While the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) bills itself as a grassroots movement seeking to “protect traditional marriage,” the group’s tax forms — obtained by the Washington Independent — reveal that the overwhelming majority of its funding comes from just two entities who “contributed more than $6 million to the organization’s political arm –- accounting for about two-thirds of NOM’s 2010 revenue.” In fact, despite NOM’s nonstop fundraising blasts, small donations “below $5,000 covered only 8 percent of reported revenue:
As support for marriage equality continues to grow nationwide, NOM has to rely on a shrinking base of donors to fund more of its state-based campaigns to thwart marriage equality and in turn challenges campaign disclosure rules to keep their donors secret. For instance, “In fiscal year 2009, NOM’s contributions above $5,000 made up about 78 percent of all the contributions received, according to its 2009 Form 990. One year later, contributions above $5,000 made up roughly 92 percent of NOM’s contributions, which in turn represented the majority of NOM’s total revenue for that year”:
| Year | # of Big Donors (>$5,000) | Amount Raised From Big Donors | % of Total Fundraising |
| 2008 | 52 | $2,161,000 | 73% |
| 2009 | 14 | $5,500,000 | 78% |
| 2010 | 17 | — | 92% |
Previous in TP LGBT
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.