The National Organization for Marriage and Family Research Council have unveiled two new videos today in an attempt to reinforce their argument that heterosexuals are somehow made victims when LGBT equality advances.

NOM’s newest clip in its so-called “Anti-defamation Alliance” collection is one of its weakest yet. In an attempt to drum up support from individuals who oppose unions, NOM interviewed Sara Rowe, a firefighter in Duluth, Minnesota. When Rowe’s union came out against the state’s marriage inequality amendment, she disagreed and wrote a letter to the editor expressing her dissent. That’s her entire story; there was no backlash or discrimination or legal issues of any kind. She simply “was made to feel uncomfortable and unaccepted” for who she is, and it seems the irony is lost on her. Watch the clip:

Meanwhile, FRC has reached out to Kathleen Crank and her 14-year-old daughter Sarah, who testified against marriage equality to the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee in January. Kathleen’s concern rises from the offensive negative feedback left on Internet comment threads after Sarah’s testimony was posted online. Watch it:

Bullying a 14-year-old girl as these trolls apparently did is no doubt wrong, but not exactly a compelling argument against marriage equality. And Kathleen shares her own burden for posting offensive comments online. When ThinkProgress posted Sarah’s testimony, Kathleen actively engaged in the post’s feedback thread to defend her family’s anti-gay views. Many of those comments seem to have been deleted, but some remain. She claimed that Sarah “wrote [the testimony] herself,” but admitted that she is “thankful that she has embraced my values” — perhaps not surprising considering Sarah is homeschooled. In various comments, Kathleen laid out exactly what those values are:

CRANK: I simply pointed out that AIDS is devastating an entire continent. AIDS is a terrible disease, and in the US [men who have sex with men] are 44 times more likely to contract it than heterosexuals. [...]

I have had friends who chose that way, I have family that chose that way. The problem with the GLBT community is that there is this viewpoint that if you love me, if you accept me, then you must celebrate my behaviour and give me everything I want. To me it is similar to alcoholism or drug addiction. I know many many people who have successfully come out of that lifestyle. [...]

Truthfully, the best kept secret in the GLBT community is that very few GLBT people want to get a marriage license or parent..so speaking out against this legislation is not speaking out against gays. I do believe the practice of homosexuality is harmful and destructive to individuals and society, as I testified several years ago, and that is borne out by the health stats. [...]

Nature itself forbids same sex couples to marry. The parts don’t fit and no children can be created. No laws will ever change the natural law. The rage of the GLBT community is really against God and nature.

These are apparently some of the best arguments that opponents of equality can come up with: pity the woman who disagreed with her union and the mother teaching her daughter a distorted reality about the lives of gays and lesbians.

Greg Quinlan, PFOX

Greg Quinlan, president of the ex-gay group PFOX, has a distorted perspective on the world. In his new screed at LifeSiteNews, he reiterates the false claim that child molestation can cause homosexuality, conflates affirming a child’s gender identity with rejecting a child’s sexual orientation, and accuses gays of having a “dread and absolute fear of heterosexuality.” But what’s noteworthy about his post is not the harmful ex-gay rhetoric but his framing that “homofascism” is threatening liberty with “anti-heterosexual legislation.”

Quinlan’s interpretation of the LGBT equality movement may read as a fringe view, but his argument is the same as more mainstream anti-gay groups like the National Organization for Marriage:

But when I decided to leave homosexuality after seeing hundreds of my friends and acquaintances die of AIDS, I was demonized and excoriated as an ex-gay traitor, which continues to this day.  Now I see that same hate against the ex-gay community being targeted against African-Americans who refuse to equate sodomy with their skin color and against heterosexuals who will not recognize homosexual behavior as a civil right.

So what does that mean for heterosexuals? Just look at what is happening. In addition to banning heterosexual therapy, individual homosexuals are filing lawsuits against heterosexuals by using gay rights laws to force mandatory recognition and approval of homosexual behavior. Businesses and individuals who do not approve are fired from their jobs, threatened, or publicly castigated – as witnessed by the attempted but failed nationwide Chick-fil-A boycott by homosexuals.

The culture war is not slowing down; it’s just beginning to gain steam as gay organizations turn to anti-heterosexual legislation, mandatory public approval of sodomy, federal funding of gay youth activist organizations and homosexual initiatives, required government training against “homophobia,” “heterosexism,” and “transphobia,” etc., etc.  This is more than a culture war; it is a war for our very own freedoms—a war for the character and future of our nation.

Homofascism will soon be, if it is not already, the greatest threat to our individual liberties in this country.  So-called equality marriage is just the beginning.

