Jeremy Hooper noticed this audacious graphic the National Organization for Marriage is using to help promote its opposition to marriage equality:
Hooper’s own example that he and his husband have just been court-certified to adopt children is a compelling debunk in and of itself. That’s a family where fathers will be twice as relevant!
But it’s important to identify the distortion at root in NOM’s graphic. The first quote from President Obama refers to men who have children who they don’t support. The second quote refers to both men and women who have children they are raising as a family who deserve the same legal protections as all other families.
NOM believes it can make this claim because of studies that show children whose fathers have abandoned them do not fare as well as they grow up. Even though they do not ever even include same-sex parents, anti-equality groups conflate these “fatherless” studies to draw the same conclusions about lesbian couples (i.e. no “father”) who are raising children together. When ThinkProgress debunked such a usage, NOM’s own Ruth Institute attacked us, ultimately revealing another conflation: between “intact families” and “families with a mom and a dad.”
In other words, this graphic proves two distinct realities about NOM. First, the organization either has no real conception of what same-sex families look like, or they don’t care. Secondly, they are perfectly willing to lie, scapegoating the President in the process, to gin up support for their anti-gay positions.