NOM hate group leader Robert George,
who believes, and aggressively promotes the idea
that sexual minorities are sub-humans undeserving of rights
In its summer, 2012 so-called
"Intelligence Report" on
the National Organization for Marriage, the Southern Poverty Law Center once
again -- for whatever reasons -- has not had the cojones to classify NOM as an
anti-gay hate group, though any objective evaluator examining the evidence
would be able to conclude that
NOM fits the SPLC's hate-group criteria.
Here
is the SPLC's own succinct expression of what qualifies an organizaton for
anti-gay hate group status: “[T]heir propagation of known falsehoods –
claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific
authorities – and repeated, groundless name-calling.”
It
therefore is curious and disturbing that the SPLC ends its so-called
"Intelligence Report" on NOM by alleging that "it remains to be
seen whether NOM can avoid following other religious-right groups into a world
of untrammeled
hate."
This
reminds us of when Indira Gandhi was facing a popular uprising against her rule
in India. Saturday Night Live broadcast a skit, of Indira in her office, with
the people outside boisterously clamoring for justice while Indira clasped her
hands together, looked upwards and pleaded with God to give her a true sign
that the people no longer wanted her as their leader.
A
cow then crash-landed through the roof on top of Indira Gandhi.
The
Southern Poverty Law Center appears to be waiting for a
cow to crash through its roof, before
it will certify NOM as an anti-gay hate group.
Here
is an example of how the SPLC's summer 2012 "Intelligence Report"
failed to consider the proper incriminating evidence against NOM;
The
SPLC report largely is taken up with the matter of NOM promulgating the known
falsehood that homosexuality equates to pedophilia. The report discusses NOM
Blog links to Michael Brown's gay-bashing wherein Brown equates homosexuals to
pedophiles. The SPLC lets NOM off the hook there, though, apparently on grounds
that Michael Brown is not himself part of NOM.
SPLC
then cites Maggie
Gallagher's NOM Blog post "A Link is Not an Endorsement" and
alleges that in it, she made a "noteworthy comment," which would be
this: "I would like to say personally that nothing in any argument I’ve
ever made on gay marriage rests on the idea that same-sex couples harm their
children at any higher rates than any other family form. (If there is data that
shows this, I’ve never seen it.)”
Flabbergastingly,
the SPLC did not then go on to point out -- in its so-called "Intelligence
Report" -- that Gallagher's claim in her "noteworthy comment" is a
lie, as has been very well documented by
researchers and reporters more willing than the SPLC to expose NOM. Gallagher
in truth had, in the past, repeatedly demonized gay parents. The SPLC actually
wrote -- about Gallagher's claim that she had never defamed gay parents --
"Gallagher may be entirely sincere, but sometimes it's hard to tell."
Hard
to tell?
NOM's malicious bigot Maggie Gallagher,
who says she is "unwilling" to live in a country
with anti-discrimination protections for LGBTers
Firstly,
the SPLC missed the fact that Gallagher's "A Link is not an
Endorsement" post was non-specific -- Gallagher did not state that she was
referring to NOM's defamatory anti-gay pedophilia allegation links -- and,
the SPLC seems not to have realized that at the time Gallagher made the post,
NOM was engaged in a hateful, lies-filled propaganda blitz against gay adults
having any interaction with
children, period, but especially, that of parenting them. Gallagher at the time
was also being criticized for linking repeatedly to many different sorts of
anti-gay hate speech posts, not only for links to posts saying that gay equates
to pedophile. In other words, the SPLC missed the gay-bashing NOM forest for a
few gay-bashing NOM trees. If now, however, the SPLC requires further resources
to verify that Gallagher "personally" often has insinuated that gay
equates to pedophile, they could look here.
It just boggles the mind that the SPLC actually wrote into its so-called
"intelligence report" the phrase "Gallagher may be entirely
sincere, but sometimes it's hard to tell." That is not the work of determined,
competent investigators.
