I’m still working my way through reading the Prop 8 decision and writing a post on it, but for now, here’s what NOM’s bigots had to say, courtesy of Towleroad.
First up, Brian Brown:
“As sweeping and wrong-headed as this decision is, it nonetheless was as predictable as the outcome of a Harlem Globetrotters exhibition game,” said Brian Brown, NOM’s president. “We have anticipated this outcome since the moment San Francisco Judge Vaughn Walker’s first hearing in the case. Now we have the field cleared to take this issue to the US Supreme Court, where we have every confidence we will prevail.”
And then John Eastman:
“Never before has a federal appeals court – or any federal court for that matter – found a right to gay marriage under the US Constitution,” said constitutional scholar John Eastman, who is chairman of NOM. “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned circuit in the country, and Judge Stephen Reinhardt, the author of today’s absurd ruling is the most overturned federal judge in America. Today’s ruling is a perfect setup for this case to be taken by the US Supreme Court, where I am confident it will be reversed. This issue is the Roe v Wade of the current generation, and I sincerely doubt the Court has the stomach for preempting the policy judgments of the states on such a contentious matter, knowing the lingering harm it caused by that ruling.”
Aw, boo boos. The fact that this is the first time a federal appeals court has “gotten it” is absolutely irrelevant. That’s kind of how courts work. It took a “first time” and a “never before” to desegregate our schools, to give women reproductive freedom, and a host of other things that are now simply understood as part of what it means to be an American.
It’s never a good idea to assume that Brian Brown or NOM are telling the truth, but Joe has this fundraising letter from them posted at his blog, and if what the NOMsters are saying is indeed true, then they’re a little short on cash right now:
Dear Marriage Supporter,
Please help us overcome a looming shortfall!
Increasingly virulent and frequent attacks from the same-sex marriage lobby have depleted our emergency funds, and we need your help!
As 2011 draws to a close, everyone at the National Organization for Marriage is excited about the election year ahead, which we believe will be full of huge victories for traditional marriage.
But unless we raise additional funds quickly, we will be faced with hard decisions about where to begin scaling back our efforts for next year. NOM does not have the resources to accomplish everything we need to do…and with the many new and critical marriage battles upcoming in 2012, this is the exact wrong time for us to have to scale back.
Friend, will you make one emergency year-end gift of $25, $50, $100 or even $1,000 if you can afford it, to NOM right now to help us eliminate our budget shortfall before the end of the year?
Please, please, please? Brian’s loafers are quaking at the prospect of having to get a real job that doesn’t pay him simply for being a bigot.
Anyway, if you read the entire letter from NOM, it will fill you with holiday cheer.
We know that the people who run the National Organization for Marriage are nothing if not flaming, dishonest hypocrites. That’s a given. But it’s a little bit rich to see Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage attending a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich, who abandoned his first wife while she was suffering from cancer to marry a newer model, and then started a years-long affair with Callista, while he was on a witch hunt against President Clinton, only to eventually leave Wife 2.0 and marry Callista, and the rest is history.
I mean, we know that the National Organization for Marriage doesn’t actually support anything beyond hatred for gays. I get that. But you’d think they’d see how bad this looks. Here’s what happened:
Last night NOM president Brian Brown attacked a Mother Jones reporter and shoved him out of the room as Occupy Wall Street protesters invaded a $1000/plate fundraiser for Newt Gingrich.
And here is that reporter talking to Keith Olbermann about the incident:
Anti-gay organizations and politicians like Rick Santorum have long argued against marriage equality by saying it would create a slippery slope leading to the legalization of polygamy. It turns out they were wrong, as they tend to be about virtually everything.
On July 20, 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize marriage equality for same-sex couples. On Nov. 23, 2011, British Columbia’s highest court ruled that Canada’s 121-year-old criminal law banning polygamy is constitutional. Canada is significantly more liberal than the United States, and British Columbia is more liberal than most of Canada — yet the imagined slippery slope failed to materialize. If Vancouver isn’t buying it — it won’t happen in Kansas.
Wake up fundies — your arguments are baseless and useless.
