Another NOM Commercial, Another Batch of Lies

April 30, 2009

For those who haven’t heard, Miss California, who last week said that gay marriage should be illegal in favor of “opposite marriage”, has signed on as a spokesperson for the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the anti-gay group that released that horrible and hilarious “Gathering Storm” ad a few weeks ago and called their campaign 2M4M.

This morning NOM released their first ad with Miss California. She doesn’t have a speaking role (it’s not her strong suit, after all), but they used footage of the broadcast to open the ad.

Okay, so first things first. Of what relevance is it that Miss California is “young”? That seems like an extraneous fact to throw in, as if her being young made the reaction to her answer more wrong. Which, of course, would be silly.

More importantly, this ad, just like “Gathering Storm”, is chock full of misrepresentations.

Opinions from “some of the nation’s foremost scholars” are mentioned, all of which proclaim that the sky is falling. Let’s take them one by one.

But first, let’s look at the slight-of-hand NOM has tried to pull off here. At the 0:45 mark in the video, a quote goes by over the blurry image of a document. Then that one disappears and is replaced by another quote over the blurry image of another document. I went hunting for these quotes (I’ll get to them in a minute), and found something amazing.

They come from the same document. While it’s technically true that the letter in question was signed by a team of lawyers, NOM clearly intended for the audience to believe they were from separate documents. In fact, they’re from the same page of that letter.

The letter (pdf here) was sent last week to Connecticut Speaker of the House Christopher G. Donovan by professors Thomas Berg of the University of St. Thomas, Carl Esbeck of the University of Missouri, Richard Garnett of the University of Notre Dame and Robin Fretwell Wilson of Washington & Lee University. Here are the quotes.

“will create widespread and unnecessary legal conflict…”

“effects would be…devastating”

(The text replaced by elipses in the second quote is “widespread and”. I guess they didn’t want it to be too obvious that the quotes were written by the same person.)

In the letter, the four present the argument that that codifying marriage equality would require businesses to recognize the legal marriages and not discriminate against those individuals.

Examples are provided, including false examples in footnote 5. One reference is the New Mexico photography studio that was told that they could not illegally refuse public accommodation as defined in §12181 (7)(f) and codified in §12182(b)(1)(A)(i). This, of course, has nothing to do with individual religious freedom, but that’s never stopped the anti-gay crowd before.

Also referenced is the case of the United Methodist owned Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, which for several decades took advantage of a tax credit by allowing the pavilion and attached boardwalk to be used as public land and then was found to have violated the rights of a lesbian couple by refusing to grant them use of the public land for a commitment ceremony. Public land = Used by the entire public, even the parts that disagree with you.

But this letter doesn’t just have the problem of misused examples that have nothing to do with religious liberty. In addition, the authors rely heavily on the writings of Marc D. Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, who is quoted in the letter as saying “[n]o one seriously believes that clergy will be forced, or even asked, to perform marriages that are anathema to them.”

DOT DOT DOT

No, civil marriage equality doesn’t mean preachers will be forced to perform religious marriages they don’t want to. Of course not. Even NOM-cited documents draw that obvious conclusion. But that’s a major plank of the anti-equality platform that groups like NOM like to claim.

Did they just not expect people to check this out?

I have trouble wrapping my head around the whole premise of the ad, that marriage equality will mean that people will have to treat LGBT people like everybody else with regard to marriage. Why is that a problem? Why do they expect debate over whether Christians can be exempt from complying with civil rights laws?

We aren’t trying to make anybody stop speaking. We aren’t telling people that they can’t act with bigotry. We’re saying that America is better than the current laws, and that the basic premise of liberty for all includes LGBT Americans. Why is this controversial?

Finally, I looked up the Joe Solomonese/Hardball clip. It’s from an April 8, 2009 episode and includes commentary (such as it is) by NOM president Maggie Gallagher. In fact, on the new commercial, they cover her up with a Hardball logo. Did they just not want people to know she was there? Here’s the clip. It’s almost nine minutes, but it’s very important to know the truth behind the Religious Right’s rhetoric.