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The ad was produced by Fred Karger, challenging the church's tax-exempt status because of its political activity.
Cable TV provider Comcast has agreed to air gay activist Fred Karger's commercial challenging the Mormon Church's tax-exempt status.
Philadelphia-based Comcast came to the agreement Wednesday after Karger said he would change an unsubstantiated statement in the ad and provided substantiation for four other statements the cable company had questioned, The Salt Lake Tribune reports. The ad will air in Utah, where the church is based.
The one unsubstantiated claim said that the church, formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has more than $1 trillion in assets. "Karger said that portion of the ad will say something to the effect that it is thought that the church has that much in assets," the Tribune reports.
The spot also features young former Mormons asking for tips regarding the church's "vast business holdings" and "secret political activities," according to The Inquirer of Philadelphia. It directs viewers to go to a website, MormonTips.com, to share the information.
Karger is a veteran political strategist who worked in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. In George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign, he helped create an attack ad on Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, featuring a Massachusetts prisoner Willie Horton, who raped a woman while on a weekend furlough. The intent of the ad was to portray Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, as soft on crime because of the furlough program.
But Karger, who worked for those Republicans from the closet, finally came out in 2006 and turned his attention to LGBT rights. He highlighted the Mormon Church's role in passing California's anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 in 2008 -- the church hierarchy urged members in California to vote for the proposition, and those everywhere to donate money to the campaign to pass it. He also has campaigned against the antigay National Organization for Marriage.
Karger himself ran in the Republican presidential primaries in 2012, becoming the first openly gay Republican presidential candidate to get his name on the ballot in several states.
He has continued to denounce the Mormon Church for its antigay policies, which it has toughened in recent years. It not only opposes same-sex relationships -- expecting Mormons with such "attractions" to refrain from acting on them -- it has begun denying baptism to children being raised by same-sex couples, until they turn 18, and then only if they are no longer living with that couple and denounce their relationship.
And now Karger says he is gathering information on the church's political activities to build a case against its tax exemption. "We're really going to dig," he told the Tribune in December.
The church's anti-LGBT policies are deeply harmful, he said in that interview, especially to young people. "Somebody has got to fight for these kids," he said. "It's inexcusable, the damage and suffering the church has caused for so many of these families."
