Maggie Gallagher Admits Defeat (But Not Really)

Isn't it fascinating that Maggie Gallagher can't quite seem to grasp — still, at this late date, after she admits that her nasty anti-gay politics have failed to sway the mind of America — that the culture's moral mind has shifted about the place of gay folks in the scheme of things? And not that she and other anti-gay activists who have spent years trying to make the lives of gay folks miserable have been shouted down and shut up, as she claims?

A Concluding Look at John Corvino's What's Wrong with Homosexuality?: The Fork in the Road to Social Transformation

I promised you all a final overview statement about John Corvino's outstanding book What's Wrong with Homosexuality? (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013) after I'd finished offering excerpts from it. And here it is--not a review per se, but something closer to a reaction, and a reaction to a very specific aspect of the book at that.

Mark Oppenheimer on What Makes Maggie Gallagher Tick: Mission Rooted in Biography

Mark Oppenheimer's exclusive at Salon today trying to figure out what makes Maggie Gallagher tick is a must-read article.  Oppenheimer succeeds in humanizing a person whose seemingly unlimited need to place some fellow human beings in categories designed to stigmatize them and thwart their lives puzzles many of us.  Why spend one's life seeking to limit the humanity and possibilities of other human beings?

Newt Signs NOM Marriage Pledge, Maggie Gloats, Blogsphere Goes Ballistic

As Andrew Sullivan says, one can definitely find hope in the comments responding to Maggie Gallagher's gleeful report that the Newt has signed her NOM "marriage pledge."  The NOM home page states that the mission of the National Organization for Marriage is "to protect marriage."  As this NOM press release attacking civil marriage for same-sex couples in Rhode Island notes (and as numerous statements by NOM for some years now stress), NOM exists to defend the "traditional" definition of marriage as between one man and one woman for life.  NOM advertised its August 2010 rally in Charleston, West Virginia, as a "One Man, One Woman" rally.

In the News: Updates to Ten Previous Stories

Follow-ups and/or updates to stories about which I've blogged here in the past:

Happy Thanksgiving

Edward Hicks, "Peaceable Kingdom"

For any American readers who may be logging in to read as you prepare to travel for today's holiday, or as you prepare for the family gathering (and I dearly hope holiday-makers aren't wasting time reading this), a pre-gathering reflection I find helpful from Patricia Volk's book Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family (NY: Vintage, 2001):

Once Lost, Now Found: Louis Marinelli of National Organization for Marriage Has Conversion Experience

The story developing now with a former National Organization for Marriage head honcho, Louis Marinelli, is engrossing.  It's in important respects like a modern-day conversion story, a story of scales falling from the eyes, as a person suddenly begins to realize people he has demeaned and sought to treat inhumanely are human beings, in the same way he's human.

Andrew Sullivan on Growing Catholic Support for Gay Marriage and His Experience as a Gay Catholic

My posting about Ross Douthat's latest op-ed statement re: why monogamy matters mentions that I responded to Douthat's essay in part due to a comment Andrew Sullivan recently made on his Daily Dish blog about his experience as a gay Catholic.  Sullivan notes just-released poll data showing that a majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage.  As he also notes, the shift towards support for marriage equality has been particularly pronounced, in the very recent past, among white Catholics.

African-American Faith Communities and the LGBT Community: An Arkansas Church Builds Bridges

National Organization for Marriage chair Maggie Gallagher has recently been crowing that the opposition to marriage equality in Maryland is being led not only by her own Catholic church but by black churches as well.  (Unfortunately for Maggie, her fellow Catholics decidedly do not support her attempt and that of the Catholic hierarchy to block the human rights of LGBT citizens: as Tom Fox noted recently in National Catholic Reporter, Catholic lawmakers and Catholic citizens have bucked the hierarchy to support the marriage equality bill, and polls show 49% of Maryland Catholics supporting marriage equality with 42% opposed--a higher percentage of support than among citizens at large).  

Obama Administration Won't Defend Unconstitutional DOMA: Official Catholic Reactions from U.S. Bishops and Maggie Gallagher

In case you're wondering what the moral teachers of the Catholic church in the U.S. have to say about the decision of the Obama administration yesterday no longer to defend the Defense of Marriage Act--because enshrining discrimination in federal law is unconstitutional!--wonder no more.  The bishops hastened to get out a press statement right away.  Their take?

