Maggie Gallagher: We're Still Losing

"I myself am struck by the fact that given politicians and the academy and Fox News have all abandoned the issue, exit polls show Americans continue to be split 50–50 on gay marriage. The biggest problem we face is not that our arguments lack appeal, but that the debate has been closed down, and Americans rarely hear our arguments. That, and that opposing gay marriage threatens your job. On my behalf I would say, I didn’t come up with an argument that I thought would 'win.' I articulated the argument that in my view needed to be won. Marriage is about bringing together the two great halves of humanity, male and female, so children have the love and care of their mom and dad. That’s the argument that I think it’s most important to win, whether or not we can."

 - Maggie Gallagher, writing for the National Review.

Maggie Gallagher: Marriage Poll Dropped Because Of Phil Robertson & Brandon Eich

According to Maggie Gallagher, the recent five-point drop in marriage equality polling can be sourced to public outrage over the treatment of Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson and former Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich. She writes at National Review:

Salon may be right — this polling result may well be temporary or an outlier. But if my analysis is right, the future depends on two things: whether gay-marriage advocates continue to press the idea that supporters of the Christian and traditional understanding of marriage should be treated as bigots in the public square — and whether stories of the oppression of opponents of gay marriage “break through” the media blockade. That will in turn depend in part on whether political champions of supporters of classic marriage emerge to make oppression visible. I am not necessarily either optimistic or pessimistic, but I would say this: In previous articles and essays I have discussed the political effects of the GOP’s decision to silence itself on so-called “social issues.” If your goal is simply winning elections, this mute strategy, while I think it demonstrably unwise, could be arguable. What is not arguable is that if you are one of the people who actually care about these issues — for whom protecting life, marriage, and religious liberty is not a political strategy but a reason for being in politics — the candidates’ silence will hurt your cause. You donate to or otherwise support candidates who adopt a mute strategy at your own peril. In a culture war, the single most effective thing you can do is persuade your opponents to stop talking. When only one side speaks, the polls will move, and its victory will become inevitable.

Maggie Gallagher's reliable sleight of hand

It was a few months after she helped pass the discriminatory Proposition 8, roll back equality in California, and write marriage discrimination into the Golden State's constitution that I first heard Maggie Gallagher go on in length about how she was the supposed victim of the same-sex marriage fight. "They're going to call us bigots," was the gist of her fearful claim. Listen to that speech here; and a response to it here.

What struck me at the time, and what continued to strike me in the subsequent years in which she and her movement adopted this "victims" meme writ large, was the way Maggie stripped the concept of merit (or lack thereof) out of the situation altogether. Not only would she pretend that hers was simply a cause to "protect marriage," the purposely installed defense system behind which anti-equality conservatives have long been hiding, but she would also fully exclude the very real pain and practical repercussions that citizens who are in, or who might someday want to be in, a same-sex civil marriage experience as direct result of her chosen line of work. It was always as if she was simply selling daisies on the side of the road, and those of us who challenge Maggie's cause were simply out to get her. It was like we had nothing better to do with our time so we thought we'd just go after this "innocent" writer and her views.

Fast forward to the year 2014, and we find the same Maggie, surely battle weary and possibly even regretful over the failing strategy that she very much helped develop, yet still woefully (and I suspect deliberately) obtuse when it comes to what her work has actually wrought. She lays this out in a new piece for National Review Online, where she argues that "the left" has essentially played dirty on the issue of marriage and is now applying that to other fights. Here's a pertinent snip:

The recent flaying of Brendan Eich for the sin of donating to Prop 8 was only the visible wedge of a far larger mechanism at work. At a seminar in Washington, a young left-leaning member of a usually conservative religious denomination challenged me on this point: “Doesn’t it show that executives shouldn’t donate to controversial issues?” she asked.

