This week the country is finding out what most of us already knew: the National Organization for Marriage is a sham operation that sought to circumvent elections laws and hide its donors. And now, most importantly, a cache of previously confidential documents reveals without doubt that NOM tried to "drive a wedge between gays and blacks." According to the documents, which were released Tuesday by the Human Rights Campaign after they were made public during a court case, part of NOM's plan is to manipulate Hispanic communities by "making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity" and "to make opposition to gay marriage an identity marker, a badge of youth rebellion to conformist assimilation to the bad side of 'Anglo' culture."
NOM's $20 million "Strategy for Victory" campaign documents state in part: "The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize, and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right, provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots."
For the most part, the gay community did not slide down that slippery slope of identity politics. In California, we saw NOM at work during the Proposition 8 campaign, when it funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Yes on 8 coffers. The Yes on 8 campaign, in turn, bought into NOM's divisive strategy by targeting African American voters with a last-minute mailer that used then-candidate Barack Obama's photo and his quote that he did not support same-sex marriage.
But as a long-term strategy, NOM has fallen short in California. In fact, since Prop 8's passage, more people of all ethnicities support marriage equality as evidenced by recent polls showing nearly 60 percent of Californians favor same-sex marriage.
In the bitter aftermath of Prop 8's passage, we were angry. But we did not stop reaching out to others. LGBT organizations began outreach in earnest, with many hiring LGBT people of color to work in the African American and Latino communities, to share their stories and listen to people's concerns. We worked with the faith community and had gay and lesbian people of faith connect with black churches. Significantly, we fell back on lessons we learned during the AIDS crisis – which continues to disproportionally affect blacks – that people are more likely to listen to their neighbors, friends, and co-workers. We began to tell our stories.
Early reaction to NOM's "strategy" seems to be backfiring. African American clergy point out that the community is not a political football and they are deeply offended.
Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said, "The National Organization for Marriage's 'divide and conquer' tactics are desperate and despicable. African Americans, Latinos, and sexual minorities recognize injustice when they see it, and they recognize when they're being used. NOM has no standing in minority communities, and these documents further underscore this reality."
It's long past time for NOM to end its charade. And if it doesn't, we hope that leaders in the African American and Latino communities will no longer look to NOM for leadership on the marriage equality issue. It's obvious to NOM and now the general public that NOM can't win on the merits of its arguments against marriage equality and it must resort to dishonesty to pit minority communities against each other's interests.