This morning, the Human Rights Campaign and Courage Campaign are launching a new website — www.NOMexposed.org — that breaks open the cover on NOM’s shady activities and lets the sun shine in where NOM doesn’t want to see it. It’s an important way to expose the worst of NOM to the public.
Connects the dots on NOM’s funding streams and budget, from Opus Dei and the Catholic Church to the Mormon Church and Evangelical Christians
Is a clearinghouse on all of NOM’s ongoing ethics and campaign finance law violation issues
Catalogues NOM’s public faces and their deep ties to religious institutions, from the Wirthlin family that appeared in Yes on 8 and Yes on 1 advertisements claiming their children were taught “gay” marriage in public schools to the infamous “Gathering Storm” ad star and Opus Dei leader Damon Owens as well as Ruth Institute founder Jennifer Roback Morse.
Is a one-stop shopping hub for NOM’s TV and radio ads, along with direct mail and fliers and other propaganda
Newsweek just published a piece this morning about NOM Exposed on their website you can find here. Two quotes I want to pull out, the first from Courage founder Rick Jacobs:
“They [NOM] will take a page from their victim playbook and say they are under threat from us while they are accepting millions of dollars to take people’s rights away.”
And HRC spokesperson Michael Cole:
“We want to out NOM for what it is — a secretive player in antigay politics, which is posing as an offshore company for antigay religious money”
Both frames are exactly right. The other thing is that, as it says in the piece, religious money doesn’t always go where it should. Folks who donate to groups like the Knights of Columbus may not be aware that the money they give isn’t necessarily going to low-income families — it may be going to NOM. In Maine, even as the Catholic Diocese closed parishes for want of funds, it spent an inordinate amount of time and money lobbying in favor of Question 1. In DC, the Catholic Church waged its own war against legislation to enshrine the freedom to marry for same-sex couples into law, even threatening to shut down its social services arm for tens of thousands of residents, leaving low-income people, including children without homes, out on the street. This website helps shed a light on where religious money is going.
NOMexposed.org is a useful resource for those of us working to expose NOM for who they are, and to educate the rest of the public that doesn’t know about NOM or thinks they’re just regular Joes and Jills without the right-wing — in some cases, radically fringe — religious views.
Visit www.NOMexposed.org. And help spread the word by sharing with your networks over e-mail, social media, and word of mouth.
HRC and Courage’s joint press release is below.
HRC & Courage Campaign Reveal the Real National Organization for Marriage
“NOM Exposed” Website Launched as Fall Elections Loom
WASHINGTON – As the National Organization for Marriage, or NOM, embarks on a fall election campaign to defeat candidates who support full marriage equality, the Human Rights Campaign, in collaboration with the Courage Campaign, unveiled “NOM Exposed,” a live, interactive website which reveals NOM’s deep anti-gay affiliations, its long connections to the Mormon and Catholic churches and its quest to keep voters in the dark about its financing. The site is at www.NOMexposed.org.
At the same time, HRC announced the formation of the NOM Project to follow the ongoing political work and propaganda of NOM as it attempts to influence elections and legislative campaigns across the country. The project will be led by Kevin Nix, a longtime LGBT advocate and political and media consultant. A former communications director at both Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and the Family Equality Council, Nix also worked at Media Matters in the 2004 presidential cycle.
“NOM and its leaders project a message of tolerance yet NOM Exposed shows that behind the well-trained talking points is an anti-gay animus and moneyed connections that it is loath to reveal,” said HRC president Joe Solmonese. “This website is not static. Working with the Courage Campaign, we will be watching the campaign trail and documenting NOM’s political buys and bedfellows. We will connect the dots for voters.”
NOM Exposed builds off the success of Courage Campaign’s NOM Tour Tracker – a blog of first-hand accounts, photos and videos chronicling NOM’s “2010 Summer for Marriage—One Man, One Woman” bus tour of 17 states. The Courage Campaign deployed three staffers to follow NOM’s tour and file reports from the road, generating more than one-million page views and more than 15,000 comments. During the course of the tour, federal courts declared two of NOM’s top policy priorities – California’s Proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act – unconstitutional.
