LGBTQ news and entertainment
This morning on MSNBC, with a shrug of her shoulders, NOM’s former president Maggie Gallagher batted her eyes at the idea that her organization “has the power” to influence the black and latino communities on the issue of marriage equality.
And yet, they’ve spent $20 million doing just that…
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Wow – that National Organization for Marriage boycott is really killing Starbucks, isn’t? Check out how their stock price is doing.
NOM’s boycott, Dump Starbucks, urges customers across the world to stop supporting Starbucks.
A counter petition from SumOfUs.org aimed to thank Starbucks for standing up for marriage equality was launched shortly after. According to the SumOfUs petition: “Without support from companies like Starbucks, the gay marriage law might have failed.”
Today, the “Dump Starbucks” petition had less than 23,000 signatures — the other, to thank Starbucks for its support of LGBTQ rights, had more than 292,000.
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MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts did a segment this morning on the damaging NOM document dump with Truth Wins Out’s Wayne Besen and NOM’s Maggie Gallagher, but Gallagher failed to show even though she confirmed an hour beforehand, so Roberts just showed an empty chair.
Roberts later tweeted that there was a booking mistake and apparently Maggie Gallagher went to the wrong studio.
However, I’m glad this story is getting the air time and attention it warrants. This is really an important story – to find out this anti-gay organization has spent time and resources pitting different minorities against each other.
Seriously, folks, this world needs less divisiveness and more unity. There’s no way to spin this that comes out good.
“NOM’s underhanded attempts to divide will not succeed if Black Americans remember their own history of discrimination. Pitting bigotry’s victims against other victims is reprehensible; the defenders of justice must stand together.” – Julian Bond, Chairman Emeritus, NAACP
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Responding to the growing controversy about the National Organization for Marriage’s plans to pit African Americans against gays to create tensions in order to achieve their goal of denying equal rights to gays, NOM president Brian Brown today acknowledged and admitted to using marriage equality as a “wedge” between the two communities:
Gay marriage advocates have attempted to portray same-sex marriage as a civil right, but the voices of these and many other leaders have provided powerful witness that this claim is patently false. Gay marriage is not a civil right, and we will continue to point this out in written materials such as those released in Maine. We proudly bring together people of different races, creeds and colors to fight for our most fundamental institution: marriage.
Everything in this statement confirms the strategy of using people of color as spokespeople and using the language of “civil rights” as a catalyst for division.
Brown’s statement was issued in response to the revelation that NOM has based stategies against the LGBT community for years by attempting to “drive a wedge” between gays and the black community. From their own documents recently made available:
“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots…”
The freedom to marry is a civil right, crucial to same-sex families’ ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness just as all families do.
Wow. This is pretty amazing that this has come to light. Finally.
Today HRC’s “NOM Exposed” website got a hold of internal NOM documents that shed light on the anti-LGBT movement’s overall strategy. These documents were just unsealed in Maine mid-afternoon. The docs are part of the ongoing investigation by the State of Maine into the campaign finance activities of NOM in that state. Just a couple of telling items from PDF page 13 of the “confidential” 2008-09 report to the NOM Board of Directors:
“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots…”
On PDF page 12, it talks about “sideswiping Obama,” painting him as a “social radical” and talking about “side issues” like pornography.
We’ve all thought it, but to see suspicions confirmed in print about driving “a wedge between gays and blacks” – wow.
More to come.
Recently-appointed National Organization For Marriage chair John Eastman tries to pretend that Prop 8 speaks to more than just same-sex marriage, since it also prevents polygamy.
David Boies is having none of it. This is called a smack down.
Well, isn’t this being a sore loser.
The anti-gay hate group, National Organization for Marriage, is organizing rallies in NY cities on the first day LGBT couples can get married in NY state. Despite overwhelming evidence that NY supports marriage equality, NOM is still crying that they didn’t get to deprive LGBT NY-ers of equal rights.
Sad, kids. Just sad.
Seriously folks, you can’t make this up.
In a recent speech at the Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank in Utah, Maggie Gallagher (of the anti-gay and ironically named National Organization for Marriage) claims she’s a victim of “hatred” and that she never set out to attack the idea of marriage equality.
From Shewired.com: “I avoided the discussion of gay marriage as long as I possibly could,” Gallagher said, according to Salt Lake City’s Deseret News. When Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex couples to marry, though, she feared it meant a change in the common understanding of marriage, and she created the National Organization for Marriage.
“By the very act of declaring that two men in a union are in a marriage we are announcing that marriage has nothing to do with bringing mothers and fathers and children together,” she told the dinner guests.
Somewhere lost in all that is the idea that hundreds of civil rights are attached to civil marriage licenses. And there that are plenty of heterosexual married couples who don’t have children. Those marriages she doesn’t seem to oppose.
She also said that opponents of same-sex marriage are unfairly characterized as intolerant: “You are like a bigot who is opposed to interracial marriage.”
Well, Maggie, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck….