In case you missed it in the shuffle of last week’s Friday news dump, it was revealed that Mitt Romney’s political action committee donated $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage, the country’s leading nonprofit advocate for marriage discrimination. The contribution came in 2008 as the group was fighting to pass California’s Proposition 8, which revoked equal marriage rights for same-sex couples in that state. According to Sam Stein at Huffington Post:

While neither the donation nor Romney’s opposition to same-sex marriage were a secret, the precise way in which he contributed to NOM remained under tight wraps until Friday. One of the only public comments on the matter came when the former Massachusetts governor’s top spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, told the Deseret News that Romney. . . would be writing a check to NOM.

But when Romney eventually made his donation, he did so quietly, and through an unusual channel. Records filed by Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC with the Federal Election Commission did not include details of that $10,000 donation. Nor did NOM’s public 990 form. In fact, record of the payment was only uncovered Friday when the pro-gay rights Human Rights Campaign was sent a private IRS filing from NOM via a whistleblower. . .

Asked for comment, an aide to Romney said that the donation was made through the Alabama chapter of the Free and Strong America PAC. State records confirm this. However, the 990 NOM filed lists the donation as having come from PO Box 79226 in Belmont, Massachusetts.

According to Stein, HRC’s Fred Sainz remarked:

“It’s clear now that Romney was a major financial donor to Prop. 8. . . His spokesperson said that Romney had financially supported Prop 8 but there’s no disclosure of a contribution to any Prop. 8 effort, personal or through the national or Alabama PAC. He instead chose to give to NOM, an organization that has a history of shielding its donors. For what other purpose would you contribute $10,000 to NOM three weeks before the election other than Prop 8?

Also writing for Huffington Post, prominent LGBT activist Scott Wooledge connects the dots and asks the important questions in an article titled “How Much Racial Division and Hostility Did Mitt Romney Buy with His $10,000 Donation to NOM?.” He notes that the recently-revealed confidential NOM documents — which outline the group’s strategy to pit LGBTs, African Americans, and Latinos against each other — were intended primarily for donors’ eyes. “The lawsuit from which they emanated centered around donors, so presumably these pieces of evidence were used to persuade donors of NOM’s political viability.”

He continues (emphases mine):

Was Mitt Romney among the privileged few high-dollar donors who got an “eyes-only” glimpse at NOM’s confidential strategy memos?

In other words, it’s worth asking: what did Mitt Romney know, and when did he know it? To be fair, Romney’s 2008 donation predates the materials that have been made public. But his relationship, and that of his Church — a major donor to NOM — continues. And it stands to reason that there were 2008 versions of this strategy memo, as well as 2010, 2011, and 2012 versions. The mind shudders to imagine what is in the ones we haven’t seen.

When Mitt Romney cut his $10,000 check for Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown’s National Organization for Marriage, did he know that his money would be used to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies”? Did he know it would be going toward fanning hostility between his fellow Americans?

Wooledge also notes an additional connection between Romney and NOM: the candidate has signed that group’s so-called “Marriage Pledge.” Signatories — also including Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — commit to supporting the addition of a marriage discrimination amendment to the United States Constitution, defending the oxymoronically-named (and, oh yeah, unconstitutional) “Defense of Marriage Act,” appointing federal and Supreme Court judges who share the group’s exclusionary definition of marriage, putting equal marriage rights up to a popular vote in the District of Columbia, and establishing a presidential commission to investigate the (non-existent) harassment of those who support marriage discrimination.

American Bridge 21st Century has also launched a Change.org petition calling on Mitt Romney to disavow the hateful and homophobic strategy of the National Organization for Marriage, which you can sign here. That this petition is almost certainly not going to persuade Romney to buck the rabidly conservative GOP base and denounce NOM’s race-baiting is so obvious it hardly deserves to be mentioned at all; however, signing the petition will still send an important and strong message to the Mitt Romney campaign that NOM’s disrespectful, divisive, exploitative tactics have no place in modern, civilized political discourse, or for that matter, modern civil society.

Oh, Maggie just doesn’t like the “language” of NOM’s internal race-baiting documents, because they make them sound “too big for their britches.” Other than that, it’s all good. Does she have any clue what a national embarrassment her organization is right now? Is there any self-awareness at all?