Gallagher cultivates strategies for
suckering people with her duplicitous lies about her own record of anti-gay
hate, and she succeeded in suckering the SPLC. The
SPLC purports to be evaluating NOM, but evidently has not yet even realized
that NOM's Maggie Gallagher is characterized by her shamelessness about lying
through her teeth while talking out both sides of her mouth. They are giving
Gallagher the benefit of the doubt, despite all the heaping evidence that
Gallagher deserves no such benefit.
Even
if the SPLC could not be bothered to research the mendacity of Gallagher's
claim regarding her past statements on gay parents, the SPLC might at least
have exposed Gallagher's post title as a lie. That title, again, was "A
Link is not an Endorsement." On November 16, 2011, for one among any
number of available examples, NOM linked to a
gay-bashing post by Elizabeth Marquardt on the Huffington Post; the NOM
Blog post text began by saying that Marquardt makes a good point. How much more blatantly could a link
be an endorsement than that? Furthermore, looking through a quantity of NOM
Blog posts makes evident, from NOM's chosen headlines for the posts alone, when
it is endorsing or opposing the main idea presented in the post. Why is
Gallagher so easily able to pull the wool over the SPLC's eyes?
A NOM supporter brought this anti-LGBT genocidal sign
to a NOM hate rally
Moving
on now, SPLC did not report that NOM itself was busy smearing gay parents
raising children, in the same period as it was linking to Michael Brown's
propaganda equating gays to pedophiles. The SPLC failed to realize that NOM was on a
sustained and vicious, lies-filled anti-gay parenting propaganda blitz, not
just saying here and there that gay equates to pedophile. On the NOM/Ruth
Institute blog on November 14, 2011 Jennifer
Roback Morse attacked gay parents and at the same time, exhibited the NOM
strategy of seeking to drive a wedge between African-Americans and gays. The post was made before the NOM
documents detailing the gay-bashing-bigot group's infamous race wedge strategy
became public. Yet, the SPLC summer 2012 "Intelligence Report" came
out well after a judge ordered the NOM strategy documents released. The
"Intelligence Report" does not even mention NOM's racial wedge
strategy, still less the fact that Morse's NOM/Ruth Institute blog post
evidences that hateful strategy, with fireworks going off around it. As part of
her gay-parent bashing, race-baiting attack, Morse asked this, apropos of
mainly white gay parents adopting African-American children: "look at the
children in these posters. I wonder what the African-American community
thinks about recruiting gay men to become foster parents for the children of
their community who have been taken from their parents. Do the
African-American pastors have any thoughts and opinions about this? I imagine
they do. But I will let them speak for themselves."
So
it does not go unremarked, I am emphasizing that the racially-charged lie that
NOM's Morse was telling there, was that white gay adults were stealing
African-American babies. The malicious NOM bigot was just cunning enough to
make her wording of that lie a tad vague, but the meaning she intended her
gay-bashing readership to come away with was, beyond a reasonable doubt,
undeniable. Morse intended to convey the idea that white gay adults were
stealing African-American babies, and that she would leave it up to
African-American pastors to denounce the white gay adults for that.
Don't
forget that Morse's attack post was published in the same period that NOM was,
very obviously, on a propaganda blitz linking homosexuals with pedophilia, and
identifying gay parents as dangers to the children they are raising. The SPLC
did not connect the gay-bashing hate dots, there. The SPLC reported on the NOM
blog's link to Michael Brown's gay bashing, and then to Gallagher's duplicitous
"A Link is not an Endorsement," post, but it did not report that the
NOM link to Michael Brown was only one small element of an enormous anti-gay
propaganda blitz that included anti-gay hate expressed directly by NOM, or that
Gallagher lied in her "A Link is not an Endorsement" post. There is a
certain impression that the SPLC is afraid of fully exposing NOM.
Because
NOM's Morse said that she would let African-American pastors speak for
themselves, I subsequently interviewed Pastor Michael Bledsoe for my report "African-American
Pastor Rebukes NOM's Anti-Gay Bigotry." Meanwhile on the NOM Blog
on November 16, 2011, NOM explicitly endorsed more gay parent gay-bashing when
it titled a post "Holly Carmichael on the Tragedy of
Depriving Kids of Their Dads." With that title, NOM endorsed the idea
that all instances of gay adults raising children are "tragedies."