The NOM Tour Tracker showed NOM’s summer tour consistently outnumbered three-to-one by pro-equality counter rally participants organized by Freedom to Marry and state LGBT organizations. It also showed NOM staff attempting to limit public access to their events, and NOM’s sparse supporters doing everything from speaking in tongues, to comparing marriage equality to genocide and advocating the murder of LGBT families.
“The NOM Tour Tracker unmasked the so-called ‘National Organization for Marriage’ as a small and secretive fringe group devoted to attacking families, spreading lies, and sowing fear,”said Courage Campaign Founder and Chairman Rick Jacobs. “With a majority of Americans and a growing number of conservatives now standing up for equality, NOM Exposed takes this important work a step further by bringing to light the nefarious connections, shadowy finances, and dubious ethics at the heart of NOM’s brand of political extremism. We are proud to work with the Human Rights Campaign on this important initiative.”
NOM Exposed, the result of several months of research and collaboration, reveals the following:
At a time of the country’s greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, NOM’s financial growth has been explosive. NOM has amassed huge resources – estimated to reach or exceed $10M in 2010 – from modest beginnings in 2007.
NOM is a highly secretive organization that tries to not only hide the identity of its political donors from the voting public in state after state, but operates in a way to discourage people from knowing who its key players and associates are.
NOM has deep connections to the Catholic Church hierarchy, to the Mormon Church, to evangelical right-wing pastors and churches and to those who have a long history of anti-gay rhetoric and activity. These are individuals and organizations which not only oppose same-sex marriage, but oppose domestic partnerships, civil unions, hate crimes protections and even fertility treatments for women because some of those women could be lesbians.
Since 2008, NOM and its allies have engaged in a radical, nationwide plan to flout long-established campaign finance disclosure laws. This is nothing short of a strategic, coordinated plan to hide NOM’s political activities from voters. This effort has prompted several state investigations and resounding legal defeats for NOM.
In addition to the rich archive of information, NOM Exposed features a blog where the latest on NOM’s activities will be tracked. LGBT leaders will also contribute guest posts to the blog with their own research and experiences with NOM. Freedom to Marry which organized the Summer For Marriage tour in response to NOM has the inaugural guest post up today.
“NOM Exposed gives voters a comprehensive look at an organization that operates largely in secret, yet plays a super-sized role in campaigns from California to Maine,” added Solmonese. “By releasing this site and dedicating resources to NOM Project, we will confront this web of secrets and lies wherever NOM seeks to spread its political propaganda.”
Please share what you are seeing and learning about NOM — as well as your reaction to the NOMexposed.org web site — in the comments. It’s important that we expose NOM for the secretive, nefarious fringe group they are, instead of the “rational and reasonable” image they try to present to the public.
Update: We’re getting a lot of reports of problems accessing the site, which may be a possible denial-of-service attack. We’re looking into it and will let you know when we know more.
I didn’t have a chance to write this last night, but my first thought on day one of the tour is that NOM is just incredibly lazy. For those who have knocked on doors in an electoral campaign, you know the value of targeting — you target your persuadables and your lean voters, for example. You don’t just walk into your local farmacia and start talking to people — it’s an inefficient use of time. They might not even be U.S. citizens.
Except that’s what NOM is doing. Nearly all of their stops are in random parks all over the state where there could be anyone — from a group of ex-convicts to the local weekly gay book club meeting. Yesterday night’s stop was at an On The Border, a Tex-Mex restaurant chain filled with… wait for it… white folks. One stop, tomorrow morning, is at the Jelly Belly factory. Is this some Latino tourist hotbed and we just don’t know it yet?