[h/t Jeremy]

In this clip, Julian Bond touches on the contempt the National Organization for Marriage has shown for all people, but especially African-Americans, calling it “scary” that they think they can just move minority voters around like pawns on a chess board. He’s right.

[h/t Jeremy]

Ooh, nice job Onion staff:

Last week, Republican U.S. House Speaker John Boehner appointed Dr. Robert George — co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the National Organization for Marriage — to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). George’s two-year appointment that comes with a taxpayer-funded federal salary.

GLAAD’s newly-launched Commentator Accountability Project – which aims to unmask the extremist views of anti-LGBT activists frequently consulted and quoted by the media – names George as one of the 36 homophobes most often cited in news reports. George appears on the list alongside other famously outspoken bigots like Scott Lively, Tony Perkins, Alan Chambers, Matt Barber, Peter LaBarbera, and NOM’s own Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher.

For those of you who may not be familiar with him, Dr. George is an anti-LGBT extremist who once described being gay as “beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures” and said that committed same-sex relationships have “no intelligible basis in them for the norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and the pledge of permanence.” The organization that he co-founded, the National Organization for Marriage, is the nation’s foremost opponent of marriage equality, fighting to preserve the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) on the federal level and pushing constitutional marriage discrimination amendments in the states.

NOM was disgraced earlier this week when internal documents revealed that the group engages in disrespectful and unsavory race-baiting tactics in its fight against marriage equality. The confidential memos asserted that NOM’s strategic goal is to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks” and “make opposition to gay marriage an identity marker” among young Latinos, “a badge of youth rebellion to conformist association to the bad side of ‘Anglo’ culture” and “a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”

Last year, Speaker Boehner and House Republicans decided to defend DOMA themselves after President Obama’s Justice Department halted its defense, citing the law’s unconstitutionality. Boehner hired a team of private attorneys and committed to spend as much as $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars to defend the discriminatory measure in court.

By appointing an extremist like Robert George, Speaker Boehner is again using taxpayer funds to further an aggressively anti-gay social agenda. This stunt makes it clear that the USCIRF is the equivalent of a kangaroo court intent upon casting victimizers as victims. It is utterly farcical that Robert George — a man who has dedicated his life to curtailing liberties and limiting the freedoms of those who hold different beliefs — would be named to a commission that oversees liberty. But given George’s demonization of LGBT people and his group’s appalling use of racial politics, Boehner’s appointment may ultimately backfire with Latino and African American voters.

UPDATE: MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts tweeted the following explanation at 12:13pm this afternoon:

MYSTERY solved… @maggiemarriage was in a studio ready for our #nom interview it was just the wrong studio booked improperly on @msnbc_booking IT WAS OUR MISTAKE and she has an open invite for the show. Our sincerest apologies.

Here’s hoping that another slot can be scheduled for TWO’s Wayne Besen and Maggie Gallagher to appear together. We were looking forward to the chance to discuss NOM’s race-baiting tactics with her!

Original post, 12:04pm:

TWO’s Wayne Besen and Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage were scheduled and confirmed to appear on MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts this morning. To my knowledge, this would have been the first on-camera appearance by anyone from NOM in the wake of yesterday’s revelations that the group uses disrespectful, racially divisive “wedge strategies” in an attempt to splinter the Democratic Party by pitting African Americans and Latinos against the LGBT community.

This is what Maggie looked like today on camera:

That’s right. She bailed, with no explanation. Perhaps she was still at home figuring out how to spin these ugly truths? I wonder what her excuse will be. While any defense of something so baldly indefensible as manipulating minority groups for selfish political gain is an exercise in futility, today’s stunt was a disgracefully unprofessional move on Maggie’s part. Things just keep looking worse and worse for the crazies at NOM.

(HUGE thanks to Jeremy Hooper of Good As You for the screen grab!)

The National Organization for Marriage is having a fun week. Just this morning, Maggie Gallagher was supposed to appear on MSNBC to debate our own Wayne Besen on the topic of this week’s document dump, which revealed NOM’s disgusting, cynical strategy to pit racial minorities against the gay community in order to advance their causes of denying LGBT people our equal place in society and hurting our families, in general. [NEWSFLASH: Some LGBT people are also racial minorities and most respected Civil Rights leaders are also supporters of equality for LGBT people.] Anyway, the point is that Maggie bailed without an explanation. [NOTE: it appears that Thomas Roberts tweeted that Maggie's failure to show was due to a studio error. The following point about NOMmers being embarrassed to appear on television this week stands, though.]

