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?
You see, this is why Focus on the Family and their affiliated wingnut devotees are victims at this very moment: The New York marriage equality law that passed included exemptions for religious organizations in all areas directly pertaining to the practice of their religion. Therefore, for instance, a church doesn’t have to marry gay couples [they wouldn't have to anyway, but wingnuts are idiots and you have to spell it out for them]. But fundamentalist Christians, unfortunately, have a really disturbingly wrong sense of the meaning of their “religious freedom.” They think it means that they should never have to be confronted, in the public sphere, with anything that hurts their fee fees or that scares them. So here, watch as Bruce Hausknecht and Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family cry, cry, cry about how their “rights” are being violated. Did you know that a Christian wedding photographer might have to photograph a gay wedding?! It’s true! Fundamentalist Christians not getting a pass to be abhorrent bigots, and simply having to abide by the laws of the places where they live, is surely a sign of Kirk Cameron’s rapture and the End of the World.
Stupid or lying? Lying or stupid? That’s always the question.
Oh, this is must-see teevee right here! One of my favorite things about being where we are on LGBT equality — with all the momentum moving in our direction and more than half of the country supporting marriage equality — is watching the spokesbigots for the various religious organizations go completely unhinged in public. This is going to happen more and more, so stock up on popcorn. I’ll let Joe set it up for you:
ZOMG! In less than five minutes, Catholic League mental case Bill Donohue hits on every viciously anti-gay lie in the religious right’s arsenal. Polygamy, procreation, incest, and even some wild sh*t about prongs and sockets. SRSLY. Huge huge kudos to the show’s host for firing back at every bit of Donahue’s batsh*ttery.
So funny!
My favorite part is when the very Catholic Bill Donohue suggests strengthening laws to keep child molesters away from children. That would require some really expensive architectural renovations in many Catholic churches around the world.
Tony Perkins, leader of the hate group known as the Family Research Council, is very upset that the very tall Empire State Building became so very colorful after the New York marriage vote the other night:
People at the Empire State Building said it was a coincidence. Officials explained that it takes hours to change the lights. But there was no mistaking the message Friday night when the highest point in the city lit up like a towering rainbow, its colors blazing across the New York skyline. Like a warning flare, the reds and blues and greens exploded over the city, announcing the arrival of same-sex “marriage” to the world. Overnight, New York had become a beacon in the fight for family–a symbol of people who had lost their way.
When the law goes into effect next month, New York will be the sixth and largest state to shatter the definition of marriage in America.
[...]
Despite all of the disappointment, God is on the move. Regardless of how things appear, never doubt that He is at work behind the scenes. Rainbow colors may cut through the New York night, but shadows are where you and I are called to shine. The world takes advantage of the darkness, but only the church can set it ablaze. “Arise… for your light has come… See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and His glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” (Isaiah 60:1-3)
Pretty colors mean bad gays, but the bloody red-hued light of Tony Perkins’ astonishing hatred and bigotry will live to shine another day, at least as long as the mainstream networks continue to invite him on to give the “I Bought David Duke’s Mailing List” viewpoint on things.
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.
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) had a good run. The group, led by anti-gay activists Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, has been able to demagogue and exploit existing anti-LGBT prejudice and foment new fears by lying about the allegedly negative impact marriage equality would have on civilization.
Unfortunately for NOM, the vote to legalize marriage equality in New York means the jig is almost up. The dead-end desperation was evident in Brown’s response to a question posed by a reporter that asked whether the success in New York could be exported to other states. He called this notion “a joke” and said, “They’ve never been able to win a popular vote.”
True, but until Friday’s New York state senate vote, the gay rights movement had also never won a marriage fight in a Republican-led legislative chamber. Brown doesn’t understand that the landscape has radically shifted.
Indeed, for the first time in history a Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans that support marriage equality crossed the 50 percent threshold (53%). These results were not an anomaly and have been confirmed by several credible, independent polls.
Most worrisome for Brown should be the next generation, which isn’t buying his bigotry. The Gallup poll found that support for marriage equality was most robust between the ages of 18-34, and significantly weaker among those 55 and older. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see a precipitous fall in Brown’s crystal ball.
NOM’s primary argument has been that it represents the will of the people. Now that they are increasingly on the wrong side of the public opinion divide, will NOM replace their tyranny of the majority creed with an elitist argument proclaiming that the “moral minority” knows better than the American people?
