlin [00:42:01] It tells you that is. And why that made people mad.

Holly Tuckett [00:42:03] That's the national center for Lesbian Rights. And why it made people mad is

John Dehlin [00:42:07] because I just have to say there's this moment in the film where it just cuts. It cuts to Mark, and all he does is he goes like this. And there's nothing that's said other than Mark just going like this in reference to NCLR being brought on.

Holly Tuckett [00:42:21] Right.

John Dehlin [00:42:21] And I don't mean to bring up, like, sensitive stuff.

Holly Tuckett [00:42:24] Yeah, no, it's. But that's. It's. It's. You know, we. We showed all the. All the warts because that's interesting.

John Dehlin [00:42:33] Why were you mad about NCLR?

Mark Lawrence [00:42:34] Well, on January 5th, me and Derek and Moody went up to Snowbird and met with Dustin Lance Black. Do you know who he is?

John Dehlin [00:42:42] Filmmaker for Mill. Right, right.

Mark Lawrence [00:42:45] And Jim debacis was there, and Troy Williams was there, and we had this great conversation with Lance, and he asked me, he says, why don't you turn the case over to my team, my legal team, who is boys and Olson, who was handling Proposition 8. He says, we'll cover your legal bills. And I said, no, that's not what this is about. This is about this little all volunteer, nonprofit organization hires this little bootcamp.

John Dehlin [00:43:14] It's David and Goliath for you. It was David and Goliath.

Mark Lawrence [00:43:16] It's about us. It's about Utah. It's about us. We're not going to turn this over to a national organization. That's how you felt.

John Dehlin [00:43:22] That's how you felt. How did you. Did you.

Holly Tuckett [00:43:25] Well, I think that what what happened was is that Magleby and Greenwood, you know, realized that they do civil litigation, which is not civil rights litigation. They do civil litigation. So they argue big cases for big money, big business and they're really successful. I mean, that's why Mark sent them. One of the letters that he sent was because he knew that they were really successful law firm, but they had not ever argued at the circuit court level in a civil rights case.

John Dehlin [00:44:04] So it's a reasonable case. It's a reasonable decision to say, let's get an expert who's seasoned, kind of like the David Boies at the Supreme Court level, the Ted Olson's. Let's get someone who's got experience, even the Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Let's get someone who's experienced adjudicating at that level.

Mark Lawrence [00:44:19] Right. And that would have been fine. But what happened was five days after my meeting with Dustin Lance Black, I had a donor called me up and he was furious because we have turned the case over to a national organization. And I said, what are you talking about? And he told me NCLR went on NCLR's website and there's Derek and Moody and they're going, look at our plaintiffs in Utah.

John Dehlin [00:44:40] Were the Utah lawyers disappointed or were they like totally?

Holly Tuckett [00:44:43] No. Well, Peggy had a. Peggy has a relationship with Kate Kendall who is the executive director of nclr.

John Dehlin [00:44:50] So they were not like super disappointed or.

Mark Lawrence [00:44:53] No, they're the ones who brought them in. Peggy's the one who brought in Clr in because it was Peggy to case, but we didn't know about it.

John Dehlin [00:45:00] Okay.

James Huntsman [00:45:01] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:45:01] And I was getting donors that are calling me up and wanting to know why we had turned the case over to a national organization and I didn't even know about it. Basically that's when we got picked up and tossed under the bus.

John Dehlin [00:45:11] Right.

Mark Lawrence [00:45:12] So.

John Dehlin [00:45:13] So I'm sorry about that.

Mark Lawrence [00:45:14] Okay. Things worked out.

John Dehlin [00:45:17] Let's talk about Gene Shar. Sher. I remember when he got picked.

Mark Lawrence [00:45:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:22] Tell us about him. He's. He's a bit of a character.

Holly Tuckett [00:45:25] He's a character, you know, D.C. lawyer, Mormon guy. D.C. mormon guy. He leaves. He leaves his very successful law practice basically to come and get his butt kicked. To come and get his butt kicked by a non civil rights attorney litigator. It was really Quite something.