One commenter wrote last night why we’re doing this if no one shows up. This is exactly why we’re doing it — to show how this is a waste of people’s time and money. It’s lazy organizing and part of the reason we’re doing this so they never again can get that $1 million to launch a campaign that includes a fancy bus tour with paid staff. Or be the largest single contributor to Yes on 1 in Maine. Or run misleading but effective ads during the Prop 8 fight. On and on.
Speaking of Jelly Belly, we here at P8TT/NTT are officially inquiring into what exactly the company thinks of this tour stop on their property, as well as their positions on LGBT equality, Prop 8, and the like. Stay tuned.
Here’s the first on-the-road video produced by the Vota Tus Valores team. It looks like it was filmed by a hummingbird observing the scene.
P8TT/NTT friend Karen Ocamb has her take on the first day, including more background on Alfonso Aguilar and our old friend Brian Brown’s statement on the tour.
Yesterday, NOM filed a lawsuit that would allow it to flaunt Rhode Island’s election laws by running ads (targeting the gubernatorial race, where two pro-marriage equality candidates, Frank Caprio and Lincoln Chafee, are leading in the polls) without disclosing contributors or complying with spending laws. It is pretty remarkable how much they spend on legal fees, given the numerous lawsuits of this nature they’re filed in several states, not to mention ethics violations in places like Maine.
The silence from @NOMTweets and the NOM blog on the California tour sure is deafening. I don’t see a single post or tweet in the last week, at least. Do they not want to be closely associated with a mess?
They did find time last night to trumpet their several days-old “dynamite” amicus brief filing in the 9th Circuit, though. My favorite line:
They want this court to short-circuit the hard task of persuading their fellow citizens that their unions ARE marriages, by asking this court to re-educate the voters and re-assign the meaning of a word.
“Most people use the term “judicial activism” to explain decisions they don’t like.” — Ted Olson, August 8, 2010
We’ll have coverage today from our NOM Tour Tracker team at the events — if you can call them that — at the State Capitol in Sacramento, along with Yuba City, Davis (just before tonight’s California gubernatorial debate), and elsewhere. Coverage from the first three stops will be up late this afternoon, and from the last three stops this evening.
For those who missed it, today is Day One of the second NOM-sponsored bus tour — this time in alliance with several other socially conservative organizations. We at NOM Tour Tracker are covering it again. More details on the tour and why we’re doing this can be found in my post here.
Because of the volume of stops, we’ll be doing daily or twice-a-day summaries of each day’s stops on this tour, (though we’ll have special devoted coverage for larger rallies/meetings/happenings as they occur). So below, you’ll see dispatches from Bakersfield, Visalia, Hanford and Madera, in travel diary-style. More to come from Roseville, their final stop today – Adam
by Arisha Michelle Hatch
Stop #1: Bakersfield
Only one stop into The Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles’ “Vota Tus Valores” bus tour (vote your values, for those who don’t speak Spanish), sponsored by the National Organization for Marriage, and we’re already questioning whether to take these folks seriously.
The tour bus arrived 15 minutes late to the Park at Riverwalk, which could have caused confusion if anybody had bothered to come (or if the tour had actually taken the time to invite people).
There was no setup for speakers, just Spanish music blaring from the bus, a few organizers handing out literature and an opportunity to be interviewed by a Univision reporter who was forced to guess the location after poor directions from the organizing staff.
“They had a party but nobody came,” said one member from the local Women’s Democratic Club who stopped by with two friends.
Only one “values-voter” stopped by, but she was not Latina.
“I was shopping at Target when I saw the bus across the street and wanted to see what it was all about,” she told me.
We initially counted 8 in attendance, but 7 were organizers that got back on the bus at the end of the stop.
We’re told that there are “a half a dozen” people in the tour bus, but I guess there was no compelling reason for them to actually get off the bus. We counted four Latino organizers in total, everyone else looks pretty white, non-Hispanic.
Like Louis from the NOM tour (hi, Louis!) the organizers were quick to offer us water.
I was speaking with Andy Blum, a spokesperson from American Principles in Action, another of the tour’s sponsors, when one of the younger non-Hispanic organizers approached me with water.
