Rick Santorum seated with NOM's Maggie Gallagher

The newly released confidential documents from the National Organization for Marriage offer vast insights into the inner workings of the anti-gay group, at least as of 2009. While the race-wedging and parent-scaring tactics have gotten the most press attention, the memos also reveal an official partnership between NOM and Rick Santorum to campaign for maintaining the Defense of Marriage Act. Apparently, he agreed to be the spokesman for the group’s “Two Million for Marriage” campaign (which now directs to its “Defend DOMA” campaign):

The goal of the Two Million for Marriage effort is to use the Obama administration’s priority of the repeal of DOMA to rally a nationwide donor and activist base, recruiting two million activists and 50,000 donors by the election of 2010. We have already launched a $2 million e-mail, direct mail, and automated call campaign and have gained nearly 500,000 activists and roughly 15,000 new donors in our first few months of this effort. Senator Rick Santorum has served as the face of this effort through e-mail and direct mail. Senator Santorum has recently agreed to use his voice in a nationwide automated call effort to slicit activists and donations.

Santorum’s opposition to the freedom to marry is by no means new. As Elon Green noted earlier, Santorum is one of several Republican presidential candidates who have signed NOM’s presidential pledge to oppose the advancement of marriage equality. Nevertheless, the partnership confirms the extent of Santorum’s commitment to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. Despite his constant discussion about marriage while campaigning in Iowa this past fall, he has recently tried to distance himself from it, claiming he “hasn’t been talking a lot” about gay issues and even downplaying his marriage position by comparing it to President Obama’s.

Given Santorum’s close ties to NOM’s work, one wonders if he also supports fostering the same kind of racial divisions to achieve his goals.

North Carolina Speaker of the House Thom Tillis (R)

When North Carolinians head to the polls on May 8, one of the issues they will vote on is Amendment One, a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnerships. (The state already has a law making same-sex marriage illegal.) Polls have sometimes split on the issue, but one released earlier this week found 58 percent of voters supported the discriminatory amendment. It appears, however, that one of its more prominent supporters does not think it will succeed, at least in the long term.

In a visit to the campus of North Carolina State University last night, House Speaker Thom Tillis (R) took questions from students on a variety of issues, including Amendment One. Tillis predicted the amendment would ultimately pass, but expressed doubt that it would stay in the constitution for long:

A question and answer session prompted questions on students’ minds, among those issues the upcoming Amendment One that would constitutionally ban homosexual marriage. “It’s a generational issue,” Tillis said. “The data shows right now that you are a generation away from that issue.”

According to Tillis, researchers have predicted Amendment One will pass with approximately 54 percent, but Tillis, who voted to pass the amendment, believes it won’t remain long. “If it passes, I think it will be repealed within 20 years,” Tillis said.

Tillis was a strong backer of the bill at one point, trotting out “data” on how heterosexual marriages were “more stable and nurturing” and fast-tracking the bill through the House without public comment. Since then, Tillis has tried to dodge responsibility for his role in pushing the referendum as other Republicans have walked back their support over fears it would be too far-reaching. (A spokesman said that Tillis still supports the bill.)

This was not the first time a college student had questioned his support of Amendment One, which may have influenced his statement that marriage equality is a “generational issue.” College students are not the only one who oppose Amendment One, however: President Obama, Gov. Bev Perdue, and the North Carolina Libertarian Party are a few of the individuals or organizations who have stated their opposition.

-Zachary Bernstein

It’s no secret that anti-gay groups have primarily targeted children in their campaigns, whether through overt accusations that homosexuals recruit and molest kids to the more recent and more subtle threat that young people might actually be “taught homosexuality” in schools. The intended audience for all of these messages is parents, as the National Organization for Marriage confirms in their 2009 confidential strategy memos released today.

NOM’s parental fear-mongering suggests a two-step process. The first is to raise awareness about various “side issues” (read: irrelevant issues) that put parents on guard for their children:

Expose Obama as a social radical. Develop side issues to weaken pro-gay marriage political leaders and parties and develop an activist base of socially conservative voters. Raise such issues as pornography, protection of children, and the need to oppose all efforts to weaken religious liberty at the federal level. [...]

The Preserve Innocence Project will monitor all administration initiatives from the White House, Department of Justice, Education Department, and the Health and Human Services Department that affect the welfare of children. We will put a special focus on exposing those administration programs that have the effect of sexualizing young children. We will provide a weekly update to Congress, to conservative leaders and to the national media on personnel or policy threats to childhood innocence. We will work with Congress to develop appropriate legislation to reverse current Department of Education policies that use the Safe Schools program to foist de facto sex education on children as young as kindergarten age.