Mark Lawrence [00:45:46] I'm almost convinced that they were actually on our side. His arguments were so bad.

John Dehlin [00:45:51] Okay, wait, which level did he argue at?

Holly Tuckett [00:45:53] He argued at the circuit court.

Mark Lawrence [00:45:54] The appeal.

Holly Tuckett [00:45:55] Yeah. So in Denver.

John Dehlin [00:45:56] We're bringing him in the right time.

Holly Tuckett [00:45:58] Yeah. Okay, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:45:59] And what was he like? What was his strategy?

Holly Tuckett [00:46:01] His strategy was basically to prove that gay people are pedophiles, that they're deviants, that they're incapable of creating family situations.

James Huntsman [00:46:18] I think his strategy, unlike yours at the beginning, was to focus and bring in the children.

Holly Tuckett [00:46:23] So

Mark Lawrence [00:46:25] he did get really ridiculous. He actually said that heterosexual men who were married, who had families would leave their families and leave their children because marriage doesn't mean anything to them anymore. And I think that's a huge assault on me, the straight male community. And then he even started coming up with numbers. There would be 900,000 abortions.

Holly Tuckett [00:46:47] Yeah, he was bringing in like really ridiculous statistics.

John Dehlin [00:46:50] The former bishop. Right. Former Mormon bishop.

Holly Tuckett [00:46:52] I believe he was a former Mormon bishop.

John Dehlin [00:46:54] And it's, you know, on the one hand, I guess a lawyer should do everything they can to win a case. On the other hand, you would kind of hope that there'd be a little more. What?

Holly Tuckett [00:47:03] Well, to me, when you're, when you're a representative of the law, you look at all the sides and his view, when he wrote his email to say goodbye to his firm, he literally put in there that it was like a calling for God. He was on a mission for God to defend this case for the state of Utah. And so to me, that's inserting a personal bias into your job as a litigator instead of looking at legal precedents as a litigator. And so, you know, that's where I think he went way. Right. And the justices said, we're going to just kind of rest over here. And it was just enough for us to get a decision in favor of overturning Amendment three.

John Dehlin [00:48:01] So he lost.

Holly Tuckett [00:48:02] He lost.

James Huntsman [00:48:03] And I think it's important to sort of recognize that that's why this issue became so emotional and so heated. Because on a local issue, on a local level within the state of Utah, it's not a problem. Right. Because generally people within the court system and everything else, they're kind of on the same page. And you don't need to have some type of sort of non religious argument. When it went to a federal court in the district court in the state of Utah and then up to the circuit court in Denver, then you have the national organizations, everyone getting involved, saying, hey, wait a second, that's you know, we presented Mark's point of view in the film, but these other organizations who we didn't cover as much because that's not this movie, they also had a valid argument to want to take over this case because we're talking about federal law here. This wasn't just a local issue to central. This case had become a federal law heading towards the Supreme Court. And if it lost, the case was lost. It had huge ramifications. So that's why this sort of local pioneer team, you know, charging forth into sort of rewriting federal law.

Mark Lawrence [00:49:17] We never really even considered exactly the national consequences.

James Huntsman [00:49:22] It was huge. And then you had these local sort of lawyers and. And we respect all the people involved in all their arguments and points of view. But when you take those arguments outside of, say, central Utah and you make those arguments in Denver in a circuit court, it becomes very problematic. And I think that's what sort of caused the case. And then, of course, when it went to the Supreme Court, they just said, we're not even going to.

John Dehlin [00:49:46] They didn't even consider it.

Holly Tuckett [00:49:47] No. Sonia Sotomayor read the judge's findings and their decision and upheld it. And literally. So we went from having a marriage ban in 2013 to the end of what was was October, wasn't it? Of 2014. So it wasn't even.

Mark Lawrence [00:50:15] Well, no, it was in June because that's when the Supreme Court denied.