“Bubbly or flat,” he asked.
“Flat, I suppose.”
“Perhaps Perrier is inappropriate,” Blum interjected.
Why NOM would sponsor another #turnoutFAIL bus tour is completely beyond me. Do the people on this bus actually represent Latino/a values? Will they get their act together and actually turn out people?
Stay tuned, this could be very interesting (or, at least, funny).
Update (Adam): Also, Karyme Lozano, the Mexican-born telenovela (soap opera) star who recently had a “religious conversion” was in attendance with Vota Tus Valores, seen here with local reporters:
Lozano, while an anti-choice activist, was also crowned Queen of the 2008 San Francisco Pride Parade and is very supportive of LGBT individuals. For her to ally herself with NOM on this tour is disgraceful. Jorge Amaro has more on Lozano here.
Stop #2: Visalia
The Vota Tus Valores bus tour kept up its attendance average in Visalia — 1 person showed up.
“I vote according to God’s will,” said one Latina woman who happened to be in the park when the bus pulled up but refused to go on-camera.
If you’re keeping tally, the total attendance count is now 2.
Approximately 4 people sat at a picnic table in front of the bus, but it would be a stretch to say that they were even remotely engaged.
We’ll see what the scene is like in Hanford.
Stop #3: Hanford
This stop was even less well-attended than Bakersfield and Hanover (which is a nice way of saying that nobody was there), despite the event organizers’ protestations to the contrary.
The lackluster turnout afforded us the opportunity to meet and speak with Alfonso Aguilar, Executive Director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.
We didn’t get the chance to chat for very long before the bus driver honked the horn signaling that it was time to get on the road. We didn’t go too deep, but I did learn one thing: he’s comfortable with spin in the same way that Brian Brown is.
When asked if they actually engaged any Latino voters at the Hanford stop, Aguilar said “yes we did” (with a straight face) as an organizer named Thomas quickly chimed in to insist that they spoke to two people adding some off-handed comment about siesta that I didn’t quite catch (I don’t want to call anybody a liar so early in the tour, but there wasn’t a single person in that park).
“Our people work,” Aguilar added almost as if he was informing me of some new concept.
Ummm…maybe you should’ve thought about that before picking the time and location?
It may be too soon to tell, but Thomas appears to be compelled to fill Louis’ role over the next 42 stops (for those who didn’t follow the NOM “Summer for Marriage” tour, Louis was Brian Brown’s younger antagonistic tag-along who became a regular character featured on our blog).
The funniest thing so far (other than the Perrier) is that there’s actually an advance team traveling 30 minutes ahead of the tour.
From one organizer to another, here’s a tip: if you arrive at an empty location for a stop that you didn’t promote to begin with, choose a different park.
On to Madera.
Stop #4: Madera
In Madera, the advance team was able to wrangle up a few additional attendees: fifteen men from a local Christian men’s shelter were present to “show support,” including one man wearing an Obama shirt and a reformed neo-Nazi who was heavily tatotted with swastikas.
I was surprised that he shook my hand, but he later admitted that the white power movement was “part of his past.”
I spoke to them about immigration reform – most seemed in favor – as well as marriage equality which elicited a few awkward oppositional laughs.
The heightened attendance meant that Tus Valores actually pulled out a microphone and sound system. Alfonso addressed the crowd before introducing Karyme Lozano who spoke briefly to the crowd about voting your values (very generally).
We’re on our way to Roseville, where the tour folks are holding a “meeting” as listed on their public tour schedule- whatever that means. Stay tuned.
Update: Stop #5: Roseville
The Votabus arrived at their publicized meeting stop in Roseville – a chain Mexican food restaurant/”cantina” called “On the Border” just in time for happy hour.
For those unfamiliar with the restaurant, think Chili’s with a Tex-Mex twist (in fact the restaurant was originally founded by the same investment group). On The Border is a nationwide chain that also maintains international franchises in Puerto Rico, Canada, Egypt, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.
