The National Organization for Marriage likes to boast that it’s never lost a popular vote on marriage equality (a claim that could be debated), but there is certainly one realm in which it has a much worse record: court decisions. Yesterday, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston handed NOM anther defeat, making their win-loss record even worse.
In August, the First Circuit upheld a Maine law requiring NOM to disclose its campaign expenses, writing that the law “neither erect[s] a barrier to political speech nor limit[s] its quantity.” Yesterday’s decision focused on a Maine campaign disclosure law requiring groups that raise and spend over $5,000 in an election to disclose their donors. As usual, NOM’s attorneys argued that the lists should be kept secret because anti-marriage equality donors could be put at risk of retaliation from marriage equality supporters. The court disagreed. NOM has promised to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which has already ruled against the organization in the 2009 Doe v. Reedcase.
In related news, the documentary “Question 1,” which follows the referendum campaign against marriage equality in Maine in 2009, will have its West Coast premiere tonight in Sacramento at 6:30 pm. The film also focuses on “Yes on 1″ spokesman Marc Mutty, who in interviews with the filmmakers admitted that the campaign lied to voters but has since argued his words were used out of context. The screening is sold out, but a wait-list will open at 6:00. You can watch the trailer for the documentary here.
Update: Thanks to Kathleen for brining us the full text of the opinion in Quick Hits. From Scribd:
Another year, another defeat for anti-gay groups seeking to keep the identity of their donors secret. On Thursday, a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court decision holding that the Family Policy Institute of Washington, a NOM affiliate, must disclose the names of its donors as dictated by Washington state law.
In its opinion, the Court concluded that Washington’s laws requiring political committees to release the names and addresses of individuals contributing over $25 and the names and occupations of those contributing over $100 are constitutional. The district court had ruled that the disclosure laws do serve a legitimate government interest because they allow voters to “follow the money” being contributed to fund ballot measures. From the decision:
“It is true that the public disclosure of a single $25.01 contribution to a ballot measure campaign may provide little relevant information to voters. As the district court recognized, however, small contributions may provide useful information to voters when considered in the aggregate. On the PDC’s website, voters can conduct detailed searches and sort ballot measure contribution data by city, state and zip code.
Voters can use this geographical information to determine, for example, whether statewide ballot measures are financed by out-of-state contributors, or to determine whether county-wide ballot measures are financed by out-of-county interests. With respect to contributions exceeding $100, voters can also aggregate the data by employer and occupation to determine whether particular economic interests stand to benefit from the legislation.”
The 9th Circuit’s decision follows several other cases in Washington where anti-gay organizations have lost in court and been required to disclose their donors. Still, the issue is most likely not going away–the 2012 elections will feature marriage equality ballot fights in several states, and NOM and its allies will no doubt endeavor to keep their contributions secret, as they have failed to do in Washington.
This Golden Oldie recalls the story Jeremy broke on Chick-Fil-A partnering with NOM, which made headline news around the country and spurred a continuous boycott. The extensive comment thread on the news with 234 comments can be found here.
We at P8TT are taking Christmas through New Year’s off, with occasional light posting. Golden Oldies you requested will run in the place of regular posts. If you’d like to suggest one from this year, please leave your suggestion in the comment thread. Regularly scheduled programming will resume on January 2nd -Adam
This is a very weird story Jeremy just broke- and which includes video of Jennifer from right here at NOM Tour Tracker.
Also, if a logo at the bottom of the Ruth Institute’s new site isn’t good enough for you, consider that the logo is that same as that of Winshape Marriage, which is Chick-Fil-A’s project to strengthen “traditional marriage” through camp retreats and counseling. That project is also listed on the Wikipedia page for Winshape Foundation. It can also be accessed through http://www.winshape.org.
Basically, Chick-Fil-A and Ruth Institute are, apparently, now working hand-in-hand. Read on -Adam
So alright, let’s begin with some background on the two players we’ll be discussing:
The Winshape Foundation is the charitable of Chick-Fil-A and its founder Truett Cathy. The foundation has several Christian focuses, all focused on strengthening certain values. Fair enough. In a perfect world we would all be able to come together and jointly work for some of their very valid goals.
The Ruth Institute is a spinoff project of the National Organization For Marriage. The group is all about opposing gay marriage, with a particular focus on young people. You might know Ruth’s visible head, Jennifer Roback Morse, who we’ve featured on here a number of times. She’s also the one who caught national headlines recently when she talked about wearing a rainbow scarf (that wasn’t really rainbow) to the Prop 8 trial as a way of reclaiming the rainbow from the gay rights movement.
Okay, so Ruth has been pushing something called The Reel Love Video Challenge. We showed you a promo for the contest back in December. Basically, the idea is for young people to make :30 second videos telling what lifelong love means to them. And again, just like with the Winshape Foundation’s work, the whole contest would be totally benign and even positive, if not for Ruth/NOM’s agenda towards LGBT people.
Right, so today we were mindlessly knocking around the Reel Love video site, primarily as a distraction. However, through our bored surfing we happened to catch note of a few new references to something unfamiliar to our “culture war” eyes. Something called LoveIsHere.com:
Now, who knows how LGBT-focused this yet-to-launch site will be. The content plan that we dug up doesn’t seem explicitly LGBT-focused:
But still: The Ruth Institute is *BEYOND* focused on gays and the civil discrimination thereof. Morse even tours around on NOM-sanctioned buses for that “godly” cause:
When we see major American companies getting in bed with that which threatens our own bedrooms, we can’t help but take note. Here’s hoping Chick-Fil-A/WinShape (to whom we’ve registered contact) will this time offer a response.
***
*UPDATE: In a very odd turn of events, the site seems to have somewhat launched in the literally minutes since our post went up. Now when one loads the site, the 1/11/11 landing page is (usually) gone and there is some aggregated content from other sources. We say “usually,” because sometimes we still get the landing page.
**UPDATE3: It seems the plan is to launch this LIH effort on Saturday January 8th, with a featured 60 second spot airing during the TV movie CHANGE OF PLANS (on FOX, 8pm EST). This per an email posted on Bill Coffin’s site. The same Bill Coffin who, on 12/1/10, Tweeted the following:
As you may recall, NOM’s been facing an uphill legal battle in Washington to keep the identities of individuals who signed its anti-gay petitions secret. In an article published today, The Washington Independent brings us the not surprising but still telling revelation that the overwhelming majority of NOM’s financial contributions come, in fact, from just two individuals.
2010 was a good year from NOM in terms of dollar signs–the organization reported its greatest individual donations since its creation in 2007. But NOM’s donor pool, while deep-pocketed, is extremely small. According to NOM’s own IRS filings, which were obtained by the Independent, just two donors gave over $6 million to NOM’s political operations, accounting for almost two-thirds of the organization’s operating costs. Single donations of less than $5,000 made up just 8 percent of reported revenue.
Even more revealing is the fact that NOM’s donor base seems to be shrinking. In 2009, contributions over $5,000 made up around 78 percent of contributions; last year, they made up 92 percent. This is the kind of duplicity we’ve come to expect from NOM, and it just goes to show how laughable their attempts to portray themselves as a ‘grassroots’ organization really are. Don’t forget, this is the group that used an Obama rally photo as part of its press releases to pretend its events could actually draw crowds. NOM may rich and powerful, but representative of a broad community of like-minded individuals it is not.
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