Holly Tuckett [00:50:19] Denied cert. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:21] And when it does that, it's like a ruling. It's basically saying that that that affects all states in the country at that point.

Holly Tuckett [00:50:28] Well, no, for it. It affects all the states in that circuit.

Mark Lawrence [00:50:32] That circuit.

John Dehlin [00:50:33] But when Sotomayor rules.

Holly Tuckett [00:50:35] Right.

John Dehlin [00:50:35] When soda still in the circuit.

Holly Tuckett [00:50:37] It was still in the circuit.

John Dehlin [00:50:38] Okay, okay.

James Huntsman [00:50:39] But that probably was also problematic for other states and other circuits who maybe had a similar case or similar argument. They realized, okay, this is even more problematic. Let's just stop right now.

Mark Lawrence [00:50:53] This case had a national indication beyond

John Dehlin [00:50:56] those five or six.

Mark Lawrence [00:50:57] It was heavily quoted in Obergefell, the final case that did make it to the Supreme Court. I think the Supreme Court looked at our case and they probably saw how ridiculous the state's argument was and they said, we're not even going to bother with this. So they sent it back and that was it. We were done. So we had marriage equality in June of 2013.

Holly Tuckett [00:51:16] 2014.

Mark Lawrence [00:51:17] 2014. But this whole thing ended up taking less than a year.

James Huntsman [00:51:21] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:22] Super fast.

Holly Tuckett [00:51:22] Super fast.

John Dehlin [00:51:23] And in Gene shares defense, he was doing the impossible. He was trying to justify a legal position Based on religion without invoking religion. And how do you do that?

Mark Lawrence [00:51:35] You can't.

John Dehlin [00:51:35] You can't. So I don't know if you intended it, and I don't know if this is just my opinion, but in some ways, Reyes, Attorney General Reyes, comes off a little bit as the bad. A bit of a bad guy. I don't know if that's intentional. Sean Reyes. It's ironic because I actually have met Shaun Reyes once and it was at a private screening of Love Loud in Park City for Sundance. So when he was there, because his wife. I went to school with his wife, so I said hi to her. She's like, oh, I'm married to this guy, Sean Reyes. I'm like, oh, I've heard of him, but I had no idea that he was kind of negatively implicated in LGBT stuff. But talk about his kneeling down and what he said and when and where.

Mark Lawrence [00:52:20] We were sitting there. I was sitting right next to the plane on the front row in Denver.

John Dehlin [00:52:24] In Denver.

Mark Lawrence [00:52:25] We were right behind Peggy, who was sitting at the attorney's table.

John Dehlin [00:52:28] In what room? Or this is in the courtroom in Denver. After or before the ruling?

James Huntsman [00:52:34] Before.

Mark Lawrence [00:52:35] This is before the hearing.

Holly Tuckett [00:52:36] Before the hearing?

John Dehlin [00:52:36] Before the hearing. And the plaintiffs are there.

Mark Lawrence [00:52:39] The plaintiffs are there. And we're just kind of talking amongst. He came in and sat down and he kneeled down in front of all of them. He says, I just want you to know that you shouldn't take this personally. It's not about you. This is about the law.

John Dehlin [00:52:52] Now somebody might say, well, that's really sweet. He's trying to say, I'm not trying to hurt you. You know, we love you.

Mark Lawrence [00:52:57] Everybody just looked at him and it's like, you gotta be kidding. And we just. I couldn't believe it.

John Dehlin [00:53:03] Explain to the straight people what. What's wrong about that?

Mark Lawrence [00:53:08] This is a guy who's fighting against their civil rights, our civil rights. He's telling us we are second class citizens and that we need to keep in our place. And we're not supposed to take that personally.

John Dehlin [00:53:20] Yeah, it's just legal.

Holly Tuckett [00:53:22] It's just legal that you can't marry the person you love.

Mark Lawrence [00:53:25] Right.

James Huntsman [00:53:26] So.