Anti-Gay Initiatives Across U.S. State Legislatures: Gays Not to Take Them "Personally"

When I look at the pictures of the two young Republicans sponsoring the "Don't Say Gay" bill now before the Tennessee legislature, I think of something Timothy Beauchamp said at AmericaBlog Gay yesterday.  Beauchamp is reporting on a statement that the Republican minority leader in the Maryland Senate, Nancy Jacobs, made recently as the Maryland legislature gears up for a big debate about same-sex marriage.  Jacobs says she hopes her gay and lesbian fellow citizens won't take "personally" what her fellow Republicans say about them in the legislative debate.

Fresh Sperm: Bishop Eddie Long and John Paul II's Theology of the Body

One of the supposedly earth-shaking insights of the Catholic theology of the body developed by the late pope John Paul II is its insistence that male-female complementarity is the central thread on which Judaeo-Christian beliefs hold together.  The theology of the body insists that everything in scripture and tradition should be read through the optic of the crude biological facticity of gender, of maleness and femaleness.

Joel Burns, Fort Worth City Council Member to Gay Teens: It Gets Better

Joel Burns' testimony (I'm using that religiously charged term deliberately here) at a recent Fort Worth city council meeting in Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project is circulating around the internet right now, and deserves serious consideration.  It's a powerful testimony, heart-wrenching and mind-altering to witness.

New National Organization for Marriage Watchdog Site Launches: NOM Exposed

I’ve blogged in recent days about the . . . remarkable . . . confluence of the political activities of the National Organization of Marriage in Minnesota right now with the political activities of the Minnesota bishops and Knights of Columbus.  As I’ve noted, NOM is openly campaigning for Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.  And, though the head of the Minnesota Catholic hierarchy Archbishop John Nienstedt has maintained that the anti-gay marriage videos he’s distributing, which were paid for by a donor who wishes to hide his/her identity have no political intent, these videos strongly echo NOM’s political ads for Emmer.  And the Catholic bishops of Minnesota have chosen to send these videos to all Catholic households in the state as the election nears.

Syreeta McFadden on Ross Douthat's Approach to Mosque Controversy: Sinister Subtext Appealing to "Seeming" Reason

A must-read piece today: Syreeta McFadden at Religion Dispatches on Ross Douthat's recent ground-zero mosque column.  Joan Walsh masterfully dissected Douthat's bigotry at Salon earlier in the week, and Eduardo Peñalver has sparked lively discussion of Douthat's column with a posting at Commonweal.

My point here is not to discuss Douthat's column.  I'll leave it to interested readers who have not yet read it to link to and read it for themselves.  And I do recommend Walsh's commentary and the Commonweal thread about the essay for further analysis of the piece.

Timothy Kincaid on NOM's Summer of Hate: Bald-Faced Bigotry Betraying Core Religious Values

A good article by Timothy Kincaid today at Box Turtle Bulletin, putting the rank homophobia of groups like the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) in historical perspective.  In particular, Kincaid notes the inexorable, if slow and spasmodic, movement of democracy, with its belief in the inherent worth and rights of every human being, towards rights for everyone.  Not merely for select, privileged elite groups.

Dispatch from the Front: Maggie Gallagher Notes Majority Support for Same-Sex Marriage Among Youth

 

NOM's Maggie Gallagher loves to natter on--and on--about how the rights of gay human beings ought to be up for grabs through popular vote.  Let the majority rule, Maggie insists, when the majority agrees with her.

But now Maggie's defending a homophobic California beauty queen, who quotes Leviticus to suggest that gays should be put to death, by noting that 45% of Californians aged 18-29 voted to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens with proposition 8.

Ms. Prejean and the Catholic Bishops: Glass Houses, Stones

I wrote earlier today,

When people claim to be moral teachers, those whom they teach will naturally look to the lives of the teacher to see how his life exemplifies the values he’s teaching. If there’s a wide and easily discerned gap between the teaching and the life that is lived, people will wonder. And they’ll talk.

I went on to apply that observation to the U.S. Catholic bishops and their current monomoniacal pursuit of their gay brothers and sisters. I opined that it's wise not to go on the attack and shake the big stick when the ground is already sliding away underneath you as you wave your big stick around.

Little did I know when I made these comments earlier today what a timely illustration of my point would emerge as the day ends. It has now come to light that Ms. Prejean, who (as with the bishops) has made her recent career out of informing LGBT human beings that we are uniquely defective in moral terms, has--oops--made not one but a whole big mess of sex tapes similar to the one that recently gained public notoriety.

Oops. You'd think, wouldn't you, that, knowing she had made these tapes and they might come to light, she'd have been a tad bit more . . . temperate . . . about posturing as a moral authority figure?