Another tactic used by the anti-gay crowd is to bleat about the allegedly dire societal consequences of same-sex marriage. Following New York’s vote, Rev. Pat Robertson predicted that America would become the next Sodom: “There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, ‘what’s going to happen to America?’ Well if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us.”
The politics of fear worked well in the past. Marriage equality was first laughed off as a strange invention created by weird hash-smoking Dutch people and socialist Scandinavians. Next, the fundamentalists sneered at the liberal New England states. Then Iowa happened, placing marriage equality in the heartland. Next, the District of Columbia plopped scary old “gay marriage” right in the center of the nation’s capital. And now we have New York, which overnight doubled the number of people in states with marriage equality. (The Williams Institute reports that 11 percent of the US population now lives in states that allow gay couples to marry)
The American people are wising up to the gloom and doom rhetoric of activists like Rev. Pat Roberson and Brian Brown. They can see the corn is still growing in Iowa. The cows are still mooing in Vermont. The partisans are still causing gridlock in DC. And, of course, Broadway plays will still thrill audiences and Wall Street trading will continue after the first same-sex couple marries in New York.
The clear lack of genuine “consequences” has led some conservatives to reexamine their opposition. For example, commentator David Frum revealed to CNN this week that he now supports marriage equality: “Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact. If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half. Instead – while American family stability has continued to deteriorate – it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970’s and 1980’s before same-sex marriage was even thought of.”
New York’s new law will introduce more Americans to same-sex married couples, which will increasingly shed stereotypes and misconceptions. The momentum from the bipartisan vote will further embolden conservatives to back marriage equality with their voices and wallets. New York has also placed the issue squarely within the mainstream, giving greater cover to court justices to rule in favor of marriage equality without fear of getting too far ahead of public opinion.
Finally, the decisive victory has led to increased media pressure on Barack Obama to stop “evolving” and start backing fairness and freedom.
There is still an enormous amount of work left to do. However, success in the Empire State means more people will witness the quality of our marriages, which inevitably will lead to greater marriage equality.
It’s Monday Funday, and I took a little self-imposed breather at the end of last week, so I’m just catching up on some of the wingnut reactions to the marriage equality vote, and wouldn’t you know it? They are blubbering like crazy.
We start with a piece that’s actually pretty normal and nice, from Michael Potemra at The Corner, which basically can be summed up as, “All these people getting together and celebrating? They look pretty normal and happy and really, you know, not scary at all.” Indeed, this is the craziest thing he saw:
The most out-there people I’ve seen are a sweet young couple, being interviewed by a reporter with “Associated Press” on his accompanying camera: a handsome 26-year-old chap from Ireland in a laid-back T-shirt and a gorgeous platinum-blonde in a stunning 1950s Seven Year Itch-style dress. Wait a minute, you’re thinking, what’s so “out there” about great retro clothes? And you’re right, it’s actually not that “out there” at all. The only thing that makes it worth mentioning is that the hot blonde proves, on my closer inspection, to be a guy.
So basically Mike Potemra is one of those conservatives who’s not all hot and bothered by this. Oh, but his stable mates at The Corner? Losing it. Indeed, Kathryn Jean Lopez immediately replied to Potemra’s piece saying, essentially, “You don’t get it! New York is just like North Korea now! Waaaaaaaaah! Ahem, wah.” Lots of people made fun of her for comparing New York marriage equality to North Korean dictatorship, so she came back this morning to explain, using a reader e-mail, that it’s just the same because…
Wait for it.
Because they are now victims of the “tyranny of the majority.” Because a minority in New York State is now a bit closer to full equality, the wingnuts, dying breed that they are, are now being trampled by the whims of this capricious majority which seeks to deny them…
Well, seeks to deny them nothing. I mean, yes, please, let’s all take a moment of silence to imagine what it must feel to be a straight anti-gay wingnut in Schenectady right now. They woke up this morning with all their constitutional rights intact, their marriages as healthy as they were last week. But they are oh so butthurt. Unfortunately, their little pocket Constitutions don’t include “freedom from butthurtness.”
The most fun at The Corner came in Maggie Gallagher’s apoplectic post the night of the vote, which has been quoted and laughed at many places by now:
New York Republicans are responsible for passing gay marriage. The party will pay a grave price.