John Dehlin [00:53:27] But. But, you know, from his perspective, he was trying to be sweet, wasn't he?

Mark Lawrence [00:53:30] Yeah, he didn't make it. He failed. He failed miserably.

John Dehlin [00:53:35] But yeah, it's. It's a powerful part of the movie.

Holly Tuckett [00:53:38] It is.

John Dehlin [00:53:39] Because I think he's a sweet, nice guy and, you know, sweet, nice guy. And I think he was trying to be lovely.

Holly Tuckett [00:53:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:53:44] And he came off as being deeply offensive, unfortunately.

Holly Tuckett [00:53:47] But I think. I think the lesson in that is that when you're in a place of privilege, you know, you have to really think about how you are talking to somebody who's not in that place of privilege. And the things that you say and how you say them carry more weight because of your privilege. And we're. We're in that right now with the whole entire country. I mean, I really feel like our movie is still relevant because of. Because of those sorts of topics.

Mark Lawrence [00:54:24] Yeah.

James Huntsman [00:54:26] And I think to Sean's defense, I think he was trying to say something to sort of reach out, I think. So. He works for the state. He was named as a defendant. His office. So it's his office and the governor's office renamed as defendants. So Herbert and Sean Race.

Holly Tuckett [00:54:45] Yep.

James Huntsman [00:54:47] I mean, guy was in an impossible position. And maybe that was his way. I don't know. I've never talked to him, but maybe that was his way of sort of saying, trying to extend that olive branch.

Holly Tuckett [00:54:57] Absolutely.

James Huntsman [00:54:57] You know, and it, of course, didn't work. It was interpreted maybe incorrectly. But, you know, he was in a very difficult situation, which, again, for us, stepping back as a distributor behind all this and trying to find interesting stories, those are those awkward, complex relationships that we often find ourselves in that make great entertainment.

Holly Tuckett [00:55:18] Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:55:21] So another, like, kind of like punch you in the gut moment of the film is, Mark, when you show up at your kind of storage unit and then they talk, you know, you get the picture that, like, spoiler alert. Well, I, you know, I tried to pick these questions to make people want to see the movie because we are talking about poignant. I don't want to ever do a podcast where I assume you have to read a book or watch a movie to enjoy it.

Holly Tuckett [00:55:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:55:48] But I also, I'm. I'm optimistic that this is going to make people want to come see the movie. So come freaking see the movie. But there's this scene where you're, like, talking about whether, you know, after it's victorious, but after there was some serious conflict amongst the parties involved where you're sort of, I don't know, not feeling too good about the whole thing.

Mark Lawrence [00:56:10] No, I lost a lot. I gave up a lot. And I don't know if I'd do it again. I don't think I would now.

John Dehlin [00:56:18] That's mind boggling to me because this had. When do you have a chance to be involved in anything that has national implications for so many people?

Mark Lawrence [00:56:28] That's true. I feel like I did Something that made a difference.

John Dehlin [00:56:30] Like, if you die, you. You did this, right?

Mark Lawrence [00:56:33] Yeah. Maybe they'll name the street after me or something. I don't know. I dare to do that. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the whole case. I was with this group of people, and we were very tight, like a family. The attorneys, the plaintiffs. Everything was going well. And then as soon as the best thing that could happen happened, we were tossed under the bus, and they were done with us. And we worked hard. One of the things that I wish was more in the movie is the fact that this wasn't all about me. It was about my organization, Restore Humanity. I have a board of directors, and they worked damn hard for this. And the attorneys didn't even know them by name, and they didn't get any recognition for anything in this, and I could not have done them without them. Matt Spencer, my communications director, I couldn't have done this without them, and they don't get any recognition. But I just. I have mixed feelings about it. I don't know if I'll ever come to terms with it.

John Dehlin [00:57:33] You know? You know what? I've tried to be a part of good things happening sometimes in the world, and I don't think I've ever been involved with something good where, like, it doesn't turn to kind of internecine warfare, where, you know, this is just, like, an unfortunate part of activism, where kind of sometimes activists eat their own.