Frankly, if we were in NOM’s shoes, we’d be embarrassed to appear on television at this point. The race baiting is gross enough, but another tidbit revealed in those documents shows that NOM also has been seeking to recruit glamorous, yet stupid celebrities to, presumably, help spread their agenda to less glamorous, yet just as easily led voters. NOM’s contempt for the human beings they want to reach knows no bounds:

It sounds like a headline from the Onion, but strategy documents uncovered yesterday, from the nation’s most prominent anti-gay marriage group, the National Organization for Marriage (found by the Human Rights Campaign), reveal a novel approach to convincing Americans to vote against marriage equality: recruit glamorous but unintelligent celebrities. (p.19/20)

“Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries. (This is applying the Witherspoon and IAV model to non-intellectual elites.)”

[...]

Tonight GLAAD responded to NOM’s approach to “recruit glamorous but unintelligent celebrities”:

“Celebrity or not and ‘cognitive’ or not, given how cynically NOM views its supporters, who would want to stand with them and support their agenda?” said Herndon Graddick, GLAAD’s Vice President of Programs and Communications.

Indeed. One major difference between our side and their side is that, perhaps sometimes to a fault, we who support and fight for equality and fairness tend to assume that the people reading our words are intelligent people capable of forming thoughts, sentences and opinions on their own. The Religious Right, on the other hand, has never shied away from lying to and manipulating their followers, as they are fairly certain that the people who respect them will never fact-check them or question them.

Our readers? Smart. And if we make an honest mistake, we usually get called on it pretty quickly, often from other journalists on our own side, because we value honesty and integrity. Our opponents simply do not.

UPDATE: MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts tweeted the following explanation at 12:13pm this afternoon:

MYSTERY solved… @maggiemarriage was in a studio ready for our #nom interview it was just the wrong studio booked improperly on @msnbc_booking IT WAS OUR MISTAKE and she has an open invite for the show. Our sincerest apologies.

Here’s hoping that another slot can be scheduled for TWO’s Wayne Besen and Maggie Gallagher to appear together. We were looking forward to the chance to discuss NOM’s race-baiting tactics with her!

Original post, 12:04pm:

TWO’s Wayne Besen and Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage were scheduled and confirmed to appear on MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts this morning. To my knowledge, this would have been the first on-camera appearance by anyone from NOM in the wake of yesterday’s revelations that the group uses disrespectful, racially divisive “wedge strategies” in an attempt to splinter the Democratic Party by pitting African Americans and Latinos against the LGBT community.

This is what Maggie looked like today on camera:

That’s right. She bailed, with no explanation. Perhaps she was still at home figuring out how to spin these ugly truths? I wonder what her excuse will be. While any defense of something so baldly indefensible as manipulating minority groups for selfish political gain is an exercise in futility, today’s stunt was a disgracefully unprofessional move on Maggie’s part. Things just keep looking worse and worse for the crazies at NOM.

(HUGE thanks to Jeremy Hooper of Good As You for the screen grab!)

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.]

Last night, the Human Rights Campaign released a slew of previously-sealed internal documents from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the nation’s largest, most visible, and most insidious group of marriage discrimination proponents. The documents, marked “confidential,” were unsealed yesterday afternoon in Maine as part of that state’s ongoing ethics investigation into NOM’s campaign finances. NOM, notoriously dogged in its efforts to fight internal disclosures of any kind, had sued in state court to block the investigation, and now we know why: the documents disclosed yesterday reveal the group’s vile and repugnant strategy of setting minority groups against each other through the shameful exploitation of race.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, check out some of these whoppers below. All emphases, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

Here’s how NOM plans to set the Latino and LGBT communities against each other, from page 17 of a “confidential” 2009 strategic report entitled National Strategy for Winning the Marriage Battle:

. . . by searching for these leaders across national boundaries we will assemble a community of next generation Latino leaders that Hispanics and other next generation elites in this country can aspire to be like. (As “ethnic rebels” such spokespeople will also have an appeal across racial lines, especially to young urbans in America).

