News, analysis and fact-checking of anti-gay rhetoric
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The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.NOM’s breakfast dump heaps up
Timothy Kincaid
July 17th, 2012
It’s been a week since I brought you the exciting news of how the National Organization for Marriage’s big Dump General Mills project just keeps going on and on. And in that time the number of those dedicated souls who vow that they will “look for substitutes” has grown by a colossal 18%, all the way to 23,054.
Much of the growth can be attributed to support by the American Family Association, whose followers number at least ten thousand. And one thing you can say about the AFA supporters, when it comes to the cause of protecting the family from the militant homosexual lobby, they are committed. Or, at least, if they are not yet committed, they certainly should be.
COMMENTS (3) | LINK
NOM’s General Mills protest is now a giant “dump”
Timothy Kincaid
July 10th, 2012
OneNewsNow, the American Family Association’s project to bring us the news that the mainstream press ignores (including all sorts or facts, numbers, studies, reports, quotes, and all sorts of information that you can’t find anywhere else) has finally taken notice of the National Organization for Marriage’s boycott of General Mills. And today they are sharing with America’s families that “General Mills earns spot on boycott list”.
And as a result, the listing of those who pledge to “look for substitutes” to General Mills brands has soared to new heights. Currently at 19,555 signatories on the DumpGeneralMills.com page – a full 398 more than it was on the 5th – it seems almost certain that this dump will pass 20,000 and become truly a giant dump, and as I’m sure we all know, it’s hard to ignore a giant dump.
COMMENTS (2) | LINK
Dear Diary: A Fact Checker at NOM
Rob Tisinai
July 9th, 2012
This excerpt from the diary of a NOM fact checker has somehow fallen into my hands. I cannot vouch for its authenticity.
Dear Diary,
This morning I was trying to use a decorative letter opener to cut the despair out of my soul when a NOM staffer dropped off a blog entry for me to fact check. “Make sure it’s accurate,” he said. He must be new.
He’d been told to write about our Starbucks boycott. I’d forgotten there were jobs here worse than mine. Starbucks stock shot up after we announced the boycott, but his article claimed the price has fallen lately, and after more than two months it’s finally a smidge below where we started.
Hooray, apparently. God, the desperation around here is so thick they should spread it on white bread and serve it with tea.
Anyway, I checked the stock price — OMG! it had dipped a bit, then risen, but then dipped again, most recently since about June 20. So this was…correct?
Oh, why couldn’t I have just stopped there. I could have been the hero, could have announced, Hey everyone, we’re saying something TRUE, could have been included in the alcohol-free celebratory sniffing of white-board markers. Read the rest of this entry »
Nearly $M last month for marriage
Timothy Kincaid
July 9th, 2012
Supporters of gay marriage in Washington state said Monday that they raised more than $952,000 last month for the campaign to uphold the state’s new law, which is currently on hold pending the outcome of a November ballot measure.
But that’s just last month
As of Monday, Washington United for Marriage said it had raised more than $2 million for the campaign to fight back attempts to overturn the law. Preserve Marriage Washington, which collected the signatures to get R-74 on the ballot, has raised more than $135,000, according to the most recent numbers with the Public Disclosure Commission, though it hasn’t yet submitted its totals for June.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage, which was involved in ballot measures that overturned same-sex marriage in California and Maine, has said it will fight to strike down the law, and has loaned regional coordinator Christopher Plante to the local campaign.
“We expect to be outspent on this,” said Plante, who is now serving as deputy campaign manager for Preserve Marriage.
Ya think?
NOM’s big dump update
Timothy Kincaid
July 5th, 2012
Few things are as exciting as clicking over to the Dump Starbucks and Dump General Mills pages to see just how many new signatures the National Organization for Marriage has racked up. Since our last report,
Dump General Mills now has 18,157 pledges to “look for substitutes” to General Mills brands. That’s up a whopping 154 people from just Tuesday. If this were a petition to get Sheriff Andy to let Opie join the baseball team, that would be astounding.
Dump Starbucks has 45,446 signatories, up 104 signatures since the 2nd. As this is an older boycott, the numbers are starting to level out and probably won’t get above 50,000 before the effort is removed from the web and everyone pretends it didn’t happen.
In comparison, 62,630 people signed a petition to get a Virginia athletic club to allow same-sex couples to register for family access to a swimming pool, and 269,884 people signed a petition to ask Citibank and Barclays to publicly condemn Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill. I don’t believe that either of these efforts got press attention or frantic emails sent out to ‘concerned citizens’.