Don’t kid yourself, young lady; the business owners who donated against Prop 8 faced no such effective retaliation for their private and personal donations. Right now, the stigma game is one-way, directed by those who have power and know how to use it against traditionalist communities they hate. (No doubt, if cultural conservatives had more power like that, they would use it in ways that would outrage liberals — I am not making a moral point here, just pointing out the mechanics as truthfully as I can.) 

FULL: Organizing Groupthink // The Left applies lessons learned from gay-marriage victories to the next war. [NRO]

Business owners who donated against Prop 8 didn't face retaliation? Well no, obviously not. That's because equality is a good thing. Fairness is a virtue. Despite the pro-discrimination crowd's willfully misleading framing, this marriage fight is not a two-sided conversation with equally-merited positions. Opting to discriminate against your fellow citizen, especially in a fight that is almost exclusively in place because of people who want to overextend their religious convictions, is a really bad choice.

Prop 8 supporters have never had reason or cause to retaliate against those who fought against the discriminatory measure. There is not one California citizen who opposes marriage equality whose life has been changed in any way by the roller coaster Prop 8 debate. When the state supreme court first brought marriage equality to California, oppositional straight people were just as married as they ever were. When Prop 8 passed that November, none of these oppositional folks were any more married than they were the day before the election. Same goes for the court battle, right up until present day, when equality is now and forever the order of the day in California and the entire west coast. There are surely people in the area who very much wish Prop 8 were still a reality, but while they might be annoyed or even dismayed, their rights are not in any way altered and their lives are not really affected.

This is not true for many of us who opposed Prop 8. Thousands of couples who successfully married before the passage of the ban saw their unions in limbo. Many more couples were denied the opportunity for many years after. Personally, I had my entire wedding planned in California, which my husband and I had to cancel and move to Connecticut after Prop 8 went into effect (our vendors had placed special Prop 8 language into all of the contracts that we signed that summer). And there are countless other stories. Because those of us who are gay, or even those of us who simply love and support LGBT people and equality, had very real rights at stake. And not only rights but an overall peace of mind. It is an uniquely dehumanizing experience to have your civil rights turned into a popularity contest.

I understand why Maggie doesn't want to focus on the very tangible and easily perceptible harms connected to her legacy. Sure, she largely denies that there are any, instead insisting that she has been working for good. However, that narrative is looking flimsier and flimsier. Heck, even NOM, which Maggie co-founded and stewarded, is now admitting that the laws that have long-denied us are, indeed, bans. When this story is told over the next many years and decades and centuries, people are not going to have to be told which side was the aggressor. People know what a ban is. People know what discriminatory rhetoric sounds like. People know what offense and defense looks like.

The lesson Maggie should learn from her own time in the marriage fight is that the script won't change simply because the the wily foe doesn't like the role into which he has been cast. You can't work day in and day out to achieve a certain plot then overlook all the backstory when the first act's downtrodden team becomes the final act's prevailing voice of reason.

Maggie Mocks Gay Parenting Study

"The New York Times and the media are widely reporting the results of a new study of 500 children raised by same-sex couples. Researchers are aghast that such a shoddy piece of work, which is based on a convenience sample of parents who volunteered to be surveyed, and which relies solely on these parents’ reports to determine child well-being, should have been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. The author is facing a petition and statement signed by hundreds of reputable academics, questioning his moral character and scientific integrity, and the editor of the journal who published such a thing faces similar attacks and enquiries about whether the peer-review process was compromised. Oh wait, the study shows children of same-sex parents do better than the average child, after adjusting for income. Never mind." - Maggie Gallagher, writing for the National Review.

Key Figures from NOM Plot Next Anti-Gay Move in Secret Meeting

Key figures from NOM have been plotting their next move in secret in Princeton, NJ, calling themselves The Princeton Group.

Writes Jeremy Hooper at NOM Exposed:

On Friday, June 13, I celebrated my fifth wedding anniversay with the man to whom I have been partnered for eleven years. A few days later, my husband and I celebrated our first Father's (or Fathers') Day. It was a great weekend to honor our strong bond, loving family, and overall peace. 