Social conservatives are very dishonest about this topic. First, they conveniently fail to point out that the issue of polygamy has been around significantly longer than the the issue of marriage equality for same-sex couples. Indeed, the Mormon church had to officially abandon polygamy to pave the way for Utah statehood.
Clearly, this is a longstanding topic of debate that preexisted gay issues in a political context. Arguments for and against polygamy historically have, and will continue, to be fought on its own merit, irrelevant to and regardless of LGBT marriage equality. This point is factual and incontrovertible.
Social conservatives have once again failed to demonstrate the danger of allowing LGBT couples to wed. The Canadian ruling places one more of their flawed and felonious arguments in history’s dumpster. What bizarre talking point will their depraved imaginations come up with next?
Earlier this afternoon, I wrote about a weird robo call going around in an Iowa state senate race, which asks voters to call the Democrat in the running, Liz Mathis, and ask her which “homosexual sex acts” she endorses. Their reasoning is that, since Mathis supports marriage equality, she must have specific gay sexytime acts that she personally supports. Or something. Wingnuts are nothing if not bizarre and childish.
NOM had denied involvement in the robo calls, presumably because, though the anti-gay message presented therein is absolutely no different qualitatively than NOM’s beliefs, it’s not presented in a media-tested way. They like to slither the bigotry a little more gently into people’s brains, you see.
“Yesterday a phony group claiming to support marriage launched robo calls that were so offensive they clearly were designed to turn voters away from Cindy Golding because she supports marriage between one man and one woman,” said Brian Brown, president of NOM, in a statement released on their blog. “Neither NOM nor Family Leader had anything to do with these calls and we decry them. We call on the Attorney General to launch an investigation into this dirty trick to determine who is behind the calls, which are designed to steal the election from Ms. Golding.”
Brian. Brian, Brian, Brian. You do realize you just admitted that ads such as these ads, which contain nothing less than your true beliefs, may have the opposite of their intended effect, and repulse voters so much that they pull the lever for the Democrat out of disgust at “pro-family” Republicans, if nothing else.
How refreshing that Brian admits that his and his organization’s bigotry is outside of the mainstream of normal, non-wingnut Americans.
Oh, Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, would either of you know the truth if it smacked you across the face and sang you a big gay showtune?
Rachel Maddow reported last night on NOM’s latest ruse, a pathetic effort to make it appear as if their campaign to repeal marriage rights in New Hampshire has broad popular support — as Rachel points out, supporters of the law outnumber those who want to rescind equal marriage rights by two to one. It seems that Jeremy discovered that, in a sad, sad attempt to make it look as if they have friends people are on their side, the NOMsters have resorted to photoshopping Barack Obama’s crowds to make them look like they’re watching Brian Brown speaking.
As grotesque as it is bitter, as lonely as it is hilarious, these are the actions of losers. Losers who lie a lot.
John Stossel, as a libertarian, is often quite wrong about things, but it’s funny when he’s forced to endure the mendacious ramblings of NOM’s Brian Brown, and even his reaction to it is “come again?”
Brown says gay marriage threatens marriage between a man and a woman. I asked him to explain.
“Marriage is a public good,” he said. “When you redefine marriage, you redefine it for everyone. In states that have redefined marriage, we’ve seen serious consequences, ranging from what is taught in schools — kids in first grade in Massachusetts are taught that it’s the same thing to grow up and marry a boy or a girl — to what happens to religious organizations or organizations that just believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman. … You see Catholic Charities’ adoption agency essentially being forced out of being able to adopt kids because the state said it is discriminating.”
Whoa. Those are three separate points. I don’t see a problem with the first: If they redefine marriage to include gays, that doesn’t diminish my marriage. And if kids are taught that gay marriage is OK, so what?
[...]
“Deconstructing marriage is a very bad idea,” said Brown. “We see the rising rates of divorce and unwed motherhood. There is a direct correlation. If you look at any social indicators — children raised without mothers and fathers — you see higher rates of incarceration, juvenile delinquency that cost the state money.”
Sorry, but I still don’t see what divorce and unwed motherhood have to do with gay marriage. It’s mostly straight people who are doing the divorcing and unwed mothering.
[...]
“The state should support what is true and good and beautiful,” Brown countered. “And it’s true and good and beautiful that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. Men and women are unique and special.”