I don’t just comment on NOM’s abysmal PR failures to mock them. I do so because it is important that media and legislators begin to understand that behind their hype and pretense is no substance.
If our community wanted to head up a campaign to boycott Starbucks “because they serve overpriced crappy coffee”, it would take little effort to find tons of people who don’t like Starbucks. But NOM’s moral franticness and hectic histrionic ‘protection of a sacred rite’ can barely scrape together half a hundred thousand. People just don’t support them. They just don’t care.
We may continue for a few more years to lose votes and polls. But the fire is gone, the passion is gone, and only a tiny fragment of the population is sufficiently opposed to marriage equality to type in their name in an online list.
Exciting dump update
Timothy Kincaid
July 3rd, 2012
The National Organization for Marriage’s big dump just keeps growing. Today the number of people who have pledged to look for substitutes for General Mills brands has shot up to 18,003. That’s an increase of 239 people in just one day!
If it keeps up at this rate, by September the NOM dump will be at nearly one hundredth of one percent of the population. And that, my friends, will make General Mills sit up and take notice.
And let’s not forget that this exciting development represents at least 18,000 people nation wide who care enough about this issue to type their name. And that sort of activism can translate to literally dozens of protesters. Truly this grass roots endeavor eclipses even 2010′s Tour of Mostly Empty City Plazas.
NOM’s takes ‘dump’ nationwide
Timothy Kincaid
July 2nd, 2012
The National Organization for Marriage has exciting news about their very successful “dump” campaigns. Although it may have about 20,000 stores, Starbucks will soon be feeling the bite of NOM’s reach and influence. In addition to the 45,342 people who have pledged not to buy Starbucks are the grandchildren and bingo partners of these dedicated souls who will not receive Starbucks giftcards this Christmas. And with press coverage in many newspapers and Sunday inserts, their dump efforts have gotten tremendous visibility.
In a move that is certain to severely cut into the profits of Starbucks, NOM has announced an alternative to the ubiquitous coffee house: Jitters and Bliss coffee. Now when you feel an urge for a caramel macchiato, instead of dropping in to a Starbuck you can instead go online and order a tin of coffee (comparably priced to Starbucks), wait for it to be delivered (shipping free with $50 purchase), brew it up, and enjoy a delicious cup of coffee free from the guilt of supporting the homosexual agenda. And best of all, that cup of coffee will taste twice as blissful after a week or two of no-caffeine jitters.
More recently, NOM is now charging at the front of a vast cavalcade of boycotters who have vowed to go without General Mills products. That’s right, no Haagen-Dazs, Pillsbury, or Green Giant for them. (Star Tribune)
Minnesota for Marriage leaders are heading into the summer months with a dogged focus on keeping supporters energized and pushing back hard if other Minnesota businesses surface to oppose the amendment.
When General Mills stepped into the fray, Minnesota for Marriage immediately issued news releases that said “the Green Giant, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Kix and Trix have all declared war on Marriage” and that the company was promoting “genderless marriage.”
Angela Beeney of Plymouth and 4-year-old Ivy Brandon of Hastings, in foreground, dropped off General Mills products in Golden Valley to protest the company’s opposition to the marriage amendment. - Star Tribune
Not limiting itself to Minnesota, NOM now has 17,764 signatures on the pledge (up from 14,714 on the 28th) and the Fortune 500 company is no doubt seriously regretting its decision to pander to same-sex marriage activists and support that radical social agenda. These true marriage defenders have sworn to ‘look for alternatives’ to the General Mills products, whenever convenient and economically feasible (families are hurting in this Obamaconomy). And although more than 80,000 have signed a petition thanking General Mills for their position, it is strongly suspected that some of those signers are not traditional families anyway, and are not really the food company’s target market.
And the campaign is growing daily. With more and more businesses pledging their endorsement of immorality, NOM has an ever increasing opportunity to stand for righteousness. In fact, just today NOM has been apprised of an opportunity that cannot be missed. Finally, NOM has irrefutable evidence that Microsoft’s profits fund the radical redefinition of marriage. (Seattle Times)
Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer and co-founder Bill Gates have each donated $100,000 to the campaign supporting the state’s new gay marriage law, which faces a referendum vote in November.
Zach Silk, campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, said Monday that the checks were cut Friday and are being reported to the state Public Disclosure Commission on Monday afternoon.