Little did we know that just about fifty miles away from our NYC home, over in Princeton, NJ, Maggie Gallagher (NOM cofounder and past president), Robert George (NOM cofounder and chairman emeritus), Brian Brown (current NOM president), John Eastman (NOM's current board chair), and a number of other individuals who were responsible for creating NOM back then (like founding board members Luis Tellez and Chuck Stetson, for instance) and are responsible for maintaining NOM now (like Sean Fieler, a key funder, and Diego Von Stauffenberg, NOM's current development director) were holding a secret, invite-only meeting focused on "developing and deploying an action plan to protect marriage and preserve religious liberties." It certainly seems like some sort of secret, shadowy version of NOM (Super NOM?) is going on behind the scenes.

Also involved (as host of the secret meeting)? San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.

Blast from the past - NOM's 'wedge strategy' paves the way for the group's irrelevancy

Rumor control has it that former NOM head Maggie Gallagher continues to resurface now and again as a prophet of doom to her side of the marriage equality argument. Apparently she is constantly saying that those against marriage equality have lost the argument.

With that in mind, enjoy this video of what I consider a turning point of NOM's past dominance of the marriage equality fight. In 2012, it was discovered, via court documents, that the organization had planned to play the black and gay community against one another on the subject of marriage equality. The ultimate goal was to cause a problem for President Obama in his upcoming re-election.

When news of this came out, NOM was thrown for a serious loop and the organization didn't respond to the news for a couple of days. Here is Gallagher trying to play it off on MSNBC in one of her first interviews after the news of the wedge strategy came out:

Maggie Gallagher can't stop admitting our imminent victory

After the "protect marriage" movement's most visible face left the National Organization For Marriage, shut down her seventeen-year syndicated column, and began plotting out a new course, I saw many possibilities for where Maggie Gallagher might take her career. Maybe she'd do some consulting work. Write another book. Open a bridal shop with dressing rooms that were specifically sized so they'd accommodate only one woman. The possibilities seemed endless.

I did not, however, expect Ms. Gallagher to go on a de facto promotional tour in which she waved the white flag and told anyone who would listen that the marriage equality movement that she had so viciously fought for so long was going to win the whole thing any day now. Yet over the past year or so, that is exactly what she's done, popping up on radio shows and in print with her admission that the cause to which she attached her legacy (i.e. marriage discrimination) is soon to go down in flames.

Leading Gay Marriage Opponent On Losing The Battle: 'I Have A Lot More Freedom Now'

Now and again, I like to check in with Maggie Gallagher, a woman who co-founded the National Organization for Marriage, the leading advocacy group opposing same-sex marriage. Gallagher has long served as one of the intellectual pillars of that movement.

She doesn't dispute that the tide has turned in the fight for gay rights since she entered it. But she isn’t completely dejected about the recent string of losses. "I have a lot more freedom now to figure out what I want to do with the next 20 years of my life," she wrote in an email on Thursday.

She weighed in on what's next for the social conservative movement and the growing number of religious Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, among a range of other issues, not excluding the recent St. Patrick's Day controversy. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the United States, has proposed a boycott of Guinness beer after the company withdrew support from New York's St Patrick's parade due to organizers barring gay and lesbian groups from marching with a banner identifying themselves as LGBT.

This week, Bill Donohue, of the Catholic League, announced he was putting all of his organization's energy into a boycott of Guinness beer. It's hard to imagine such a boycott affecting Guinness' bottom line. What do you make of efforts like that?

Consumer boycotts are not usually an effective strategy. As YouTube celebrity Antoine Dodson (back when he identified as gay) said, when asked why he was eating at Chick Fil-A, "Them Waffle Fries are banging."

At this point, what do you think is the most effective way to push the message of "traditional marriage" forward?