Holly Tuckett [00:57:50] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:57:51] And sometimes it's a circle firing circle where you're all firing on each other. And I don't know if you can totally ever escape that.

Mark Lawrence [00:57:58] It's not.

John Dehlin [00:57:58] Not trying to, like, minimize what you're saying. I'm just saying I can relate.

Mark Lawrence [00:58:02] If there was anything I was going to take away from this that I would want, especially young people today to know is you should at least take one opportunity in your life to go out and change something.

John Dehlin [00:58:11] Just do something now that's positive.

Mark Lawrence [00:58:13] Yeah, that's positive. And then get the hell out of

John Dehlin [00:58:16] it before it gets bad, before it destroys you.

Mark Lawrence [00:58:20] And don't get. Don't get lawyers involved in it.

John Dehlin [00:58:24] Unless it's a lawsuit. Then you kind of don't have a choice.

Holly Tuckett [00:58:27] You don't have a choice.

Reflections on the Film's Ending and Ongoing Stakes

John Dehlin [00:58:28] I was struck this week by. By Supreme Court Justice Kennedy's resignation.

Holly Tuckett [00:58:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:58:35] Like, he's been the swing vote on LGBT issues, and now he's gone. Do any of you have fears that this could be reversed? Is that even possible? Have you thought about that? Do we know?

Holly Tuckett [00:58:46] I'm trying not to think about it.

Mark Lawrence [00:58:47] There's a lot of people right now that are scared.

Holly Tuckett [00:58:50] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:58:50] And very, very worried. It would be a difficult process. It would have to come up through the courts. Somebody would have to prove to the Supreme Court that marriage equality is interfering with their civil rights. With their rights. But who knows what could happen? It could happen.

James Huntsman [00:59:04] I think it'd be tough. It would be.

Holly Tuckett [00:59:06] There's been a lot of talk on about it, that it would be tough, that it. That it wouldn't be something that they.

Mark Lawrence [00:59:13] The Supreme Court wants to see together and go, hey, let's overturn something they don't do. It doesn't work.

Holly Tuckett [00:59:18] That's not how it works.

Mark Lawrence [00:59:18] They don't like overturning their decision.

John Dehlin [00:59:20] Let's hope.

Holly Tuckett [00:59:21] Yeah.

Mark Lawrence [00:59:22] I mean, they could go after Roe v. Wade, too. Yeah. It could all happen. And that's what, 50 years old now.

Holly Tuckett [00:59:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:29] I'm just saying the story may not be over. Were you gonna say something?

James Huntsman [00:59:31] No, I was just gonna say when you were talking about the ending of the film and how sort of ending. And we had a lot of discussions with Kendall, Holly, and Torment about that ending, because generally you like to end on a number. And in this particular case at least, I was advocating that we end with Mark. But there was actually another element which is more subtle in the film. And I maybe would have argued that there's more. There's another element that actually is also gut punching, and that is because of the success of legalization of gay marriage in the state of Utah, the Mormon Church issued a new policy thereafter about homosexuals within Mormonism and their children. The famous November policy, 2015. Yes. I think that policy was a direct result of the legalization of gay marriage in Utah. And so for me, having. Spoiler alert. Having the film end with sort of Mark's sort of tragic perspective and then the church's new policy that then sort of opens the door and says, okay, where are we now within the state of Utah as a nation on rights for all of our citizens, and what does the future hold? Because, you know, so that. For me, I can sometimes argue that maybe the LGBT community within the state of Utah maybe is worse off because of the legalization of gay marriage in the eyes of the Mormon Church and Mormon culture and Utah culture outside of the state of Utah. I don't think it's an issue.

Mark Lawrence [01:01:06] But you're absolutely right, because they've come up with several policies since then.

Holly Tuckett [01:01:10] Yeah.

James Huntsman [01:01:11] And the November 1st was very. As you know, John, you've. You've discussed that a lot on Your podcast. There's a lot of members in the church that struggle with that. Some have left the church, some stay in and try to deal with it. But it's a big, big issue.