SPLC, moreover, completely ignored that on
December 8, 2011, NOM Blog took a sleazebag slap at Zach Wahls, and then
left a
quantity of anti-gay hate speech online in the comments under that sleazebag
slap. NOM has its blog administrators curate the comments, meaning,
anti-gay hate speech in those comments is part of the NOM brand.
Speaking
of which, as a regular contributor to The National Review, NOM's Maggie
Gallagher has more than once advertised that the
SPLC has not classified NOM as a hate group. Such advertisements from
Gallagher inevitably attract fierce gay-bashing comments from NOM supporters,
which Gallagher and her TNR editors -- who curate comments -- then evidently do
not mind leaving posted to the internet as part of their brand. Under this
particular Gallagher advertisement that NOM is not an SPLC hate group,
commenter "motherofthetroops1955" said that "Being termed a
"hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center is a badge of
honor," and went on to call equality advocates "people who not only
stand for evil, but are evil, and who must be defeated by any means
necessary." The central problem here, of course, is that Gallagher and NOM
assume and exploit a certain level of public legitimacy from the fact of SPLC
not having classified them as an anti-gay hate group, yet Gallagher very
actively seeks to de-legitimize everything the SPLC does. She lies about the
SPLC just as she lies endlessly about gay people, but in the face of it, the
SPLC ignores the mountainous evidence of her lies and gives her an unwarranted
benefit of doubt. Gallagher
condemns LGBTers and the SPLC, both, very deceitfully, and far more thoroughly
than the SPLC ever criticizes her for her attacks against it and against
LGBTers.
In
this CNS News post, Gallagher called the SPLC a "homosexual activist
group" and said that such groups want "to do more than redefine
marriage, they want to redefine civilized discourse in America."
What about that quote from Gallagher does the SPLC not understand? Gallagher has said that the SPLC not only wants
to redefine marriage; it wants also to move society away from verbal
gay-bashing. In other words, Gallagher actively wants for
verbal gay bashing to remain acceptable. It is no secret that Gallagher
has written "I oppose extending anti-discrimination laws to gays for many
reasons." And as we know, but as the SPLC ignores, the endless
verbal gay bashing from NOM officials and NOM-approved speakers includes saying
that homosexuals are "worthy
to death." Be sure to note that Gallagher accusatorily says that the
SPLC wants to "redefine civilized discourse" -- as though anything in
all of her gay-bashing were "civilized" and as though it were
"civilized" for she and NOM to have sponsored a hate rally where a
NOM-approved speaker told the mob that homosexuals are "worthy to
death."
Gallagher
in that same article alleges
that her fellow anti-gay group the KKK uses language to incite to anti-minority
violence which, so she claims, she and other anti-gay groups do not use. She
says that the SPLC should not be going after non-KKK anti-gay groups, because
-- so Gallagher is alleging -- non-KKK anti-gay groups do not incite to
violence. But there she is, sponsoring a public speaker to say that homosexuals
are "worthy to death," and never even thinking to denounce him, or to
apologize for that having happened at a NOM rally. If one needs additional
evidence that NOM bolsters incitements to anti-gay violence, one could look at
the fact that NOM made a fund-raising video with Jerry
Buell, a Florida public school teacher who told his class that gays
should be allowed to serve in the military, at the front lines with hetero
troops deserting them from behind. After same-sex marriage was legalized in
New York, Gallagher as a guest on David Barton's Wallbuilders radio program got
Barton so riled up against Republican State Senators who had voted for equality
that he said "No disrespect to our Native American friends, but this is
where you hang a bloody scalp over the gallery rail. You hang these four
Republican scalps over the Senate rail and every other Republican senator looks
up and sees those scalps and says, ‘my gosh, I’ll be hanging up there beside
them if I don’t stay with this pro-family stuff.’ And that’s exactly what has
to happen.” Gallagher inspired that hateful outburst, but never distanced
herself from it. And as a matter of fact, in describing how NOM would work
towards its goal of eliminating marriage equality in the Empire State, Gallagher
said "It's gonna be a bloody mess in New York."
