BAM!

The cat is out of the bag. NOM Exposed has posted previously confidential internal documents from our good friends Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher that detail NOM's strategy for denying civil rights to GLBTs. And it turns out they're not only anti-gay, they're race baiters as well.

“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…”

Alvin McEwen has a pertinent comment about this:

NOM has portrayed whatever African-American opposition to marriage equality its spotlighted as spontaneous attempts by leaders and members of the black community to keep its civil rights legacy from supposedly being "tainted" by a comparison to gay equality.

But now we see that there was nothing spontaneous about this. It was a cynically planned effort by NOM - which the organization continues to exploit - in order to drive a wedge between blacks and gays.

I wonder how the black community is going to react to the news that they've been manipulated by a bunch of white folks who want to get rid of President Obama.

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.

And then there is the Latino bloc:

"The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity - a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation."

Their problem there is that, while family is very important to Latinos in general, that can work against NOM: sons and daughters may be gay, but they are still family. It's also notable that Latin America is making great strides in equal rights for gays and lesbians, in some cases far ahead of the U.S. The assimilation argument is going to backfire, big time, if the folks back home in Mexico or Brazil or Argentina or Chile recognize same-sex marriages and adoption rights.

If you look at the documents (all available at the NOM Exposed link), it becomes clear that NOM is nothing more than a Republican front with a Republican agenda -- "traditional marriage" is simply a screen.

NOM is right in line with Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, the Catholic bishops, and the rest of the right-wing theocrats.

Jim Burroway has an excellent summary of the whole thing. Read McEwen's full post as well.