Oh, whatever. As I have said so many times and will continue to say, can it, Gallagher. Another New Yorker, Thers at Whiskey Fire, replied to Maggie Gallagher’s post like this:
No they won’t.
The NY GOP bowed, finally, to the will of their constituents — such as it is.
[...]
But the real reason gay marriage passed in NY this year — and I am, to be clear, whoopin’ hollerin’ glad it did — is that most New Yorkers are of the opinion that “f*ck this who marries who sh*t, I need a job, or need to keep a job, or my kids need a job, and by the way, job jobs jobitty job job job.”
Anyone attempting to make gay marriage repeal a cause in NY is invited to waste their time and resources. Which are basic qualifications for GOP statewide candidtates overall, who have been astonishingly wingnutty awful for quite a while now.
NY moved on before the vote, which is why, as any NY political observer will tell you, the vote even happened.
Ya see, Maggie? Nobody really cares about what you all think anymore. Oh sure, you’ve got a few holdout majorities in banana republic states like Alabama, but the mainstream of America has gone against you and in the direction of fairness and equality.
As for other wingnut reactions [and I'm sure I'll post them as I run across them throughout the day, because I know there's a hilariously stupid quote out there from Matt Barber about how "god" is going to "punish" New York, presumably by yet again misfiring at some poor Midwestern town in the flood plain], Roy Edroso devoted his Village Voice column to right-wing reactions to the vote, as I figured he would:
You can imagine how rightbloggers feel about this. A few say they don’t mind, but the majority fulsomely display one or more of the classic stages of grief — with “anger” being by far the most popular.
We really shouldn’t rub it in, but how often do we get the chance? Let’s listen to some of their growls, hisses, and spits.
Oh, this is so fun! Here’s an epic whine Roy found:
?The Last Tradition just let all the stops out. “Fag marriage legal in New York State,” he cried. “It’s a happy day for rump wranglers and cock suckers of every shape and color.” (Hear, hear!) “This is an extremely sad day in the history of New York which has become the new Sodom and Gomorrah.” (TLT seems a little late to that party. Don’t they have cable where he lives?)
Oh, pathetic! You can just smell the sad, dejected defeat as the lowly wingnut attempts to throw anti-gay slurs, desperately hoping that at least one of them might stick. Oh, but no. Here’s another one Roy found, a wingnut I’ve never heard of:
Perhaps our favorite headline is John Guardiano‘s at the American Spectator: “Why Gay ‘Marriage Equality’ Is Bad for America and Hurts Children.” As the title suggests, Guardiano went scare-quote-happy. In his lede, he referred to “last night’s ‘historic” vote for ‘gay marriage’ in New York.” (These so-called “married” gays and their so-called “history”!)
“Indeed!” Must suck to be “John Guardiano” today! Roy sums up Guardiano’s piece like this:
To recap: When people began marrying for love instead of by parental arrangement, that was the thin end of the wedge; now, as if that noxious innovation hadn’t done enough harm, the demons who visited it upon us invite same-sex couples to join the pandemonium. Soon, when America is filled with ruined “married” people, we will regret the day impoverished farmers stopped trading daughters for cows.
It’s funny because that really sort of is what’s behind Maggie Gallagher and all of the rest of the Religious Right, with their hatred for gays and reproductive rights and everything else: their pwecious patriarchy is crumbling.
Anywho, go read the rest of Roy’s piece and if you’ve seen a great wingnut blubberfest over New York’s historical vote, leave it in the comments.
To end this post, let’s hold our noses and go see how wrong the gay wingnuts over at Gay Patriot are about this:
And to note that it passed with Republican votes — and in a legislative chamber run by the GOP.
Yeah, the GOP just loves gays. Four whole Republicans got over it and voted for equality.
Later on, they gave their approval to the decision, with the usual hand-wringing motions which suggest that they’re really not that happy with it, after all:
The process was often messy, the rhetoric regularly exaggerated, the understanding of marriage generally at odds with the history of the institution, but at least those who made the final decision were elected by the people of the various jurisdictions of the Empire State and thus answerable to them at the ballot box.