Barie Shortell was attacked for being gay,
in a city where a NOM speaker told a mob
of gay-bashers that homosexuals are "worthy to death"
If NOM and other anti-gay hate groups
are not associated with violent incitement -- as Gallagher lyingly tells the
world -- then why is she threatening a "bloody mess" to stop gay and
lesbian couples from marrying in New York State? Gays and lesbians maybe would
threaten a "bloody mess" against her -- in any circumstance -- but
especially were she to stop attempting to get their marriages annulled against
their wills? What bad thing, exactly, are gay New Yorkers doing to Gallagher,
that she is threatening them with a "bloody mess" to take away their
rights? And remember; Gallagher accuses the SPLC of wanting to "redefine
civilized discourse" by having society get past the unmitigated ugliness
of verbal gay-bashing -- but then -- Ta dah! -- there she is, the pig,
threatening a "bloody mess" to take away gay people's rights. How
terribly, terribly civilized of this hideous, lying, professional gay-bashing
bigot! Why did the SPLC leave NOM's pattern of violent incitements out of
account? A more detailed, later feature article could be devoted to NOM's
sometimes successful plotting to scare and intimidate people out of supporting
equality, and its strategies for keeping LGBT Americans living in fear.
A
further quote from Gallagher in that same article exemplifies why the SPLC
should have NOM and Gallagher tops on their lists of anti-gay hate groups and
figures. Look
at the following Maggie Gallagher quote from that article:
The
SPLC says "that if you say that gay men have a lower life expectancy, that
that’s hate, even though it might be true," Maggie Gallagher told
CNSNews.com. “There’s actually a pretty good study from 2001 that suggests that
gay men live 8 to 21 years less. I don’t know for sure that it’s true, but it’s
striking. And it is certainly true that gay people have higher rates of
depression and anxiety and substance abuse. But apparently, if you say that,
you’re a hate group now.”
Let
us now examine, for SPLC officials' edification,
what Gallagher just did there.
1) In the
context of denying that any of SPLC's listed anti-gay hate groups
are hate groups, Gallagher cited a falsehood about gay men's life expectancy,
and then said that the falsehood "might be true."
2) Gallagher
goes on to say -- in 2010 -- that a 2001 study "suggests" that gay
men live 8 to 21 years less, but does not name the study, still less talk about
what might have changed since 2001, and still less why such a study would
justify denying gay men rights;
3) Gallagher -- the
constantly lying anti-gay bigot --
then says that she doesn't know "for sure," whether the alleged study
results are true, "but it's striking." Gallagher very
obviously, in a practiced, malevolent way, is laboring to get her gay-bashing
audience to believe as true the very things that the SPLC has already
identified and documented as anti-gay falsehoods. In attacking the SPLC
while communicating anti-gay lies to her anti-gay followers, Gallagher is
thumbing her nose and blowing a gleefully malicious Bronx cheer at the SPLC,
who appear not even to comprehend the gay-bashing involved in Gallagher's
manner of going after them.
4) Gallagher
then rubs salt in the wound, by saying "And it is certainly true that gay
people have higher rates of depression and anxiety and substance abuse. But
apparently, if you say that, you're a hate group now." There, she gives
the lie to her claim that repeating those defamatory allegations leads to one's
organization being classified as an anti-gay hate group, because there she is
repeating them as "certainly true," yet she and her group NOM have
not been classified as an SPLC hate group, despite her having done this exact
kind of anti-gay hate-mongering and disinformation campaigning over and over
and over again, with no attempt to hide any of the evidence of it from the
SPLC. Moreover, Gallagher intentionally, and clearly, is leaving her
gay-bashing audience to believe that where gay people have higher rates of
depression, anxiety and substance abuse, they have those higher rates because they are gay, not
because they face stigma and discrimination from people like her. Remember: Gallagher
has written “I oppose extending anti-discrimination laws to gays for many
reasons.” The unmistakable appearance is that whereas Gallagher is
fearless and utterly shameless about lying her head off in order to lead the
charge against the SPLC, the SPLC is fearful of marshaling together and then
publishing all of the evidence of her untrammeled hate.