“It’s going to make a tremendous difference,” Silk said. “It’s very important for us to have that broad support from business leaders and companies themselves.”
We are confident that NOM will soon announce a full-on boycott of all of Microsoft’s products. But they will not be reactionary – recognizing that Apple gave money to oppose Proposition 8, NOM will boldly stand against these both of these two empires of evil and cease using any products or software from either of these companies.
Perhaps as early as today. Or tomorrow. Or maybe next week (strategery takes time), next month, or the second Tuesday in August of 2028. But definitely sometime very very soon they will stand up and show Microsoft and Apple just what happens when you dare to stand against those who fight for marriage, family, and blind obedience to Catholic teaching.
Thanks, NOM, for the corporate support
Timothy Kincaid
June 15th, 2012
I knew it would happen.
Last week, the National Organization for Marriage (but not yours) sent out a vaguely threatening letter to the 50 largest corporations in Minnesota demanding that they “stay neutral” on the upcoming vote to constitutionally ban their employees from being treated equally. And if there is one thing which is now pretty much guaranteed to generate corporate support for marriage equality, it’s telling them that they can’t.
Among the largest corporations headquarted in Minnesota are United Healthgroup, Target, Best Buy, Supervalu, 3M, U.S. Bancorp, Medtronic, and General Mills. So you know that it was going to be no time at all before someone on this list – if not all of them – said, “What’s that? Gay marriage? Oh, yeah, we support that.”
General Mills (makers of cheerios) was the first. (StarTrib)
Chief executive Ken Powell voiced the company’s opposition [to the anti-marriage amendment] Wednesday at a General Mills function attended by 400 gay and lesbian professionals, followed Thursday by a Web letter from the company’s vice president for global diversity and inclusion, Ken Charles.
“We do not believe the proposed constitutional amendment is in the best interests of our employees or our state economy,” Charles wrote. “We value diversity. We value inclusion.”
(And, while he was at it, he thought he’d mention how proud he was to testify in favor of ENDA)
Target hasn’t yet taken an official stance on the amendment, but they featured a gay themed t-shirt line on their website and donated the proceeds ($120,000) to Family Equality Council which supports, well, family equality.
So now I’m stuck. I’m going to have to buy breakfast cereal, and I don’t even eat breakfast cereal.
I wonder… can I pick up Cheerios at Target while I’m on my way to JCPenney to buy Levis?
Brian Brown Accepts
Jim Burroway
May 29th, 2012
From the NOM Blog:
Dan — I accept and will look forward to debating you at your dining room table. As I said in my challenge to you, anytime, any place.
While I appreciate the invitation that you have extended to my wife, she will not be able to attend. She is a full-time mom with seven beautiful children and an eighth on the way.
Dan Savage invited National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown to a debate at Dan Savage’s dining table, with the New York Times’s Mark Oppenheimer serving as moderator. The original invitation included having Brown’s wife and Dan’s husband also at the table. A date and time will be announced later, giving Savage time to redecorate his living room and dining room for the occasion.
This, I Did Not Expect
Rob Tisinai
May 25th, 2012
A couple years ago, before I was blogging at Box Turtle, a man showed up at a National Organization for Marriage rally, carrying this sign:
In a decidedly emotional reaction, I redesigned NOM’s logo to reflect the sentiment:
I expected some controversy, and when my head settled I offered a more considered analysis of the situation (though NOM’s later dishonesty relieved my fear that I’d treated them unfairly).
However, I discovered something today that I did not expect: An antigay Facebook page has taken the image for its cover photo:
Click to enlarge
Facebook will probably kill the page, but you can see a screen grab of it here.
Let me issue the usual caveats:
- You can’t judge our opponents by a few of their fringe members (the source of my misgivings about my own graphic, which I explored in the more considered evaluation linked to above)
- The page itself may be nothing more than a nasty and stupid joke.
- And in any case, it’s a tiny group — barely more than 40 people who work with, go to school with, or live next to gays and want to kill them.
Even so, this development stunned me. You really can’t parody some of these folks. I know that, but being confronted with it still astonishes me.
And in case you’re wondering, I won’t demand that they stop using my image. If I can help them damage their cause — help expose them as a group of murderous bigots with whom no decent person would associate — then I say huzzah!