I still don’t get his argument.
It’s very simple, John. Brian doesn’t have an argument, at least not in the grown-up sense. All he knows is that he and Maggie Gallagher have a deep psychological problem with gay people, and that airing their personal issues loudly, in public, has proven to be quite profitable. The first mistake when dealing with people like NOM is to pretend that we’re dealing with mature, intelligent adults. It’s sorta like the problem Obama has when he deals with the Republican party…
It’s better to handle them as if you’re dealing with a particularly ill-behaved, dishonest third grader and then work downward based on their future behavior.
Jeremy just had a novel idea for Maggie Gallagher, who is on the whine-trail this week about marriage supposedly being destroyed, redefined, being taken over by the government, blah blah blah, etc. For instance, she said this:
“Gay marriage is not an increase in liberty; it is a government takeover of an institution that government did not create and should not redefine.
When the government endorses a lie about human nature, there will be consequences.”
Yeah, whatever, Maggie. We still haven’t seen YOUR traditionally wed husband and you still don’t wear a wedding ring. Which leads to Jeremy’s idea:
If Maggie thinks marriage had been subjected to government takeover, then she and every single married person who agrees with her needs to return the marriage license that he or she obtained from the state.
DAMN RIGHT SHE SHOULD! Maggie, Brian Brown, whatever other Religious Right goons live in marriage equality states: if your marriage has been devalued, redefined, destroyed, taken over by the government, or whatever else, due to the inclusion of gay people in the institution, then return your now worthless marriage license and fend for yourself without the benefits granted to you by the state.
We are waiting with bated breath. Unless you really don’t believe your own BS and this is just about heterosexual supremacy, patriarchy and extreme butthurtness over the fact that the American people lose more respect for you every single day…
Well, the whole gay internet is making fun of this, and I try never to miss an opportunity to mock a wingnut, so here is NOM’s time-consuming pipe dream of a plan to repeal marriage equality in New York:
We’re putting together a 4-year campaign strategy that will reverse same-sex marriage in New York. We’ll have many more details, and ways for you to get involved, in the days ahead but the overall plan will have three phases:
PHASE 1:
Elect pro-marriage majorities next November that will approve a marriage amendment in both the Assembly and Senate during the 2013 legislative session.
PHASE 2:
Protect pro-marriage candidates in the 2014 elections, so that the amendment can receive final legislative approval in the 2015 legislative session.
PHASE 3:
Successfully pass the ballot measure when it goes before voters in November 2015.
Uh, let’s see. So first they’d have to get rid of lots and lots of pro-gay politicians in the Assembly, get rid of anyone in the Senate they don’t like, find underpants, (??????), profit, and then get the voters of New York, who already support marriage equality to the tune of almost sixty percent, to suddenly lose their minds and become bigots, when in reality, by 2015, support will probably be closer to seventy percent…
Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher will do absolutely anything to avoid getting real jobs, won’t they?
As you might expect, Brian Brown has a butthurt and a sad right now. The NOM spokesmouth and Connecticut resident has somehow managed to keep his marriage together despite the now-violent climate in Connecticut, where marriage equality has existed for a while now. But now he can’t even get on the train and go to New York without being tempted by the specter of same-sex married people, all around him, their existence standing as the negation of his life’s “work.”
Or something. I have no idea what he’s talking about in this clip from last night’s Ed Show. This idea that, by including gay people in the institution of marriage, the institution itself is destroyed, is beyond stupid, and for him to sit with his sideways seething smirk of schoolyard rage and try to tell Thomas Roberts and Al Sharpton that gay people getting married is a greater threat to the institution than divorce — I mean, dude works for the National Organization for Marriage, after all — is still a little bit unbelievable, even after years of watching him attempt to make words on this issue.
That said, he looks like he’s been taking a spinning class or maybe jazzercise, because he’s trimmed up a little bit! Or maybe it’s just the camera, or maybe there’s a straitjacket under his sport coat. Or maybe Friday’s vote took away his appetite. I dunno.
Anti-gay organizations and politicians like Rick Santorum have long argued against marriage equality by saying it would create a slippery slope leading to the legalization of polygamy. It turns out they were wrong, as they tend to be about virtually everything.