. . . we will develop Spanish language radio and TV ads, as well as pamphlets, YouTube videos, and church handouts and popular songs. Our ultimate goal is to make opposition to gay marriage an identity marker, a badge of youth rebellion to conformist association to the bad side of “Anglo” culture.

And from a 2009 report to its board of directors, also marked “confidential:”

The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so [sic] in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity – a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.

In that board update, NOM is just as candid about its attempts to divide LGBTs and African Americans :

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. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of his party. Fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8 is key to raising the costs of pushing gay marriage to its advocates. . . find attractive young black Democrats to challenge white gay marriage advocates electorally.

The name of the “strategic project” to which the above quote refers? NOM’s “Not a Civil Right Project.” Just last week I wrote a column for the Huffington Post in which I said that the movement for LGBT rights and the movement for African American rights are both part of the same civil rights movement, and that it is crucially important for us to continue asserting so. I also wrote that equality-minded people of all races, ethnicities, orientations, and identities needed to push back against any attempt to avoid equating LGBT rights with civil rights — from either the right or the left — because it sets minority groups against each other, reinforces false hierarchies of oppression, and makes unjust accommodations for bigotry. Little did I know when I wrote those words that I was essentially outlining the strategic plan of the National Organization for Marriage. It’s more than a little chilling, if you ask me.

The NOM document dump is a veritable gold mine. For me, one of the most frightening revelations contained therein (at least in the documents I’ve read so far — stay tuned here and elsewhere for further details) is that the organization admits that it plans on exporting its hateful models overseas. In their own words, NOM is engaged in the process of “creating [templates] that can be used abroad” because it recognizes that “marriage needs to be a national (and ultimately international) effort.”

The 2009 strategic report also discusses NOM’s “American Principles Project,” which aims to “expose Obama as a social radical,” “develop side issues to weaken pro-gay marriage political leaders and parties and develop an activist base,” and “raise such issues as pornography, protection of children, and the need to oppose all efforts to weaken religious liberty at the federal level.” If this sounds strikingly similar to the presidential campaign strategy of one Rick Santorum, that’s because he’s been working with NOM since at least 2009. The same memo notes, in a section titled “Two Million for Marriage,” that Rick Santorum “has served as the face of this effort through e-mail and direct mail” and “has recently agreed to use his voice in a nationwide automated call effort to solicit activists and donations.” No wonder Maggie Gallagher endorsed Santorum earlier this year — her group is the one writing the former senator’s playbook.

Finally, a section on NOM’s “Catholic Clergy Project” touts the group’s “close relationships with Catholic bishops” and reveals its plans to use those relationships “to equip, energize and moralize Catholic priests on the marriage issue.” (Interestingly, it also describes Catholic priests as “notoriously difficult to personally reach.”) We’ve seen NOM’s Catholic-centered strategy play out all across the country, from then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan taking the lead in opposing marriage equality in New York to Minneapolis-St. Paul Archbishop John Nienstedt injecting a prayer for marriage discrimination into the Catholic Mass and silencing any dissent among his priests on the marriage equality issue. And it has worked, at least to some degree, on the local level as well — in parishes and Catholic-affiliated institutions — with LGBT people in committed relationships being denied communion, gay Catholic school teachers being fired for daring to marry, prominent theologians being marginalized for openly supporting their loved ones in same-sex marriages, and homeless shelters having their Catholic funding yanked when their leaders hold pro-equality views.

All in all, the NOM documents are a smoking gun. Even though we knew — or at least suspected — that this was going on, reading NOM’s putridly divisive strategy in print is remarkably unsettling. The newly-released memos reveal a remarkably cynical, shrewd, callous organization that is willing to say and do whatever it takes — be it blatant race-baiting, spreading anti-gay lies through propaganda campaigns, or using religious leaders as weapons with which to bludgeon LGBT people from the pulpits and in their parishes — in order to prevent loving, committed same-sex couples from winning the freedom to marry. And they’re not satisfied with bullying LGBT people at home either — they also seek to spread their hateful bigotry across the world. The fallout from these damning revelations could and should be widespread and far-reaching. Stay tuned: we may well be witnessing the beginning of the end of the National Organization for Marriage.