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.