John Dehlin [01:01:23] Major issues could wipe out almost an entire generation or two of the church. Yeah, it's a big deal.

Holly Tuckett [01:01:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:01:30] And it's, and it's related to what you guys did, so it's super cool. All right, so couple closing questions. We're, we're coming up on the end. What was the hardest part about making this movie? And, and you know.

Holly Tuckett [01:01:47] You tired opening your checkbook?

James Huntsman [01:01:49] No, I would say funding, Finding funding

Holly Tuckett [01:01:54] was almost three year process.

John Dehlin [01:01:58] Okay.

Holly Tuckett [01:01:59] So funding was very challenging. You know, we won. So I feel like the, the gay community was, had fatigue and they were like, we're not, we're not interested in helping you tell the story right now financially. They might, they were definitely interested in it being told because I had so many people asking, when's this going to be done? When's this going to be done? When's your movie going to be done? You know, but we would have fundraisers. I felt like restore our humanity and Mark, sometimes we would have fundraisers and no one would show up and you know, we would make asks and no one would, you know, take us up on our ask. So we went through a couple of times of trying to connect with producers to help us and it didn't work out. And so James. This movie would not be made without James.

James Huntsman [01:02:59] Mark, you got the whole. Okay, well, I don't know if that's necessarily true. I would say. While she's getting a tissue. Thank you. Probably the most difficult thing for me was probably patient and having to. Documentaries take a lot longer to make than narrative films and there are a lot of complex storylines that we're trying to cover in the film. The Mormon Church case law, these interesting characters, people, real stories in the film. And to get all those to weave together inside of 80 minutes is very, very difficult. And there's a lot of stories you can't tell. There's a lot of stories so many people issued. This is a local issue. That many people in the community were involved that aren't mentioned in the film. And we. That's tough to sort of say you were involved in this, but we couldn't fit you in the movie. And so we had the push, we had the funding, we had the distribution in place. And still that was over two years before sitting down and now having a little, little theatrical release which we're very proud of.

Holly Tuckett [01:04:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:02] What were the best parts about making

Holly Tuckett [01:04:03] this movie, being able to tell Mark's story, that was important to me.

Mark Lawrence [01:04:08] Really. I don't know. I just. I am normally a very, very private person and I feel really exposed.

John Dehlin [01:04:20] And you're not super proud to have a movie made about you?

Mark Lawrence [01:04:25] I'm proud of a lot of things, but I don't mind. I have mixed feelings about it. I. I feel really exposed.

John Dehlin [01:04:34] Has it been hard on you personally?

Mark Lawrence [01:04:36] No, not really. No. I mean, working with these people and stuff. I'm glad the story is told. It needs to be told. It's part of Utah's history now and it belongs in the history. And people need to know what it was about. And I'm really proud that that story is being told.

John Dehlin [01:04:55] You guys should be proud. All three of you should be proud and everyone else involved in the movie. I was. I loved it. So what's the future for Blue Fox Entertainment?

James Huntsman [01:05:08] Well, the future for Blue Fox Entertainment will be to continue to find great stories, both documentaries and narratives and continue to release them to the public in your homes and in movie theaters of across the country. So we'll continue to plow on and, and look for terrific stories.

How to Watch Church and State

John Dehlin [01:05:27] So how do people watch Church and State? The. The website. I will just say it now. Churchandstate documentary.com. how will people. Do we even know yet how people will be able to watch it? I guess the first thing is come to the screenings.

Mark Lawrence [01:05:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:40] Talk about the screenings. When are they.

Holly Tuckett [01:05:42] So we're in the theaters at the Broadway starting July 13th.

John Dehlin [01:05:46] That's downtown Salt Lake State City on 3rd South.

Holly Tuckett [01:05:50] Yep. And we'll. We'll be running. The film will be running just like every other film that runs at the Broadway for a week. We're hoping to be held over maybe.

