Once you understand the great difference between civil marriage and holy marriage, there is not one valid reason to forbid the former from same-sex couples, and all that is left to protect is the latter.Is making that distinction really, seriously a problem people actually have? Are they not aware that unbelievers marry each other, often not at churches, often at ceremonies not officiated by priests? Or do they want to ban that as well?
When it comes to the issue of my statements about homosexuality being a mental disorder, I have one thing to say. And that is that I apologize for the insensitivity and accept the fact that this has nothing to do with civil marriage. So what if it’s a mental disorder? It wouldn’t and shouldn’t disqualify gay men and women from civil marriage.Uh, yeah, baby steps.
"A poll and a comprehensive study released last week reveal that for the first time, a majority of Americans support marriage equality and other benefits for same-sex couples.And in another new report ...
The poll, conducted for ABC News and The Washington Post, indicates that 53 percent of Americans support marriage equality for same-sex couples, a 21 percent increase from 2004.
The biggest increases are among Christians, who saw gains among white and Hispanic Catholic Americans and white nonevangelical Protestants. While support from evangelical Protestants increased, especially among younger members, they still overwhelmingly oppose marriage equality and other benefits for same-sex couples.
'This is very consistent with a lot of other polling data we've seen and the general momentum we've seen over the past year and a half,' Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry, a leading pro-gay-marriage group, said to The Washington Post of the poll."
"Catholics are more supportive of gay and lesbian rights than the general public and other Christians, according to a new report released today. The new report, which is the most comprehensive portrait of Catholic attitudes on gay and lesbian issues assembled to date, also finds that seven-in-ten Catholics say that messages from America's places of worship contribute a lot (33 percent) or a little (37 percent) to higher rates of suicide among gay and lesbian youth. ...So, American Catholics, please note that when your Church leadership speaks out to oppose marriage equality and same-sex unions, they aren't speaking for the majority of you.
Nearly three-quarters of Catholics favor either allowing gay and lesbian people to marry (43%) or allowing them to form civil unions (31%). Only 22% of Catholics say there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple's relationship.
Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Catholics favor laws that would protect gay and lesbian people against discrimination in the workplace; 63% of Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian people to serve openly in the military; and 6-in-10 (60%) Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.
Less than 4-in-10 Catholics give their own church top marks (a grade of an A or a B) on its handing of the issue of homosexuality; majorities of members of most other religious groups give their churches high marks.
A majority of Catholics (56%) believe that sexual relations between two adults of the same gender is not a sin."
... "[building] off the success of Courage Campaign’s NOM Tour Tracker – a blog of first-hand accounts, photos and videos chronicling NOM’s ‘2010 Summer for Marriage—One Man, One Woman’ bus tour of 17 states. The Courage Campaign deployed three staffers to follow NOM’s tour and file reports from the road, generating more than one-million page views and more than 15,000 comments. During the course of the tour, federal courts declared two of NOM’s top policy priorities – California’s Proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act – unconstitutional.posted by ericb at 7:35 AM on April 9, 2011
The NOM Tour Tracker showed NOM’s summer tour consistently outnumbered three-to-one by pro-equality counter rally participants organized by Freedom to Marry and state LGBT organizations. It also showed NOM staff attempting to limit public access to their events and NOM’s sparse supporters doing everything from speaking in tongues, to comparing marriage equality to genocide and advocating the murder of LGBT families.
‘The NOM Tour Tracker unmasked the so-called 'National Organization for Marriage' as a small and secretive fringe group devoted to attacking families, spreading lies, and sowing fear,’ said Courage Campaign Founder and Chairman Rick Jacobs. ‘With a majority of Americans and a growing number of conservatives now standing up for equality, NOM Exposed takes this important work a step further by bringing to light the nefarious connections, shadowy finances, and dubious ethics at the heart of NOM’s brand of political extremism. We are proud to work with the Human Rights Campaign on this important initiative.’
NOM Exposed, the result of several months of research and collaboration, reveals the following:* At a time of the country's greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, NOM's financial growth has been explosive. NOM has amassed huge resources – estimated to reach or exceed $10M in 2010 – from modest beginnings in 2007.
* NOM is a highly secretive organization that tries to not only hide the identity of its political donors from the voting public in state after state, but operates in a way to discourage people from knowing who its key players and associates are.
* NOM has deep connections to the Catholic Church hierarchy, to the Mormon Church, to evangelical right-wing pastors and churches and to those who have a long history of anti-gay rhetoric and activity. These are individuals and organizations which not only oppose same-sex marriage, but oppose domestic partnerships, civil unions, hate crimes protections and even fertility treatments for women because some of those women could be lesbians.
* Since 2008, NOM and its allies have engaged in a radical, nationwide plan to flout long-established campaign finance disclosure laws. This is nothing short of a strategic, coordinated plan to hide NOM's political activities from voters. This effort has prompted several state investigations and resounding legal defeats for NOM.”
"Many today had expressed whether Louis’ decision to support civil marriage equality, and other intentions, were authentic.posted by ericb at 7:51 AM on April 9, 2011 [1 favorite]
Exhibit A: This morning, NOM’s Facebook page had 291,000 fans on its Facebook page which Louis helped put together and administer. After Louis was done, here’s what it looks like now.
[Now only] 149[fans]. Oops.
Louis also went on Sirius/XM radio to talk with Mike Signorile about the circumstances that led to his decision. Jeremy has the audio.
Not just a decision today — a Courageous one, as Arisha noted earlier. But a follow-through on telling his story and begin making up lost time. Good for Louis."
" ..This is where I came into the picture over the past six months or so. It was clear that NOM needed a plan to activate what supporters they had, to mobilize them to respond to events to create a grassroots-like illusion of support.posted by ericb at 4:25 PM on April 11, 2011 [3 favorites]
Of course, illusion is my word but is an accurate usage of the word considering the objective. NOM in no way ever ordered me to create an illusion.