Just like NOM, Quinlan tries to drive a wedge between gays and African Americans, erasing individuals who belong to both communities in the process. Just like NOM, he defends individuals who discriminate against gays and lesbians as victims just defending their anti-gay “religious liberty.” And just as NOM manipulates the notion of what is being taught in schools, Quinlan reduces the full lives of gays and lesbians to their sexual “behavior.” He doesn’t have a single claim that isn’t one of the mainstream arguments against LGBT equality, but what makes his perspective unique is its candor.

Achieving full LGBT equality means achieving full straight equality too. When one group is treated as less than — denied legal securities for their families, fired or denied housing for their identities, etc. — the other group adjusts to expectations that they are “more than.” The term “white supremacy,” for example, is an apt description for those who oppose civil liberties based on race, because they want people who are white to have power and privilege in society that non-whites do not. In the same way, anti-gay groups are arguing for a “heterosexual supremacy,” a culture in which those with opposite-sex attractions can expect to have advantages that those with same-sex attractions or divergent gender identities do not. The landscapes for those two struggles are of course so historically different as to be incomparable, but the nature of advocating for social justice in both cases is a fair parallel.

Quinlan’s article offered nothing substantively new in terms of arguments against LGBT equality, but by defending “Heterosexual Rights,” he has pulled away the curtain on the motives of the entire anti-equality movement. The “individual liberties” Quinlan feels are at threat is nothing more than the opportunity for one group of people to discriminate against another, which has nothing to do with liberty whatsoever.

Maine state Rep. Stacey Fitts (R) voted against the bill to advance marriage equality in 2009 and avoided participating in the referendum to veto that bill, decisions he now looks back upon as “chicken thing[s] to do.” This year, Allen is openly supporting the ballot initiative to pass marriage equality in hopes of undoing previous mistakes. Fitts spoke with MPBN about how he caved to pressure from fellow Republicans even though his mind was already changing on the issue:

FITTS: As a Republican, I think any time you take a position that get outside the boundaries of your caucus, you can become alienated and less effective. And my role in serving my constituents is to remain as effective as I can. Now, looking back, was that my personal position? Ehh, probably not. I probably, inside, would have loved to have been able to vote for it. In that game of survivor that is the Legislature, you don’t want to be outside the group – that the group means something, and has value.

Now, the Republican lawmaker is proudly standing up for the values he hid from three years ago:

FITTS: I’ve just seen, for me, how important this is to the families that exist today that would love the opportunity to be families like everybody else and be married.

Watch Fitts’ ad for Mainers United for Marriage:

The New York Times profile of ex-gay therapy and those who claim it has helped them is, to the paper’s credit, timely and relevant, with reference to California’s new bill banning the harmful treatment for minors and the two lawsuits challenging it. But the article is otherwise an unfortunate puff piece for those who profit off Christian men’s internalized stigma — even hawking several ministries by name — without any mention of those who survived the traumatic psychological manipulation and came out stronger on the other end.

The Times highlighted several subscribers to ex-gay therapy who all seem to define homosexuality as some sort of sex addiction with no potential for meaningful relationships, including lawsuit plaintiff Aaron Bitzer and infamous reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi:

BLAKE SMITH: [For most of my life,] every inch of my body craved male sexual contact.

AARON BITZER: I found that I couldn’t just say “I’m gay” and live that way.

JEREMY S.: [Having gay sex almost daily] wasn’t working for me.

CAMERON MICHAEL SWAIM: [The gay life] just doesn’t settle with me. There’s got to be a way to heal this affliction.

JOSEPH NICOLOSI: I don’t believe that anybody is really gay. I believe that all people are heterosexual but that some have a homosexual problem, and some of these people attempt to resolve their conflict by adopting a sociopolitical label called “gay.”

This is a very narrow portrayal of what it means to be gay, one focused through lenses of conservative moral judgment that ignore decades of social science and the millions of same-sex families that now populate communities across the country. When gay men are unhappy being gay in society, it makes absolutely no sense for them to then turn to the people who reinforce the idea that society should not be inclusive of gays. These “therapists” prey on the guilt imposed upon these men (and a few women) by their families and the belief that gay men are only defined (and apparently extensively defined) by sexual acts.

By spreading these ideas unchallenged without a thoughtful rebuke from those who have disavowed ex-gay treatments is wholly irresponsible. These ideas may be exotic and intriguing as far as journalism fair may go, but they are incredibly harmful — particularly when families buy into them and impose them upon their vulnerable children — to present unchecked. And for many men, the treatment is not only a reinforcement of self-hatred, but an expensive investment as well. The final sentence of the article presents an insightful clue to the scheme at hand:

Five years from now, Mr. Swaim hopes, he will be engaged or married. In the meantime, he is trying to scrape together enough money to start seeing a reparative therapist.