Dan Savage Proposes Venue for His Debate with NOM’s Brian Brown
Jim Burroway
May 23rd, 2012
Earlier this month, the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown, in a fundraising letter and blog post, challenged Dan Savage to a debate:
Let me lay down a public challenge to Dan Savage right here and now: You want to savage the Bible? Christian morality? Traditional marriage? Pope Benedict? I’m here, you name the time and the place and let’s see what a big man you are in a debate with someone who can talk back. It’s easy to make high-school girls cry by picking on them. Let’s pick on someone our own size!
Savage quickly picked up the challenge, saying he will name the time and place. In yesterday’s Savage Love podcast, Savage named the place:
Where? My dining room table. Place? Seattle, Washington. Here’s the deal. We can fill a room with my screaming partisans and your screaming partisans and we’ll both play to our respective peanut galleries and I think both of us have a little bit of grandstander in our souls and we will work that and I think that will create more heat than light.
And so what I’d like to do is challenge you to come to my house for dinner. Bring the wife. My husband will be there. and I will hire a video crew and we will videotape sort of an after dinner debate. The trick here is you have to acknowledge my humanity by accepting my hospitality and I have to acknowledge yours by extending my hospitality to you. And I’m willing to do that.
The New York Times’s Mark Oppenheimer will moderate the debate. amd the unedited video tape will be posted online. Brian Brown has yet to accept the response to his original anytime/anyplace challenge.
Well, This Will Be Fun
Jim Burroway
May 4th, 2012
Dan Savage has accepted NOM’s Brian Brown challenge to a debate to the death. It’s Orville Redenbacher time.
Email of the Day
Jim Burroway
April 13th, 2012
Oops. Not him this time.
Right now we’re under relentless attacks—that are draining us of critical resources that could be deployed in states and at the federal level to directly affect the future of marriage…. . . and these bullies think they can get away with it!
Friend, I know in my heart that they are wrong. They can’t get away with it, because you and those like you all across the country have stepped up time and time again.
But I urgently need you to stand with us today. So far, we have raised just $29,672 in this campaign. In order to respond to these latest attacks and continue to be effective throughout 2012, we NEED to reach our goal of $200,000 over the next several days. I know that a few of you reading this message can afford a gift of $5,000 or even $10,000 or more. If that is you, please consider what you can do to help at this pivotal moment.
But we’re all on the hook, responsible for how we use whatever resources we have.If we stand united, we cannot be stopped. But if we don’t, our opponents will silence us one at a time until there is no one left to speak for marriage. So whether it’s $20 or $20,000, it’s important that we stand together in this battle.
Oh wait, that conspiratorial email didn’t come from Eugene Delgaudio. It’s from National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown. Lately I’ve been having trouble telling them apart.
NOM Loses Control Of Web Presence
Jim Burroway
April 11th, 2012
The National Organization for Marriage is having a rough day. Their blog is down, their Facebook site had been hacked, and someone else has control of NOM’s Twitter feed NOMTweets:
It looks like NOM has their Facebook page back, and their “apology” for stifling comments in their web sites and their racially divisive strategy is gone. But NOMTweets is still going rogue.
Update: NOM’s Brian Brown vows to crush the rebellion:
NOM finds commonality with Islamists and communists
Timothy Kincaid
April 10th, 2012
The National Organization for Marriage is politically tone deaf. I cannot think of a more stupid decision than the one to appeal to the theocratic instincts of radical Islamists and find common cause in their desire to oppress gay people. And I cannot fathom why they think that identifying with Chinese communists will appeal to their support base.
We’ve long known that NOM opposes freedom of religion for anyone other than those who agree with them. We’ve long known that they don’t blanch at the idea of capital punishment for gays. We’ve long known that in their views, states should impose morals codes on a local population based on religious dictates of a centralized global religious self-proclaimed authority. We’ve long understood that behind the “let the people vote” claims was an organization who sought to impose its will in any way possible with no more regard for the will of the people than they have for the individual rights and dignity of gay Americans.
But convincing the rest of the world that they are exactly like the Taliban or any other Islamist group has been difficult. Arguing that their perspectives on democracy are the same as those in communist China was daunting. It seems too bizarre and accusatory and extreme.
But now NOM has done it for us.
The National Organization for Marriage today announced that its new DumpStarbucks.com campaign is going international.
“In our first week, we gained 25,000 pledge signers in the U.S. alone; today we go international, expanding DumpStarbucks.com campaigns into Mandarin, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, and Bahala (one of the chief languages of Indonesia),” announced NOM President Brian Brown. “DumpStarbucks.com online ads will also start running in Egypt, Beijing, Hong Kong, the Yunnan region of China, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait.”