National Organization for Marriage's Political Advocacy Arm Ended 2012 With a $2.7 Million Deficit

Yesterday, we reported that the Human Rights Campaign had filed a complaint with the IRS to compel the National Organization for Marriage to publicly release financial documents related to its political advocacy spending in 2012. With the reports now published and viewable on their site as a result of the complaint, it appears NOM may have been hiding the information because of the revelation that the organization found itself more than $2.7 million in the red as a result of its political advocacy arm's spending. You'll recall 2012 being a disappointing year for gay marriage opponents, with pro-equality victories in four of the five same-sex marriage ballot measures by year's end. Buzzfeed breaks down more of the reports' findings:

The organization raised nearly $14.5 million in contributions, with the bulk of it - more than $9.4 million - going to the political advocacy arm. The advocacy arm also reported receiving more than $1.6 million in reimbursement of expenses.

Although the names of the donors are redacted, the largest donor to NOM was a person who gave the organization's political advocacy arm more than $2.6 million. Another donor gave $1.9 million to the political advocacy arm, while a third game $1.5 million.

The second largest donor to the organization gave $2 million to the educational arm, while another gave a little more than $1 million. 

The political advocacy arm - a 501(c)(4) organization - reported more than $13 million in expenses, with the education arm - a 501(c)(3) organization - reporting a little less than $3.5 million in expenses

.

The organization contributed more than $1 million to the ballot referendum campaigns in Maryland and Washington, as well as to the campaign for a marriage amendment in Minnesota. The organization gave more than $1 million to the "NOM ME Fund," presumably its contribution to fighting the Maine marriage equality initiative.

NOM's sole 2012 ballot victory occurred in May, when North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Maggie Gallagher’s terrible horrible no good people-having-the-wrong-kind-of-sex week

Homo Hatin’ Maggie Gallagher has undoubtedly had worse weeks in her life like that week when she finally admitted that despite her best efforts to spread the Gospel of Bigotry, people were all, “Nah. We kinda like butt sexing“:

“On every key measure, marriage is weaker,” she writes. “The consequences are more obviously unsustainable, yet culturally powerful voices are less willing to engage, and the power of porn and Hollywood to create our norms for family life is more triumphant than ever.”
Gallagher believes men must lead all households, which must consist of a husband, a wife, and children.
“Without a powerful ideal of masculinity that points men toward marriage and fatherhood, more and more young men are deciding the hard work of becoming marriageable is not worth it: Porn, beer, video games with the guys, freedom and fleeting sexual encounters are good enough.
The most urgent overlooked need is the deep need of boys for masculine ideals. If civilization refuses to provide any, porn and video-game makers will step in to fill the gap.”

Hence Call of Duty: Butt Sex With Beer released just this week. Check your local GameStop for details.
But other awful bad things happened  to Maggie Gallagher this week too. In Illinois,  home of the manly City of Big Shoulders called Chicago , lawmakers went  all limp-wristed and approved not-opposite marriage and now the Chicago Bears are going to become the Chicago Bears … if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Across the state, gay and lesbian couples and their advocates celebrated as Illinois was poised to become the 15th in the country to allow same-sex marriages. The bill will now go to Gov. Pat Quinn, who has said he will sign it into law.
Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of the gay rights group Equality Illinois, reflected on the end of a yearslong legislative battle: “The first thought that popped into my mind was all those families around the state that I’ve met over the past five years in fighting for marriage equality. The couples, their parents, their children, all who have waited for this moment.
“And I thought about my own daughter, who is 4 years old, that she will grow up not knowing that the first four years of her life were spent with the state treating her family as second-class citizens. Instead she will grow up with the equal dignity and respect that she deserves.”

