What seems to be the main point against anti-Mormon bigotry that Mechaman mentioned is that there are liberal members of such a belief system. I've heard the same thing about Catholics on here, the idea being "Don't hate on them, not all of them actually believe all that crap!" What this seems to come down to is that one shouldn't hate on a particular denomination because some percentage of the constituency might agree with you on politics, or might not care about the doctrine that much. Such is a false premise, and seems to indicate that if one is a liberal in any denomination, that is the reason one shouldn't be bigoted toward said denomination, which is absolute horse shyte. If you're going to be opposed to hatred or bigotry or discrimination against certain belief systems, it should be based on a general tolerance as opposed to some crap about how "I know X person, who is of Y belief system, and they're on our side of politics, so don't hate on them!" If sharing your political views is the reason to not hate certain demographics of society, then... well, really I don't have a response to this except a sort of "What?" combined with various expletives.
My point is about tolerance. There are conservative Mormons, there are liberal Mormons, and there are socialist Mormons. Maybe I worded it wrong the first time to make it sound like I believe (which is false, as any of you who really knew me well enough, which I guess you dain't) that you shouldn't embrace bigotry against groups because they have some people who agree with you. That is not what I believe, I believe in general tolerance towards most groups short of those that are actually legitimately bad and harmful towards society. And no, I don't consider the largely conservative Mormon Church any more of a threat to society than Fox News.
My point, in pointing out that there were a number of liberal members (not just a few) in the Mormon Church is to show that as a group they have enough diversity and allow enough freedom of thought (I don't recall the Church excommunicating Mo Udall, for instance) to make any such blanket attempts bigoted. Obviously, if this were the 1930s and I encountered a liberal Nazi (don't know how that would work) I wouldn't excuse Nazis as a whole for being a bunch of racist bastards just because a member of the Nazi party believed in universal healthcare and thought that the anti-Jew thing was going too far. The difference between a liberal Mormon and a liberal Nazi is pretty clear: the consequences of "not caring" about some of the more fundamentalist issues in Mormonism is a hell of a lot less harmful than ignoring the fundamentalist issues (like killing Jews and Slavs) that are advocated in Nazism and other evil ideologies.
Of course you know this is what I actually believe, and not what is in the OP. THis seems to be more of a critique of how I wrote the Original Post in ten minutes twenty minutes before I left for work. I concede it was poorly worded, but I still stand by my comments that there is a bigoted element on these boards against Mormons in general that otherwise pretends to be "liberal". And before anyone says "OH I DON'T HATE MORMONS! I'M NOT A BIGOT!" let me ask if you think that most people who claim "I AM NOT A RACIST, BUT. . . . " are actual non-racists or are just trying to say something racist?
You see this is about a whole thing of degrees. The most insane thing I've seen from Mormonism is some random quotes about how you can be God of the Sun and guys biking in business wear in the middle of July in Midland, Texas. Oh and maybe something about how blacks are the Son of Ham or whoever the hell it was who was Noah's black son a long ass time ago, though on the racism thing (and maybe I just notice this because I'm in the South) I should note that many white protestant denominations believed similar things about blacks as recently as forty years ago. A church one of my friends went to a long time ago, for instance, has on record a sermon by a preacher in the 1960s about why a black man shouldn't sit next to a white woman. So even on the legitimate points about negative things (like the anti-black racism) about Mormonism in the past half century, a lot of people are still missing that the Mormon Church was founded in a pretty racist era (the early 19th century, when most whites (even the abolitionists) thought that blacks were subhumans) and that there were some shrooms involved in the process. Also, many denominations outside of the Latter Saints held onto some of their racist views also well into the 1970s if not the 1980s. Likely, the average 19th century Mormon was less racist than the average white person was back then.
Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan was formed in a pretty racist era but with the explicit and primary goal of harming black people, and not just thinking (like a lot of people) that they were lower than whites. That is on a whole more harmful level than what Mormons would've believed and practiced back then and would likely be more harmful than what they preach today.
Criticizing the Mormon's Church's opposition to gay marriage is not bigotry just like it isn't bigotry to criticize the Catholic Church for being opposed to birth control. What is bigotry is this idea that the followers of said church are deluded freaks who deserve spite.