John Dehlin [01:06:01] I don't know, maybe if people all come out and support it, it'll be held over for another week or two.

Holly Tuckett [01:06:05] Yeah, yeah. So we're, we're just. That's gonna be for Utahns it the best way to see it. In my opinion. It's. It looks way better on the big screen than it does watching it on

John Dehlin [01:06:20] your device with the big Blue Fox Entertainment text across during the whole freaking screening.

James Huntsman [01:06:27] Come on, we gotta watermark those so you don't send them out to all your friends.

Mark Lawrence [01:06:31] Now my mom is in the film too, and her comment when she saw.

John Dehlin [01:06:34] She's a sweetheart, by the way.

Mark Lawrence [01:06:36] Thank you. But when we watched it, she looked at me and she said, why didn't you iron that shirt? So you get to see me with this shirt that's all wrinkled up and my mom.

John Dehlin [01:06:45] Show them your tat, man. That's an epic tat right there. You're not messing around?

Mark Lawrence [01:06:49] No, no. It goes on here and here off my head.

John Dehlin [01:06:53] It's got a little Mike Tyson going on there.

Mark Lawrence [01:06:56] Anyway, hopefully my mom will be there on Friday the 13th and she'll nag at me about the show.

John Dehlin [01:07:00] That's July 13th.

Holly Tuckett [01:07:01] July 13th.

John Dehlin [01:07:02] And the Mormon Story screening.

Holly Tuckett [01:07:04] Mormon Story screening will be on July 8th.

John Dehlin [01:07:06] 18th. July 18pm, 7pm we'll do a Q and A afterwards. We'll try and get some cool, fun people there.

Holly Tuckett [01:07:13] And right now, people can go online and order those tickets. So far, they only have the 7pm Screenings listed. And that's because we have the special event on 13th, which is a Q and A panel after the screening and, and the premiere and then on the 18th. The Mormon stories podcast hasn't been listed on their website yet, but that. That time frame is held out for. For your benefit. So go get those tickets because people have already been purchasing tickets in that seven o' clock time frame the whole entire week.

Mark Lawrence [01:07:52] All right.

Holly Tuckett [01:07:53] Because it's available.

James Huntsman [01:07:54] And after our theatrical run here, it'll be available nationwide August 10th on all digital streaming on demand devices and platforms across the country. So if you're not in the state of Utah or in Salt Lake and you want to see the film, you'll be able to. You'll just have to wait until August.

Holly Tuckett [01:08:11] August, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:13] Okay, so the. The movie is churchandstate documentary.com. everyone needs to see it and to tell everyone else about it. Again, come to the Mormon stories screening July 18th or any of the other screenings at the Broadway. And I guess most importantly, James, Holly, and Mark, thank you so much for coming on Mormon Stories podcast.

Mark Lawrence [01:08:38] Thank you.

Holly Tuckett [01:08:39] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:08:39] You guys are lovely.

James Huntsman [01:08:40] Appreciate it.

Holly Tuckett [01:08:41] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:08:41] Yeah. Good luck.

Holly Tuckett [01:08:42] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:08:43] Yeah. And just a quick thank you to all our listeners for checking in. Thanks to all our donors that make Mormon Stories podcast possible.

James Huntsman [01:08:51] Please.

John Dehlin [01:08:51] If you want to support this type of programming, go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button at the top right of the screen. 10, 15, 20, 100 bucks a month, whatever you can afford helps make this programming possible. So we appreciate the support. Check out our events page for workshops and retreats coming, you know, to a city near you to support people in faith transition. And a huge thanks and shout out to Tim Curry, Cody Layton, Amy Grubbs, and Sharon Price, along with our board for all the. All the things they do to make this podcast and everything else we do possible. Take care everybody and join us again soon for another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org. Wiser is a song written and performed by Mormon Stories listener Russell Ash, a message intended for his children to have love and kindness be their guiding star.

James Huntsman [01:10:09] Sa.

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