Louis Marinelli: NOM wants to paint LGBT “crazy”
By Adam Bink
This explains a lot of NOM’s attempts to paint LGBT and allied counter-protesters as crazy, unstable people who will put their safety at jeopardy after Providence:
Last fall the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published an updated list of hate groups that are operating across the United States in which they included organizations such as the Family Research Council and the American Family Association. In doing so, SPLC cited multiple occasions when these organizations misrepresented the facts about gays and lesbians in the advancement of their ‘pro-family cause’.
To NOM’s delight, the SPLC did not include the National Organization for Marriage in that list. That was a mistake.
The National Organization for Marriage’s culture war/crusade against same-sex marriage is all about image and when it comes to the image of the LGBT community, it’s all about painting them in a negative way. That is why during the summer for marriage tour, a project of my doing which I organized with NOM last year, each of the rallies were presented in a good v.s. evil type theme.
In Albany, counter-protesters arrived at our rally with rainbow umbrellas and were silent. As you can see from the photo I took, the counter-protesters had their backs to us. They were giving us the silent treatment, so to say, to get their message across. Yet the National Organization for Marriage had this to say about them on their blog:
…they sure showed their true colors as intolerant, inconsiderate bullies who shout down and insult anyone who disagrees with them, including women and children.
Later in that same blog post, they referred to the silent counter-protesters as militant before moving onto the rally that took place in Providence, Rhode Island.
NOM’s summary of the rally in Providence says that the protesters were “crazy”. In all actuality, some of the pictures depicting their actions do make them appear that way and I was directly responsible for taking their pictures, as some of you know.
What you don’t know is that in an e-mail I received from Brian Brown, he essentially instructed me to specifically take ‘crazy’ photos of gays and lesbians. His short and to the point e-mail dated July 19, 2010 wrote:
I need crazy pictures of our opponents.
What is particularly necessary to point out is that his call for ‘crazy photos’ of NOM’s opponents was in response to an e-mail I sent to him six minutes earlier that simply wrote: “Here is a picture of our supporters before the protesters arrived.”
The photo I took showing the size and location of our supporters wasn’t enough. Mr. Brown was dedicated to painting the LGBT community and their supporters as crazy. They used that word themselves in public on their blog! To this day, I still don’t condone the actions that some of the counter-protesters took to stand against us. They were wrong when I opposed marriage equality and still believe so today.
From that point forward my job was, among other things, to take those ‘crazy’ photos that would be used as propaganda against the LGBT community. At least until the propaganda backfired, anyway. Many people who would have otherwise came out to support us, let us know that they were scared of what the counter-protesters might do and decided to stay home the day we were coming to town.
[...]
NOM is about deceiving the public about who gays and lesbians are because the longer the public fears them, the longer they will oppose their equality. I fell into that trap and then I came to see gays and lesbians for the people they really are – which by the way, is the exact reason I changed my mind to support marriage equality.
See how it all ties in?
The full post, including e-mail correspondence, can be found here.
37 Comments April 22, 2011