Sad face for Maggie Gallagher who thought she had gay-therapy fixed Illinois back in June only to see them slip one through the Glory Hole of Legislation.
Adding to Maggie woes, her internet boyfriend Ken “Cooch, But Not That Kind Of Cooch ” Cucinelli  went down yesterday like a person going down for something that is not a sodomy act in Virginia, and Maggie is gnome-hopping mad about it, g-d-mn it! p-ss! sh-t! f-lch!:

They said he was “unelectable.” The RNC put only $3 million into this race. Ken was outspent by a margin of something between 4:1 and 10:1, if you believe the Associated Press.
The Democrats poured everything into trying to lie to voters and portray Cuccinelli as an extremist — and they barely pulled this one out.
Would another $3 million have swung 50,000 votes? The Republicans, starting with Bill Bolling, who undercut Cuccinelli as unelectable have egg all over their faces.
This was a winnable election. How did we give this away to Terry McAuliffe? Some serious soul-searching should be taking place among the anti-tea-party faction.

And now Virginia is probably going to allow non-opposite gayhomofag marriage too, which means that the state the proudly claims to be “for Lovers” will be down with the wrong kind of lovers, like the pee-pee into the poo-poo ones, and not the pure and blessed love that can only exist between one man and one woman and one state-mandated invasive transvaginal wand inserted into a woman against her will because of freedom. And Jesus. And little babies.
But mostly freedom…

And now Maggie Gallagher is defending 'ex-gay' therapy

Framing the organization as designed to merely "help" gay Jews, National Organization For Marriage co-founder Maggie Gallagher is now defending the "ex-gay" group JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing):

Chuck Limandri, my old friend from the Carrie Prejean, Prop 8 fights, is a heckuva a lawyer and one brave man. He’s taking on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s massive legal machine to defend the right of Jewish gay people to seek help.
Chuck Limandri vs. the SPLC [NRO]

Not sure why I'm that surprised. This is, after all, the same Maggie Gallagher who has admitted she considers homosexuality to be "an unfortunate thing," who once referred to homosexuality as “a sexual disability preventing certain individuals from participating in the normal reproductive patterns of the human species,” and who called on the Bush administration to offer more research dollars for the "ex-gay" cause (which she said was "seeking help in overcoming sexual dysfunctions"). 

I guess I'm just surprised to hear Maggie being so honest about her obvious roots here, now, in 2013 considering how determined she and her allies are to disprove Justice Kennedy's assessment that the "traditional marriage" movement is, in fact, rooted in animus toward LGBT people.

Oh Maggie!!

Maggie Gallagher has been shockingly quiet on same-sex marriage issues since she left the National Organization For Marriage (NOM), and even last week’s Supreme Court decisions on DOMA and Prop 8 didn’t wake her, until now.

At the National Review, her racist home on the web, Gallagher had a “chat” with NRO’s editor-at-large, Kathryn Jean Lopez — also known for some strange reason as “K-Lo.”
In this chat, titled “The Roe of Marriage,” Gallagher still insists same-sex marriage is not inevitable — a bit of a change since she’s focused her efforts recently on ensuring that when same-sex marriage becomes legal across all 50 states those who oppose equality will not be labeled “bigots.”
And amidst Gallagher’s insistence of pulling out a “win” for the anti-gay team, she proclaims that U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy declared a “fatwa against us” — the “us” being same-sex marriage  opponents — in his DOMA ruling last week.
(Curiously, Gallagher didn’t mention the Prop 8 decision, that the Yes On 8 crew — funded by NOM — were deemed to not have standing. It’s amazing how far she has distanced herself from the organization she co-founded. Wonder why?)
Here’s the excerpt:

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Are last week’s rulings on marriage as monumental, with the staying power, of Roe v. Wade?
MAGGIE GALLAGHER: What you are really asking is: Will we concede the legitimacy of Kennedy’s fatwa against us, or will we respond with a sustained opposition — legal, political, cultural, and of the moral imagination?
I don’t believe in inevitability, I believe in human freedom and our power to shape the future.

Now, did Gallagher call Kennedy a Muslim? No. She just doesn’t have any idea about what she’s talking.