And just in case anyone missed the connection:
“The National Organization for Marriage is in this for the long haul,” said Jonathan Baker, head of NOM’s Corporate Fairness Project. “Here’s our goal: If Howard Schultz and his insular Seattle liberals hear from enough of us, management will move to a more genuinely inclusive attitude toward its customers’ and partners’ diverse views on marriage.
“Us.” You know, “us”, the members of NOM and the mullahs in Bahrain and the communist leaders in China.
NOM Needs A Bigger Mike
Jim Burroway
April 6th, 2012
The National Organization for Marriage is upset over the New York Times editorial calling NOM out for its race-baiting tactics. Those tactics were revealed in a document dump resulting from a court case in Maine in which NOM has been fighting to circumvent that state’s financial disclosure law. The Times labeled NOM’s tactics as a “poisonous political approach.” NOM’s Brian Brown responded with this fundraising plea to supporters:
I promise you this: Marriage is the cause that unites people of all faiths, races and political backgrounds. And nothing The New York Times or anyone else can say will stop us from coming together to defend marriage against these strategically timed attacks designed to distract us from the critical work we need to be doing this year.
One has to wonder at the level of self-delusion it must take to put out this kind of statement with a straight face. NOM’s own strategy documents talked about dividing gays from African-Americans, gays from Latinos, and even Latinos from other Americans as long as it means they’re anti-gay (NOM is actually plotting against Latino’s assimilation!). NOM;s strategy even calls for dividing children from their own gay parents. And NOM talks of uniting people? This is an organization which is, by its own admission, hell-bent on wedging and dividing everyone nine ways to Sunday.
Now Brian Brown followed that with this letter to the editor of the Washington Times, complaining that their critic’s “end game” is “(s)ilencing the voices of millions of Americans.” But wait. All we did was put the things they whisper to each other in front of a megaphone. It’s their own words that blew up in their faces. Silence them? Puhleeze! That’s the last thing we want to do.
Mitt Romney’s $10,000 Bet With NOM
Jim Burroway
April 2nd, 2012
Last week, we were astonished to read the document dump that revealed the National Organization for Marriage’s race-baiting strategy to drive a wedge between African-Americans and Latinos against fellow members of their respective communities which happen to be LGBT, as well as their strategy to drive wedges within LGBT families. Of course, we’re not astonished at the existence of the strategies themselves, but the casual ease with which they could be set to paper with nary a qualm.
It’s ironic that the only reason those documents were made public is because NOM decided to flout Maine’s campaign finance laws. NOM has refused to disclose their donors as required under Maine law. But it has now surfaced that in 2008 during the height of California’s Prop 8 campaign, former Massachusetts governor and current GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney donated $10,000 to NOM. And more recently, Romney signed NOM’s five-point pledge at the start of the GOP race for the presidential nomination. Now that Romney looks like he is in the best position to take that nomination in August, it’s time he clarified whether he agrees with NOM’s race-baiting and family-dividing strategy. And he needs to do it now, because there’s no way that stain will disappear just by shaking an Etch-A-Sketch come summertime.
Star-Ledger’s opinion about NOM
Timothy Kincaid
April 2nd, 2012
New Jersey’s biggest newspaper (by far) has released an editorial on the National Organization for Marriage:
It is sick beyond words that a group to “save” marriage would exploit racial and ethnic divisions, stir intolerance and fear, and even rip families apart by pitting children against parents. In their self-described “battle,” they come across as the biggest losers of all.
Its not looking like a happy week at the NOM office and today is only Monday.
NOM’s problem: black people just aren’t as stupid as they thought
Timothy Kincaid
March 27th, 2012
In reading the language of the National Organization for Marriage’s race-based strategy for delaying the eventuality of marriage equality, two things immediately struck me.
First, in order for this strategy to have any success, it had to create a long-term division in America along racial lines. Their hope was that African Americans (immediately) and Latinos (as their demographic increased in the voting population) would have a permanent division from White Americans along social issues and that this would be a race-based pride point. Their entire hope was that we all continue to see race as something that makes us inherently different from each other and would continue to view each other through lenses of suspicion, hostility, and fear.
While cynical and evil, this is not the oddest of their prepositions. In order for their plan to have effect, African Americans (and subsequently gays and Latinos) were presumed to be so stupid that they not only wouldn’t notice the objective but would blindly fall for it.
