Washington Governor Chris Gregoire announced her support for gay marriage legislation on Wednesday, potentially putting the state on track to become the nation’s seventh to fully recognize same-sex unions.
Gregoire, a Democrat in the final year of her second term, is backing legislation to be introduced before the Washington state legislature, which reconvenes next week.
“It is time in Washington state for marriage equality,” Gregoire told a news conference in the state capital of Olympia. “It is time, it’s the right thing to do.”
The article points out, though, that passage isn’t assured, as some Democrats have sided with wingnuts. And of course, the hate groups will be traveling to Washington:
Brian Brown, president of the 800,000-member, Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage, told Reuters his non-profit group would lobby against marriage equality in Washington state.
“The people of this country believe that marriage is a union of a man and a woman,” Brown said in a telephone interview. “I expect the legislature in Washington state will stand up for this commitment and vote to protect marriage.”
“The people of this country” are not represented by you, Brian, and the sooner you realize that, the healthier you’ll be.
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?
Say what you will about Maggie Gallagher — seriously, go ahead, say what you will — but you can’t say she doesn’t like to help, and isn’t that what the spirit of Thanksgiving is about?
Maggie knows that there are millionsthousands at least nine or ten NOM supporters out there who will be spending Thanksgiving this year with their families and that, apropos of absolutely nothing, they will feel the need to tell all their normal well-adjusted family members about how much they hate gays and the gay marriage and the whatsits and the Kids These Days. She also knows that it’s no fun for her minions when Uncle Dave looks at them over the decanter of giblet gravy and says something to the effect of, “Seriously, what’s wrong with you? Why do you spend so much of your time fixated on gay people? What the hell difference does it make to you whether or not my gay son and his partner are married? God, you need a hobby, and probably some therapy, you dumb bigot.” [Total Uncle Dave comment right there.]
So Maggie to the rescue, with this handy video about how to tell everybody that A. You super hate gays and B. It’s your special privilege as a weird fundamentalist of some sort and it doesn’t mean you’re a bigot. These are the three simple steps, after which I have provided example sentences in italics:
1. State your position briefly. [God hates fags.]
2. Refute the charge of bigotry. [No, I didn't say I hate fags, I said God hates fags. I'm not a bigot. Let me show you some verses in my pop-up Bible that I don't really understand.]
3. A call to tolerance. (Repeat as necessary… “or until they bring in the pie.”) [Why won't you tolerate my bigotry?! I only want to use my voting power to deny a minority their constitutional rights based on my pigheaded, hateful version of my religion, nothing more! I AM THE VICTIM HEEEEEEEEEEEERE!!!!!!!, etc. Oh, look, pie! NOM NOM NOM!]
Here’s the video:
Because Maggie is using such a time-honored template for defending bigotry, if you are a white supremacist or misogynist or any other kind of hate-filled goon, feel free to cut out words like “fag” and “gay” above and insert other epithets in Maggie Gallagher’s Handy Guide To Holiday Bigotry. It’s sort of like a Mad Lib!
For the rest of you who are not backwards, hateful oafs, HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM TRUTH WINS OUT.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the gay rights movement, the gay marriage movement, really does believe you’re like a racist if you think marriage is the union of husband and wife,” explained Maggie Gallagher, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage. “They want to rip Genesis out of our Bibles.”
Maybe I should leave it to one of my Christian friends to say this, but it’s adorably quaint listening to a representative of the Religious Right say this, since the entire “family values” Christian Right pretty much ripped the Gospels out of the Bible as the first order of business for their movement. Isn’t that sort of the basis for the religion they claim to follow?
This is NOM’s latest episode of “Grown Adults Bitching and Moaning,” and it features a man named Damian Goddard, who used to be a sportscaster in Canada, where marriage equality has been the law of the land for a while now. Apparently this never turned him into one of Maggie’s Super Victims, but then something happened on Twitter related to New York marriage equality and he shot his mouth off and, as a public figure, presumably embarrassed the hell out of his organization. So he got fired.
When he starts crying about how awesome his wife has been through all of this, the first thought that entered my head was, “huh, yeah, I wonder if same sex married couples ever go through life experiences where one is the rock for the other through hard times. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder!”
Pro-family groups in Iowa say hopes for a marriage amendment in that state have all but faded now that Tuesday’s election has left Democrats in control off the State Senate.
Democrat Liz Mathis defeated her Republican opponent, Cindy Golding, in a special election for District 18, thereby allowing Democrats to retain control of the Iowa Senate. Mathis won with 55% of the vote, in spite of Golding’s campaign receiving a $40,000 donation from the National Organization for Marriage.
This is very good news. I wrote about the campaign between Democrat Liz Mathis and Republican Cindy Golding yesterday, focusing on the weird robo calls that were going out to voters in that Iowa district, instructing them to ask Liz Mathis which homosexual sex acts she “endorses.” For their part, NOM and the local wingnut group [I refuse to type their English-language-assaulting name again on this blog] loudly proclaimed that they had nothing to do with the robo calls, as they transmitted the same exact message as NOM’s, but without the media-tested language they prefer.
Well, the Democrat, Liz Mathis, did indeed win the election, but as Jeremy points out, this is not a “victory for gay rights” — because the election wasn’t even freaking about that:
It wasn’t about marriage, largely. Liz Mathis’ victory over Republican Cindy Golding in Iowa’s 18th Senate District was about jobs, education, local business, property taxes, and a whole host of other true concerns. But by and large, the state’s marriage equality law doesn’t seem to have motivated voters in the area in a major way.
But that’s not what you would’ve heard from NOM, had the candidate that they backed to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars ultimately prevailed. This morning, you’d be reading NOM press release after NOM press release about Cindy Golding, her commitment to putting marriage up for a public vote, and how last night’s results send a message both in Iowa and nationwide. Regardless of what anyone on the ground is actually saying, NOM would still reduce and spin the results so that they spoke to one issue and one issue only.
[...]
[U]nlike NOM, I see a need to operate within the confines of reality rather than that which is most convenient to my cause. I truly believe that we, as an electorate, deserve better than contrived “culture war” fires, which is a big reason why I fight so hard to extinguish NOM’s rhetorical arson. So no: I’m not going to say Liz Mathis won because of her support for marriage equality.
Because they’re liars. BUT, and there is a “but,” and you really need to read all of Jeremy’s analysis, while this election was not about marriage equality, because of the way NOM inserted itself into the race, it was, in a way, about NOM, and the way their efforts to desperately insert bigotry into politics are going quite a bit too far for normal humans these days:
In fact, NOM’s overplayed hand seemed to turn off a lot of voters. I noticed on a couple of occasions how “just not into” NOM Cindy Golding seemed to be. Plus there was credible polling showing only a tiny fraction of voters who considered same-sex marriage a top priority, noticeable attempts from both campaigns to not talk about the (non-)issue, and much anecdotal evidence suggesting NOM had trouble finding a real local support system. That had to feel like a great slight to NOM, considering the considerable capital the organization invested in this race.
A pointed slight, I would say. Even though it wasn’t about marriage, largely, I would argue that this race was VERY MUCH about the National Organization for Marriage. Considering the enormous attention that NOM brought to the district via their quest to nationalize this hyperlocal race, local voters had no choice but to consider what NOM was selling. Ultimately, those voters — whether or not they support marriage equality or even support letting the current law stand as is –decided that NOM’s hyperbolic “protect the families” rhetoric was out-of-touch with the local flavor. Voters repudiated NOM.
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.
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.