As an avid Mexican food eater, I’m slightly offended if not amused by the choice. For an organization that says it values Latino-owned businesses, the choice is somewhat comical. A simple iPhone Yelp search reveals 30+ locally-owned authentic Mexican food restaurants within a 5 mile radius, but I digress.
Approximately 12 members from the bus are currently having dinner at a large table in the center of the restaurant. There’s not much Latino voter engagement going on unless you count the non-Latino waiter.
The comments lately are abuzz with people talking about the tax penalty on their same-sex partner’s health insurance. A few months back I calculated the exact impact for my partner and me — and I work at a company with full domestic partner benefits. This is what I wrote about it. You’ll also find links to help you calculate your own penalty, too.
by Rob Tisinai
I investigated how much it would cost to add a domestic partner to my heath plan. If I were a straight man adding a wife, I could find the answer right in my employee handbook: $729.04 a year. And of course I wouldn’t have to pay taxes on that money, which eases the pain.
But a domestic partnership is more complex, because the law says I do have to pay federal income tax on it — and by “it” I don’t just mean my own contribution. The feds tax me on my employer’s contribution, too: $5876.52 a year. This appears on my W-2 as “imputed income.”
Add it up, and being gay means my taxable income would be $6605.56 greater than if I were straight. So, at my marginal tax rate, my federal taxes would be higher by $1849.56.
But there’s more. That’s $1849.56in take-home pay. What kind of salary cut does that represent? Don’t forget, take-home pay is only a fraction of your actual salary. My employers sent me to this site for calculating that sort of thing. It turns out a take-home hit like that is equivalent to a $3500 salary cut.
That’s right. Adding a spouse to my health plan is like getting $3500 pay cut, compared to what would happen if I were straight.
And this is at a company with full domestic partner benefits.
Actually, that analysis is pretty limited. It only looks at medical and dental benefits, and only takes into account federal income taxes. My accountant would have to calculate my taxes in two different ways: once as a single man for federal income tax, and once as a domestically partnered man for state income tax. That extra effort costs extra money.
And then there’s the death-by-a-thousand-cuts. To find all this out, I had to research company policy, call HR, be transferred to Payroll, then back to HR, and then wait on hold while the rep went hunting this information down. After that, I had to go online and play with payroll calculators. Same-sex couples go through this sort of small hassle again and again. And sometimes the hassles aren’t so small. Don’t forget, the National Organization for Marriage doesn’t even want to give us the right to claim our partner’s body from the morgue unless we’ve had the foresight to fill out a special bureaucratic form — a requirement married couples don’t face. These many small burdens add up to a Kafka-esque nightmare, and our opponents are quite happy to send us there.
Speaking of NOM, what does its president, Maggie Gallagher, have to say about the insurance issue?
But when both adults are working (as in egalitarian relationships), both partners tend to sustain their own health insurance.
Wow. How many ways can one sentence be lame?
“Egalitarian relationships”? That’s an odd term to pull out. And it doesn’t even mean what she think it means. Egalitarian relationships are those in which partners share control and decision-making equally. Employment status has nothing to do with it.
Why is Maggie only concerned with situations in which both adults are working? This month’s unemployment rate is 10.6%.
“Both partners tend to sustain their own health insurance.” Tend to? What does that mean exactly? Way to obscure the issue with vague, undefined terms.
Even workers with insurance don’t necessarily get it from their employers. In my state, less than half of working adults get insurance through their jobs.
Do some basic analysis on that stat, and it suggests about half of all couples face a situation where one partner is insured through work and the other is not (that’s rudimentary analysis – don’t quote it as expert commentary, but it’s a statistical ballpark). That’s the fraction of couples in need of spousal benefits.
Even if both partners are insured through work, one partner’s employer might offer much better coverage, so tax-free spousal benefits would be a blessing.
Maggie, of course, ignores all that. Instead she just makes up stuff like:
But when both adults are working (as in egalitarian relationships), both partners tend to sustain their own health insurance.
And then she pretends she’s actually said something.
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