I am sharing this with you because I want you to realize that NOM is a small group of devoutly religious Catholics supported by a couple of undisclosed sources. NOM is essentially made up of Brian Brown, its President, Maggie Gallagher, the CEO, a handful of other Board members (who are scattered across the country involved in other matters), a couple of advisors to Mr. Brown and a small and largely incompetent office staff.
Their social media management isn’t operated by NOM – they’re not big enough for that nor do they understand social media! As Jeremy Hooper detailed, Opus Fidelis manages NOM’s social media and websites.
That is all that is standing between you and the freedom to marry. There is no grassroots opposition. While they have proven to be quite successful over the past couple years, I think it’s time to put NOM’s size into perspective. Are you going to let a handful of fringe Catholics (with whom many Catholics disagree on marriage) stand between you and the freedom to marry?"
At that point, between what I had witnessed on the marriage tour and RJ’s post about marriage equality, I really came to understand that gays and lesbians were just real people who wanted to live real lives and be treated equally as opposed to, for example, wanting to destroy American culture. No, they didn’t want to destroy American culture, they wanted to openly particulate in it.Interestingly enough, I didn't actually realize that the people (or at least some of the people) against same-sex marriage actually believe that there is a homosexual agenda that's bent on destroying America. I always thought those ideas were just hyperbole.
"The film dives angrily into the fray. It uncovers the classified church documents and the largely concealed money trail of Mormon contributions that paid for a high-powered campaign to pass Proposition 8. The Mormon involvement, the film persuasively argues, tilted the vote toward passage, by 52 percent to 48 percent, in its final weeks.posted by ericb at 9:13 AM on April 12, 2011
That involvement was concealed under the facade of a coalition with Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians called the National Organization for Marriage. Mormons raised an estimated $22 million for the cause. In the final week of the campaign, the film says, $3 million came from Utah. The money financed a sophisticated media barrage that involved blogs, Twitter and YouTube videos, as well as scary (and, according to the movie, misleading) television ads, and an aggressive door-to-door campaign whose foot soldiers were instructed on how not to appear Mormon."
"First Year: NOM Raises Half A Million To Target State Legislators In Two Statesposted by ericb at 9:22 AM on April 12, 2011
In its first year, NOM’s budget was just over $500,000 and the campaigns it ran were local and comparatively small.
Two years later: NOM raises $8 million to target 11 states and Washington DC at various levels, and brags of its ability to come up with $600,000 in a few days.
From its modest beginning, NOM claims it spent $8 million in 2009 and plans to raise $10 million for 2010. Former NOM president Maggie Gallagher even bragged of raising $600,000 in just a few days to pay for ads and automated calls to prompt “grassroots activities.”
Of NOM’s $2.5 million budget increase from 2007 to 2008, nearly $2.2 million came from 52 large donations of $5,000 or more from anti-gay organizations. On average, these donations were valued at more than $40,000 apiece, with one source alone giving $450,000, according to NOM’s tax filing. In a sworn statement filed in Iowa by NOM, then-executive director Brian Brown admitted, “NOM solicits and receives most of its funds as undesignated donations from major donors and national organizations.”
NOM aggressively works (and litigates) to keep its donors private. However, there are several anti-gay organizations that have both ties to NOM and the fat wallets to fund their expanding mission.
NOM Closely Aligned With Mormon Church In California And Through Board Members
NOM’s mission and organizational secrecy fits with a pattern of behavior by the Mormon Church, which has been trying to influence policy related to same-sex marriage since the mid-90s while keeping its name not only out of headlines, but entirely out of campaign finance reports. Additionally, one of NOM’s founding board members has close ties to the Mormon Church’s leadership and was replaced by well-known Mormon writer and anti-equality columnist Orson Scott Card. Maggie Gallagher also sits on the board of the Marriage Law Foundation, which is Mormon-founded and Utah-based. And one of the academic advisors to the Ruth Institute (now a NOM project) has been deeply involved with the Church’s opposition strategy to same-sex marriage from its earliest days.
NOM’s Largest Known Donation Is From A Catholic Group, And Has Ties To Powerful And Secretive Opus Dei
Another cornerstone of NOM’s emergence is the Catholic Church. The three main founders of NOM – Brian Brown, Maggie Gallagher, and Robert George – are all Roman Catholic, and have been comparatively open about the fact that the group is backed by “well-off Catholic individuals.” A September 2010 Washington Independent article identified the largest known donation to NOM as a $1.4 million bundle from the Catholic fraternal organizations Knights of Columbus in 2009. The prior year, the Knights gave $500,000 to NOM. Another board member, Luis Tellez, is a high-ranking official in the American branch of the ultra-conservative and secretive Catholic anti-gay organization Opus Dei.
NOM Received Funding From Right-Wing Evangelical Groups And The Bradley Foundation
NOM has acknowledged that it has received funding from evangelical right-wing anti-gay organizations Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. NOM board chairman emeritus Robert George, who served on FRC’s board, also has ties to groups like the Bradley Foundation. Moreover, NOM has connections to the Arlington Group, a collection of 75 religious right groups that poured $2 million into passing gay marriage bans in states during the 2004 presidential election.
NOM Expenditures By Year
NOM’s expenditures have increased by $7.5 million over three years."
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Full body goosebumps. And then tears.
This is one of the most honest documents of someone having a major position change I have ever read.
I can't even really express what I'm feeling now, but none of it is negative.
Thanks so much for posting. I have to go wash the tear tracks off my face.
Truly an amazing document of courage and apology.
Oh, and fuck you NOM.
posted by hippybear at 4:19 PM on April 8, 2011 [7 favorites]