The second step is to then pursue a media campaign alleging that “parental rights” are sacrificed to accommodate gay rights. This scares parents into believing that learning about the existence of gay people and their families infringes on their child-rearing responsibilities. RightWingWatch also notes that NOM committed to investigating negative outcomes for children raised by same-sex couples:

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Since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, cadets in uniform at Norwich University, the nation’s oldest private military academy, “participated Monday in sessions about handling bullying and harassment as part of the school’s first gay pride week,” the Associated Press reports. The event — the first of its kind since Congress lifted its ban against open service — signals the growing acceptance of gay and lesbian cadets within the nation’s military academies, where some students have formed LGBT support groups and clubs:

In December, a group of students at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., formed a group called Spectrum, which has many of the same goals as the Norwich club. A similar organization with the same name is being formed in New York at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. [...]

“It was definitely a big change, but it happened over such a long period of time for me that it didn’t seem like that big of a deal,” said Coast Guard Academy Senior Chip Hall, 21, of Monterrey, Calif.

The West Point Spectrum, modeled after the Coast Guard organization, is being formed with little fanfare.

“Everyone has been very professional here at the academy,” said West Point Cadet Andrew Fitzsimmons, 19, a sophomore from Algonac, Mich. “It’s been a very positive environment.”

Some Christian groups on campus are uncomfortable with the new organizations, but seem intent on respecting the diversity of their fellow cadets. As one member of Norwich’s Christian Fellowship explained, “We make it clear to them that we use the bible as our guide and that as a result we can’t condone the stuff they do. But the Bible is also equally clear, in fact, even more clear. … Being judgmental about the sin without extending love to the sinner is another form of sin.” Anti-gay groups like the Family Research Council and the Center for Military Readiness — who predicted a mass exodus of Christian servicememrs from the military in the wake of repeal — have a lot to learn from this more accepting and tolerant worldview.

NOM's Brian Brown

The National Organization for Marriage’s confidential 2009 memos released last night have created quite a stir for the blatant way they sought to divide racial communities over the issue of same-sex marriage. Now, NOM President Brian Brown has responded to the controversy by invoking the exact same race-wedging strategy outlined in the documents:

BROWN: The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) was formed in 2007 and has worked extensively with supporters of traditional marriage from every color, creed and background. We have worked with prominent African-American and Hispanic leaders, including Dr. Alveda C. King, Bishop George McKinney of the COGIC Church, Bishop Harry Jackson and the New York State Senator Reverend Rubén Díaz Sr., all of whom share our concern about protecting marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Gay marriage advocates have attempted to portray same-sex marriage as a civil right, but the voices of these and many other leaders have provided powerful witness that this claim is patently false. Gay marriage is not a civil right, and we will continue to point this out in written materials such as those released in Maine. We proudly bring together people of different races, creeds and colors to fight for our most fundamental institution: marriage.

Everything in this statement confirms the strategy of using people of color as spokespeople and using the language of “civil rights” as a catalyst for division. The freedom to marry is a civil right, crucial to same-sex families’ ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness just as all families do. The mere fact that NOM brags about its affiliation with vitriolic equality opponents like Harry Jackson and Rubén Díaz proves just how low the organization will sink to plant the seeds of anti-gay animosity throughout communities of color.

This is not an apology. This is not damage control. This is an acknowledgment — NOM taking complete ownership of its insidious tactics.

Our guest blogger is Elon Green, a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

Last night, the Human Rights Campaign published National Organization for Marriage memos that, as Zack Ford put it, “explicitly confirm many of the insidious tactics LGBT bloggers have been documenting for years.”

We now know, for example, that NOM set out to “[d]rive a wedge between gays and blacks” by couching the fight of marriage in the language of the civil rights movement, as well as “interrupt this process” of Hispanic assimilation “by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity.”

It will interesting to see if, and how, Mitt Romney responds to these revelations. Last August, Romney — along with Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum — signed NOM’s pledge [pdf] to deny gays and lesbians equal rights under the law, as did Newt Gingrich in December.

In return, NOM’s president, Brian Brown, deemed the candidate a “marriage champion.” (Romney apparently failed to win the favor of former chairman, Maggie Gallagher.)

In having NOM has an ally, Romney stands to gain considerable financial support. As Buzzfeed noted:

In a “$20 million strategy for victory” keyed to the 2010 midterm elections, the group says its agenda “requires defeating the pro-gay Obama agenda.”

“A pro-marriage president must be elected in 2012,” the document says, although Obama has offered tepid opposition to same-sex marriage.

Whether directly or indirectly, Romney is sure to be the beneficiary of these efforts. Will he continue to ally himself with an organization that views African-Americans and Hispanics as pawns?

