The National Organization for Marriage is perhaps best known as the anti-gay group with those odd lightning commercials that were parodied so effectively. Now, however, NOM may become even better known for some internal memos that highlight the group's divisive strategies.
The leading opponents of same-sex marriage planned to defeat campaigns for gay marriage by "fanning the hostility" between black voters from gay voters and by casting President Obama as a radical foe of marriage, according to confidential documents made public in a Maine court today.The documents, circulated by the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, are marked "confidential" and detail the internal strategy of the National Organization for Marriage.
NOM doesn't exactly come across well in its internal documents. The group said in no uncertain terms that it intended to "drive a wedge between gays and blacks," bait the LGBT community into attacking African-American spokespersons, and convince Latino voters that anti-gay animus is a "symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation."
The group's materials also point to a $20 million effort in 2012 to defeat "the pro-gay Obama agenda" and expose the president "as a social radical." Under a section headed "Sideswiping Obama," NOM apparently planned to talk about pornography in order to undermine the Obama campaign -- though I have no idea how the group intended to connect the two.
In related news, the Obama administration yesterday directed a "health insurance company to cover the same-sex spouse of a federal employee," a move experts believe is a historic first, and announced that same-sex families will be able to cross the U.S. border together, rather than the previous policy that forced married same-sex couples to go through customs separately.
One assumes the National Organization for Marriage was not pleased with the news.