Just want to pinch his cheeks!
Thomas Peters is the Communications Director for the National Organization for Marriage. He is young and fresh-faced, which brings the count of “young and fresh-faced” among anti-gay activists to a solid one. He is also very, very new, in that one gets the sense when he tweets, talks or writes that he really has no idea what he’s stepped in by devoting his early career to such a sad losing cause as denying a minority equal rights. Very wet behind the ears, this one. Of course, we must take into account that it takes some people a little longer than others to break free from the nest, and that seems to be the case with Thomas.
This weekend, lil’ Tommy tried to make either a point or a joke, I’m not sure which, on Twitter, about how the world is just rife with gay people who don’t support marriage equality:
Why thank you, Thomas, for reminding The Daily Show, John Oliver and the rest of us that, indeed, due to the side-effects of your worldview, there are a few gay people out there so utterly self-loathing that they don’t support simple equality for their own lives. Of course, most of those gay people, like Robert Oscar Lopez, seem to become NOM stooges at some point or another.
But no, dear, sweet, brand new Thomas, the fact that a super-majority of LGBT people support equality for ourselves isn’t “liberal groupthink”; it’s simply reality.
Jeremy explains a little further:
Now, of course those of us who have been around this rodeo for any amount of time know exactly what Thomas is doing. The anti-LGBT crowd has a long history of trying to name reality. Since reality is so obviously against their mission, they have become ever-aggressive at trying to turn their “wish it were” into our collective truth. Whether its elections or legislative voters where our candidates or issues are said to be unsupportable (before ultimately winning), situational realities where they turn themselves and their discriminatory positions into the “victimized” ones, or demographic breakdowns where easily perceptible trend lines are called a lie, our opposition has been shocking in their generalized willingness to point their middle fingers at actuality. In doing so, they muddy the waters of this debate with noise and nonsense, turning an adult conversation about our society and its protections into some sort of anti-intellectual fairy tale.
But it’s not working anymore. The tide of history is so strongly moving in our favor that when people like Thomas blindly regurgitate things that they’re taught to say by the likes of Brian Brown, it doesn’t change anyone’s perception of reality. It simply makes people think that Thomas, Brian Brown, Robert Oscar Lopez and the rest of the NOM stooges might be insane.