Yeah, those mean gay activists just simply refused to bow down and wash the bigots’ feet as they fought for equality. But at least it didn’t come from an “activisssss judge.” God forbid the judicial branch do their actual job, which is interpreting the law based on the Constitution, which is where the clearest arguments for marriage equality happen to be written.
As always with that corner of the internet, I just shake my head.
I say “invasive” bigotry, because what the trolls from Focus on the Family in this video don’t understand is that their constitutional right to hold bigoted, backwoods beliefs will always be sacrosanct. Heroic soldiers have fought and died for their rights to be as ill-informed and pig ignorant as they possibly can. Former New York Giant David Tyree is walking evidence of the continued health of that constitutional right. Whether it’s wise to waste one’s life being bigoted is up for debate.
But no, that’s not what the fey Stuart Shepard and the other lady are complaining about in this video. It never is. No, they are worried that their [nonexistent] right to use their bigotry to damage other people’s lives, to take other people’s clearly constitutional rights away, and to victimize the rest of society with their ridiculous beliefs, will be taken away. David Tyree is actually featured in this video whining that his “religious freedom” will be damaged by people getting married, people whom he has never met and who have no desire to meet him.
Later in the video, they quote another stalwart defender of bigotry and expert on marriage, the ostensibly celibate Archbishop Timothy Dolan. Yes, we need to hear about marriage and loving relationships from a man who took a vow of celibacy, who really isn’t supposed to have any experience with that sort of thing.
Oh, and then there’s some boring stuff about how “God created the definition of marriage,” a statement that remains inadmissible in the court of logic until such day that the bigots prove the statement to be valid.
All in a day’s “work” for the intellectual wizards of Focus on the Family. I hope neither of the people featured in the video have any gay children, for I cannot imagine the damage they have done or will do to those kids.
A couple of really good pieces are out this week which capture a lot of my own thoughts on the issue of why, precisely, Barack Obama hasn’t come out in support of marriage equality. At the same time, they discuss the tendency among some to take Obama’s “evolving support” to then suggest that he is secretly homophobic or something, that he isn’t any kind of ally to the LGBT, that we should withhold support, and several other variations on that theme. The original piece comes from Alex Pareene at Salon, and he talks about how some liberals out there seem to perceive Obama, the president:
Liberals have a tendency (much more pronounced in 2007 and 2008 but still evident) to imagine that Barack Obama is just as liberal as them. Because he’s obviously smart, because he dabbled with genuine leftism in his youth, and because he opposed Iraq, liberals think he’s actually Paul Krugman, forced by electoral circumstance (or cowardice) to talk and govern like George H.W. Bush. Coincidentally, this is also Newt Gingrich and Stanley Kurtz’s thesis. It’s silly when they say he’s hiding his socialism behind a veneer of centrism and it’s silly when liberals say he’s doing the same.
This has always been confusing to me when I talk with certain other liberals. Obviously Fox News has been peddling the line since 2007 that Obama is a secret socialist [Kenyan usurper, etc...], that he’s somehow the most radically leftist president we’ve ever had, but that’s a Fox News line. Liberals shouldn’t be parroting it.
But on one issue it’s pretty obvious that Barack Obama is simply hiding his dangerous radicalism: same-sex marriage. He famously signed a questionnaire affirming his support for same-sex marriage in 1996. But he apparently thought that he couldn’t remain so liberal if he wanted to be a national political figure. By 2008 he opposed gay marriage, favoring the more reasonable-sounding civil unions instead. He did still oppose DOMA, though, and he plainly understood why gay couples need legal recognition.
Indeed. And Pareene goes on to explain why it’s really sort of stupid at this point for Obama to keep trying to straddle the line. The ones who are going to be bothered by his support for marriage equality ALREADY think he is some kind of Libislamofascistosexual, and they’re not persuadable voters. Screw them. Meanwhile, the country now supports marriage equality in every credible poll, and it would be a boon to a lot of the liberal base if he just got it over with already, stated his support and moved on.
Whatever their calculations — and this is why I don’t really get worked up on this issue — it’s all ridiculous politics, and we are closer than ever, due to moves made by the administration as well as myriad court cases now working their way through the system, as well as the legal precedent being established, to full equality. The administration may not be moving as quickly as public opinion on the matter, or as quickly as we all would like, but, unlike any GOP presidential candidate on offer, he’s certainly not hindering the process.
