CNN reports today that the National Organization for Marriage, an organization opposed to same-sex marriage, decided to fight it in a disturbing way: by creating "a wedge between gays and blacks." It also aimed to use "glamorous" Latino celebrities to promote its cause. The news comes from newly released confidential memos.
CNN reports:
The strategies were among several pursued by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which has actively campaigned against same-sex marriage efforts.
The Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, said it obtained the documents, part of a civil action in Maine, on Monday and published them on its website.
"This court-ordered disclosure shows NOM fighting a losing battle with strategy and tactics that are racially and ethnically divisive, filled with false political calculations, and out of touch with the majority of fair-minded Americans," Human Rights Campaign said in a statement.
Most of the memos were written in 2009. The president of NOM did not dispute the authenticity of the memos, saying in an online statement, "Gay marriage is not a civil right."
The memos highlight several efforts to fight same-sex marriage initiatives, which NOM contended were backed by the "pro-gay Obama agenda."
"The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future because of demographic growth," one NOM memo states. "Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We can interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity." …
"The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies," another memo states. "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. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party."
Well, now the objectives are explicitly spelled out. The next question is, when it comes to creating divisions between gay and black Americans, how successful has this organization been?
Read more at CNN.
Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.