In the wake of this morning’s revelations about the National Organization for Marriage’s strategy of baldly race baiting in order to achieve their goal of universal American hatred for gays, Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center responds:
Black folks, this is a message for you: The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the country’s preeminent group fighting against same-sex marriage, really, really likes you. They even want to make some of you famous!
Have NOM’s principal leaders, former president Maggie Gallagher and current leader Brian S. Brown, stood up for African Americans before? Well, not so much. But it turns out that they’ve decided that you’re actually very important.
For the moment, until that strategy proves unworkable. Then they will go back to not caring about black folks.
“The strategic goal of this project,” NOM said, “is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies. We aim to find, equip, energize and connect African-American spokespeople for marriage; to develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; and to provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots.”
Translation: Let’s get people who support marriage equality to denounce black opponents, making them look like evil racists. Maybe that’ll make people forget that the vast majority of black civil rights leaders support same-sex marriage.
Because NOM thinks they are stupid! Maybe they don’t care that much about black folks after all?
NOM isn’t the first organization to use such cynical marketing ploys, schemes that seem to have little do with the interests of the people they claim to represent, and it certainly won’t be the last. But the revelation of its bald attempt to exploit black people and Latinos should help end the idea that NOM is an honorable group that would never engage in race-baiting. Because that is precisely what it has done.
Because there is no gutter too disgusting for the talking bigots of NOM to swim in, if it furthers their agenda of hatred.
We know this. More people need to know this, so please share this morning’s report far and wide. And read Mark’s whole piece.
[h/t Joe, who also has Julian Bond's reaction, which is well worth the click.]
Oh please, Maggie will be on MSNBC trying to wiggle herself out of this by the end of the week.
This is no different than what happened in the 70′s & 80′s to drive a wedge between African and Jewish Americans. Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, Jews supported and in many cases gave their lives to help out the Civil Rights Movement. The two groups (both heavily Democratic at this point) worked together relentlessly to further Civil Rights and the empowerment of other minorities in this country. However, with this issue of Palestine and Israel emerging in the 1970′s and early 1980′s, a wedge was driven between the two groups by conservative organizations as they portrayed all Jewish Americans as pro-Israel and all African-Americans as pro-Palestinian with no room for compromise. This (non)issue subtly pitted the two groups against each other and hindered their work in empowering minority groups in this country. The only difference between then and now is that we have documented evidence of how a major conservative organization has tried to go about driving a wedge between two other heavily Democratic constituencies.