Commenting on Pareene’s piece, Amanda Marcotte picks up the ball and addresses the other thing that some excitable liberals have been doing in response to Obama’s “evolving” inaction on marriage equality:
The only thing that Alex is missing is that there’s another liberal tendency that is probably just as irritating: being addicted to feeling betrayed to the point of concocting conspiracy theories that posit that all Democratic leaders are secretly Republicans. It’s black-and-white thinking, for sure, but it’s widespread. These liberals will seek any evidence they can find that Democrat X is exactly like the most far right nutter out there, even though the evidence tends to suggest that said Democrat is a fence-straddling centrist who is too afraid of his shadow to ever commit to a point of view, which is completely unlike far right Republican assholes. While the vast majority of people I spoke to at Netroots had a nuanced view of Obama, I did run across in the past few days, online and offline, people who were pushing the “Obama is a member of the religous right” line. [...] And, to my dismay and surprise, a Facebook friend insisted that there was no difference between Michele Bachmann’s point of view on gay marriage and Obama’s view. The method used to determine this was to find the most reasonable-sounding thing Bachmann has said (her garbled and clearly facetious claim during the GOP debate that she wants to leave it to the states—which also requires ignoring that she wants a constitutional ban at the same time) and then to round up Obama’s weaseling statements while ignoring his actual opposition to DOMA and his appointment of Supreme Court judges who are likely to vote against it.
I’m reminded of certain people who, when things simply weren’t moving quickly enough for them, actually took to calling Obama the “bigot-in-chief.” It fell flat among sane people then, and it falls flat now. Liberals, in theory, are much, much better at recognizing nuance than conservatives are. The best among us are, to be sure. But there’s another kind of liberal, which Amanda sums up one sentence later:
I can’t actually believe that people believe this stuff when they say it. I think there’s an emotional reward to claiming that Obama hates the gays just as much as Bachmann, because it makes things nice and simple.
Uh huh, and you know what that is? Wingnut-quality analysis of current events.
To be clear, I see absolutely no reason for Obama to drag his feet on this issue anymore. Neither do Amanda and Pareene. But at the same time, sheesh.
Yeah, he supports marriage equality, regardless of whether he states it before the election or after the election. And New York may finally take the plunge into equality, which, as Pareene says, would make a fine time for Obama to go ahead and say so. Regardless of what happens between now and the election, though, no, Obama is not a secret homophobe, yes, his administration has done more for the LGBT community than any president before, and yes, full, real equality is just around the bend and the current president isn’t going to do a damn thing to stop it.
The current slate of Republican candidates, as well as the leadership of the Republican party in Congress, though, have signaled that they’re going to be dead-enders until their dying breaths on this issue, and that if you give them power, they’ll do everything they can to stop the march of equality. Oh, and they’ll destroy a bunch of other things along the way, just for good measure.
All right, TWO team: so in case you’ve been vacationing on Mars these past few months, New York state is a hairsbreadth from legalizing marriage equality. Of course, the anti-LGBT religious wingnuts over at the National Organization for (Discrimination in) Marriage, along with that state’s Catholic hierarchy, are working overtime to prevent that from happening.
And now it’s crunch time. The Marriage Equality Act is currently stalled in the Senate, whose legislative session was supposed to end today. However, voting on the Act has been postponed until tomorrow at the earliest. NOM just put out an “emergency alert” asking marriage equality opponents to flood key senate offices with calls opposing the Act and calling instead for another public referendum on basic rights.
Well, Maggie, two can play at that game. I visited NOM’s website so you don’t have to (you can thank me later) and pulled their list of targeted senators. The list is below. New Yorkers: please call every senator on this list and tell them to stand for justice for ALL by voting to pass the Marriage Equality Act (and if you’re in the Albany area, please strongly consider joining New Yorkers United for Marriage at a noon rally outside the Capitol).
Stephen Saland (518) 455-2411
Andrew Lanza (518) 455-3215
Mark Grisanti (518) 455-3240
Greg Ball (518) 455-3111
John Flanagan (518) 455-2071
Joseph Addabbo (518) 455-2322
Shirley Huntley (518) 455-3531
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) had a good run. The group, led by anti-gay activists Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, has been able to demagogue and exploit existing anti-LGBT prejudice and foment new fears by lying about the allegedly negative impact marriage equality would have on civilization.