Well some did. Stupidity comes in all sizes, shapes and colors. And there are a small handful of preachers in the community who see race as all important to whom such a message was appealing and who readily lent their name and voice to NOM’s campaign. And there were a few gay folks who read this as “blacks hate us” and sniped back.
But NOM misjudged. Most blacks weren’t interested in joining their anti-gay crusade. Even when their pastor was the celebrated speaker, virtually every face at a NOM event was white. And old. And, for what it’s worth, bored. Blacks didn’t fall for the ploy.
Despite their assumptions, melanin seems to have no inverse correlation to intellect. As it turns out, black people just aren’t as stupid as NOM assumed they were.
But I do believe that NOM has had an impact on the way in which the African American community has thought about the subject of marriage. Since they started their campaign (which we observed during their Tour of Mostly Empty City Plazas), I believe that I have seen a noticeable change.
In the direction towards acceptance.
Now it’s not all champaign and roses between the gay and the black community. The polls in Maryland show that black voters are FAR less likely to support equality (or, at least, were before today). But in the community the tone is different, the leadership message is different, the community voices are different, and things are changing.
It’s hard to put numbers on it, but there it’s there if you look.
A few years ago, if a black guy made a homophobic comment he might be called on it, but there was also an accompanying demand to understand his culture and not judge too harshly. I don’t hear that part anymore. What I read are black writers condemning blatant homophobia without any room for excuses.
Where just a few years ago it was presumed that a black actress might support us but certainly no black athlete wanted anything to do with gay issues. Now some of the most respected black men in athletics speak out in favor of full equality and do so with an attitude of “yeah, of course I do, why wouldn’t I?”
And where we did have the official support of many black leaders a few years back, now some of the icons of the community are willing to put their hard-earned reputation on the line in ways we frankly have no right to expect. They worked hard to make sure that what NOM wanted would not succeed.
Sure, some of this was natural flow with the tide. But I also believe that NOM’s efforts to make opposing equality a matter of “what blacks are like” got some African Americans thinking about the issue and about what being black is really all about. And they didn’t much like what NOM was suggesting.
And NOM didn’t have success with Latinos either. It seems that their efforts to get hip young beautiful latinos e latinas were met with a blank faced, “Lo siento, no hablo Inglés … ¡que condescendiente idiota racista!”
Their joint effort during the Carly Fiorina senate campaign in California (“Vota Tus Valores”) yielded one telenovela actress who thought she was there to talk about her religious conversion and talk up the values of chastity. When she found out she was supposed to do political campaigning against the evils of Teh Ghey, she hopped back on the bus and was never seen again.
Because ya know, the funny thing about race-based points of pride is that they are just that. They are issues or matters or traits or peculiarities that feel like home. They are things that are shared that make us into “us”. And Latinos and African Americans aren’t particularly receptive to white folk telling them what they should be proud about.
Ultimately, people pride themselves in what they feel good about. If it’s food flavors that go back dozens or generations, that’s community. Facial expressions that mom got from her mom who got them from her mom, that’s family. A sense of humor that no one else gets, that makes you feel like you are totally and completely accepted and loved. A sense of honor, decency, hard work, commitment to caring for those you are responsible for, charity for those who have less, the ability to always make room for one more, showing love when others may not, those are the values you pass to the next generation.
And those are the pride points that you see in all communities, be they African American, Hispanic American, Irish American, Native American, German American, or I-Have-No-Idea American. The most visible differences are the foods and the songs and the dances and the history, but look past it and really everyone pretty much prides themselves on the same thing: “we are who we are because we love each other.” That is a cultural pride point that happens naturally.
Making sure that someone else doesn’t have the happiness you have? Not so much.
Sure there are tensions. The gay community and the black community have been a bit at odds for a while. But no one is proud of that. We don’t define ourselves in terms on not liking the other. And nothing will heal our grievances quicker than having some outsider try and take advantage.
As NOM is in the process of learning.
COMMENTS (7) | LINK
NOM Looking for “Glamorous Non-Cognitive Elites”
Jim Burroway
March 27th, 2012
You know, one of the simpler joys of the NOM document dump is that you can read it and read it and read it — Oh, I don’t know, how many times? — and still overlook gems like this:
A very un-Witherspoonlike non-cognitive elite.
Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries. (This is applying the Witherspoon and IAV model to non-intellectual elites.)” [Emphasis added by GLAAD]
“Beauty queens.” Does that remind you of anyone?