As reported earlier, newly obtained internal memos from 2009 document the National Organization for Marriage’s various insidious strategies to oppose marriage equality. This post takes a look at two key race-baiting strategies NOM has employed, one targeting African-Americans and one targeting Latinos. In both cases, the organization commited to “interrupting the race analogy:”

Ultimately we aim to raise the costs of identifying with gay marriage, and also raise the attractiveness of identifying with traditional marriage. But we also need to accomplish a sophisticated cultural objective: interrupt the attempt to equate gay with black, and sexual orientation with race. We need to make traditional sexual morality intellectually respectable again in elite culture.

This strategy explains NOM’s many subtle attempts to oppose psychological claims about the nature of sexual orientation, as well as its alliances with groups that promote the idea that homosexuality is a choice and can be changed through ex-gay therapy. With black voters, NOM takes this a step farther by trying to provoke a disagreement about what constitutes a civil right and who is deserving of such rights:

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 the party. Fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8 is key to raising the costs of pushing gay marriage to its advocates and persuading the movement’s allies that advocates are unacceptably overreaching on this issue.

Recent support from public voices like Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and Jonathan Capehart suggest the effectiveness of this strategy may be beginning to wane, but it certainly still seems to be the focus of the effort to oppose Maryland’s marriage equality law. It’s particularly conniving that NOM sought to capitalize on the Prop 8 fallout that blamed black voters for its passage, because subsequent studies found that race was not a primary factor in deciding how people voted.

Though the language is not as obviously sneaky, NOM’s strategy to attract Latino voters is no less an effort to create racial divisions as a means to achieving their discriminatory goals. Rather than framing around civil rights, the organization sought to treat marriage equality as an “Anglo” value and convince Latinos to oppose it as a parallel to resisting assimilation:

Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We can interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity. [...]

Here’s our insight: The number of “glamorous” people willing to buck the powerful forces to speak for marriage may be small in any one country. But 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.) [...]

Our ultimate goal is to make opposition to gay marriage an identity marker, a badge of youth rebellion to conformist assimilation to the bad side of “Anglo” culture.

This seems to have backfired for NOM for a variety of reasons. Of note is that Ricky Martin’s “glamorous” re-entry into pop culture has actually allowed many Latinos to see a role model for same-sex families. But perhaps what has been more significantly disastrous for NOM has been the close ties between the LGBT community and immigration advocacy groups. The shared challenges of “coming out” as gay or as undocumented have served to build an effective bridge between the two movements and their goals of freedom and inclusion in society. A recent survey found that 65 percent of California nonwhites — mostly Latino — support marriage equality. This tactic may have fallen on deaf ears, but it still demonstrates how eager NOM is to intentionally divide communities as a primary strategy for fighting same-sex marriage.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that African Americans and Latinos are just as likely to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, as white people. NOM’s tactics seek to erase an entire population of people who live at the intersections of these experiences, limiting their ability to fulfill their complete identities.

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The fallout has begun from the National Organization for Marriage’s failed attempt to circumvent Maine’s campaign finance disclosure laws. The Human Rights Campaign has published four of NOM’s confidential strategic memos from 2009, which explicitly confirm many of the insidious tactics LGBT bloggers have been documenting for years. Most alarming from the memos is NOM’s admission that it has tried “to drive a wedge between gays and blacks” and also specifically targeted Latino groups with its messaging.

Here are some of the highlights of NOM’s tactics found in the new documents:

1. “Drive a wedge between gays and blacks” by convincing them to fight over the language of “civil rights.”
2. Bait Latino voters to oppose marriage equality as “a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”
3. Interrupt the “attempt to equate…sexual orientation with race” so that marriage inequality is not perceived as discrimination.
4. Draw attention to the “bigotry and intolerance” displayed by equality advocates and “document the victims” through a rapid response media team.
5. Emphasize the importance of “religious liberties” to limit the impact of marriage equality’s legislative advancements.
6. “Develop side issues to weaken pro-gay marriage political leaders” like pornography, “protection of children” and religious liberty at the federal level.
7. Expose Obama administration programs that “have the effect of sexualizing young children” or threatening “childhood innocence.”
8. “Find, train, and equip young leaders” to become a “next generation of elites” capable of opposing marriage equality.
9. Foster closer relationships with Catholic bishops to “equip, energize, and moralize Catholic priests on the marriage issue.”
10. Focus on “the consequences of gay marriage for parental rights.”

In addition, one of the memos confides, “most of the world may never know the crucial role that NOM played in the Prop 8 campaign.” In fact, throughout the memos, NOM emphasizes its intent to infuse large sums of money into various state-level campaigns in ways that circumvent donor disclosure.

None of these revelations is particularly surprising, as they have all been quite evident, but to see them in writing is nevertheless distressing. That NOM explicitly thought about the way it could divide and conquer racial groups and scare conservatives into protecting their religious liberty demonstrates just how motivated the organization is by animus against the advancement of the LGBT community.

Check back for more in-depth analysis of these documents and NOM’s treacherous tactics to oppose the freedom to marry.