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commentary
Creep of the Week
Maggie Gallagher
Published Thursday, 26-Nov-2009 in issue 1144
What happened in Maine was sad. What makes it even worse is Maggie Gallagher’s gloating.
Gallagher is the president of the National Organization for Marriage. NOM is pretty proud of itself for Maine, considering they contributed nearly $2 million to repeal the law that made marriage equality a reality there.
In a Nov. 5 column, Gallagher sang the praises of the anti-gay right and denigrated the pro-equality No on 1 campaign.
“Here’s the first thing this victory means: The $4 million spent to pass gay marriage in Maine was wasted,” she wrote.
That’s easy for her to say. In reality, the issue is far more complex. Andrew Sullivan said it best in a Nov. 4 Daily Dish post.
“The (No on 1) campaign organization, by all accounts, was superb. The money was there. The enthusiasm was there. The turnout was spectacular in an off-year,” he wrote.
So why didn’t we win? Fear.
The anti-gay folks, Sullivan writes, “play straight to heterosexuals whose personal comfort with gay people is fine but who sure don’t want their kids to turn out that way. One way to prevent kids turning out that way, the equality opponents argue, is to ensure that they never hear of gay people, except in a marginalized, scary, alien fashion. And this referendum was clearly a vote in which the desire to keep gay people invisible trumped the urge to treat them equally.”
So should we give up hope? No, Sullivan says. “In my view, the desperate nature of the current tactics against us, the blatant use of fear around children (which both worries parents and also stigmatizes gay people in one, deft swoop) are signs that what we are demanding truly, truly matters.”
But that’s not how Gallagher sees it. “Even Americans in liberal states do not believe that two guys pledged to a gay union are a marriage,” she writes. “Politicians can pass a bill saying a chicken is a duck and that doesn’t make it true. Truth matters.”
First of all, I don’t see what turducken has to do with marriage, gay or straight. Secondly, truth matters, does it? Funny, because truth wasn’t a big concern for the Yes on 1 folks. “Vote yes on 1 to prevent homosexual marriage from being pushed on Maine children,” their TV ads warned, as if marriage equality meant inevitable gay arranged marriages for Maine children. In fact, every single one of their TV ads focused on kids and schools as though the real issue being voted on was whether to turn every public school in the state into a Homosexual Learning Academy.
“We do not believe gay marriage is a civil right; we think it is a civil wrong,” Gallagher writes. “And we do not appreciate the increasingly intense efforts to punish people who disagree with gay marriage as if we were racists, bigots, discriminators or haters.”
Oh, quit your whining. If you don’t want to be seen as a bigot, then don’t be a bigot. If you “don’t appreciate” people calling you a “discriminator” after you strip them of their rights, then don’t fuck with their rights. To deny gay and lesbian people the right to marry is discrimination. You won the right to discriminate, plain and simple. At least have the nerve to own it.
AndrewW
says:
Calling people "bigots" doesn't actually help us. You just keep promoting them. We can do better.
Nov 25, 2009 5:54 PM
Michael
says:
Truth clearly does not matter to the large pro-homophobia advocacy group
NOM. Both campaigns to ban same-sex marriage in California and Maine were
the same and both used lies to scare voters. Even the stated purpose of
the campaigns are lies. Radical anti-gay activists call it perserving
traditional marriage when in reality they are working to take away the
civil rights and religious liberty of law-abiding, taxpaying, gay
Americans.
Nov 26, 2009 1:42 AM
Myra
says:
Lying campaigns, Michael, are not the
Nov 28, 2009 12:39 PM
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