The
SPLC's greater sin of evidence omission, as regards NOM, though, is the
dismaying fact that their so-called "Intelligence Report" nowhere
mentions that NOM's current mastermind is its founder and chairman emeritus Robert
George, shown with his picture on the NOM site as a current member of NOM's personnel.
(Could one reason that the SPLC would be afraid of NOM, perhaps be that NOM's Robert
George has so much power?) The record appears to show that the SPLC
has been looking at NOM, without apparently ever looking at Robert
George, which means that the SPLC has not really been looking at
NOM at all.
One
could write reams and reams about the SPLC's utter lameness in ignoring that
Robert George still is NOM's mastermind, but no matter how thorough and
eloquent one were to be on the topic, one would never be able to say anything
as apposite as the thought expressed in the single word "DUH!"
Back
in December of 2010, the SPLC reacted -- with
a post on its website -- to
criticism of the SPLC carried out on NPR by a certain Matthew Franck.
Franck claimed that opposition to same-sex marriage alone was earning
various groups a place on SPLC's anti-gay hate group list. So the SPLC
clarified that the following criteria land groups on the list: “[T]heir
propagation of known falsehoods – claims about LGBT people that have been
thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities – and repeated, groundless
name-calling.”
The
SPLC apparently has yet to put 2 and 2 together as far as Matthew Franck goes. Their
post correcting his propaganda against them does mention that he is affiliated
with The Witherspoon Institute, but not that NOM's
Robert George is a prime driver of The Witherspoon Institute.
"Duh!"
There
is much direct evidence that NOM engages in "repeated, groundless
name-calling" against LGBTers, yet the SPLC is ignoring that direct
evidence. In its so-called "Intelligence Report," the SPLC even
ignored the evidence of groundless name-calling in the narrow topic it pursued.
Yes, SPLC; when NOM rolls out an extended anti-gay propaganda bombardment
alternating allegations that all gay people ipso facto are unfit to parent,
with allegations that gay equates to pedophile, NOM is engaging in
"repeated, groundless name-calling."
What
would NOM have to do, for the SPLC finally to acknowledge that the gay-bashing
hate group is a hate group? Robert George has said that homosexuality is "beneath
the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures." And at an
all-day anti-gay symposium at Liberty University, George's NOM/Ruth
Institute colleague William Duncan gave a session on this topic:
"Homosexuals or Homo Sapiens: Who Deserves Protected Class
Status?"
So
NOM's leadership is routinely referring to LGBTers as sub-humans unworthy of
rights, and routinely also saying that gay equates to pedophile, and that gay
parents equate to dangerously bad parents, and that gay adults are stealing
African-American children, and on and on and on with the repeated, groundless
name-calling, but for its so-called "Intelligence Report," the lame
SPLC can't bring itself to determine that NOM is engaging in "repeated,
groundless name-calling" against us. Think hard about what it means that
at Liberty University, a NOM official held a symposium session titled
"Homosexuals or Homo Sapiens; Who Deserves Protected Class Status?"
Think hard about
that, while
remembering that NOM's Maggie Gallagher attempts to smear the SPLC for wanting
to "redefine civilized discourse in America." Heaven forbid that
Gallagher and her fellow merchants of hate should no longer be able to sell
their "civilized" idea that gays are sub-humans unworthy of rights.
It
isn't as though nobody had ever furnished the SPLC with useful NOM-related
research leads. I, for example, published "How
to Report the National Organization for Marriage as a Hate Group" (to
the SPLC) on September 29, 2011, and followed up by directly reporting to them through
their website contact forms all of the information I have included above in
this post, and then some.