And that the Catholic church's chief ally in its gay-bashing activities in Maine, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), headed by Catholic Maggie Gallagher, would have been at least a tiny bit less jubilant about promoting Ms. Prejean as an icon of moral uprightness in the battle against the sinful gays?

Am I saying that the bishops are in bed with Carrie Prejean? In a way, I suppose I am. They have certainly been in bed with Maggie who has been in bed with Carrie. If the bed fits, wear it, I always say.

And I think this rumpled old bed may be about to become mighty uncomfortable and crowded, as these new sex tapes begin to make the rounds. Glass houses, stones . . . .

Latest Financial Filings of Campaign to Remove Right of Marriage from Maine's Gay Citizens: Big Money from Catholic Diocese and NOM, Donors Unknown

Yesterday, groups seeking to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of Maine released totals of the funds they’ve taken in for their campaign since their last filings, in response to a state filing deadline (see here, here, here, here, and here). Interesting information in these financial reports.

Note that they do not reveal the actual source of the donations to the campaign to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of Maine. It’s that donor information that the National Organization of Marriage is suing Maine for the right to withhold from the public.

Turns out that the financially strapped Catholic diocese of Portland, Maine, which is closing parishes and Catholic schools due to financial shortfalls, has ponied up another $152,600 this month to remove the right of marriage from Maine’s gay citizens. As with its previous $100,000 donation to the campaign, however, the Portland diocese and Marc Mutty, the diocesan employee heading the anti-gay marriage campaign, have no clear idea of the source of this recent chunk of money.

For its first big donation to the campaign, Mutty said that the money came from “dedicated revenues” whose source he didn’t really know. The current hefty chunk, it turns out, is from an equally mysterious “rainy day fund” that has been curiously unavailable to save the parishes and schools the diocese is closing.

And the National Organization for Marriage is reporting that, since October 1, it has dropped an additional $1.1 million into the coffers of the campaign against the rights of Maine’s gay citizens. NOM is divulging no information about the source of that hefty sum. Once again, this is the information NOM is seeking to conceal by suing the state of Maine.

As Jesse Connolly, head of the No on 1 campaign (the campaign to protect the right of Maine’s gay citizens to marry), notes (see the set of links at the head of the posting), the contrast between the information in the No on 1 filings and that in the diocesan and NOM filings couldn’t be sharper. The No on 1 campaign is drawing its funds largely from individual donors in Maine and across the nation who are committed to safeguarding human rights.

By contrast, the assault on the right to marriage of Maine’s gay citizens is being spearheaded by two deep-pocket groups, the local Catholic diocese and the National Organization to marriage, both of which are not disclosing the source of the funds they’re using to mount this assault.

With Maggie Gallagher, a Catholic, as NOM’s president, and Marc Mutty, an employee of the Portland diocese, heading the Maine No on 1 campaign, the claim of the Catholic church to care about human rights anywhere in the world looks pretty weak, doesn’t it? Not to mention transparency and accountability. And democratic process.

And telling the truth.

The Maine Campaign to Remove Right of Marriage from Gay Citizens: Catholic Bishops' Troubling Assault on Moral Foundations of Democracy

Have I said this lately? I don’t think so, or, at least, not quite so pointedly. The attack of the Catholic bishop of Maine, Richard Malone, on the rights of gay citizens of Maine is disgraceful.

It’s important to see clearly what’s going on here. The right to same-sex marriage has already been recognized in Maine. Same-sex marriage was enacted in the state of Maine this past May by a majority vote of the state legislature. On 5 May 2009, Maine’s House of Representatives voted 89-58 to enact same-sex marriage, and the following day, Maine’s Senate affirmed the vote of the House. The governor then signed the legislation into law.

Through Bishop Malone and his henchman Marc Mutty, the Catholic church is attacking legislation legally enacted by a majority vote of a democratically elected state legislature. In the past, anti-gay forces have maintained that they are fighting to uphold the will of the majority against activist courts that are imposing same-sex marriage on some states against the will of the people.

The case of Maine puts the lie to the claim of religious bodies opposing same-sex marriage that they are concerned to see the will of the people in a democratic society safeguarded. What is happening in Maine demonstrates that there are religious groups in American society willing to remove rights from citizens, and, in doing so, to contravene the vote of a democratically elected majority of a state’s legislators. To overturn the work of a democratically elected state legislature to impose on a state and its citizens practices and beliefs peculiar to some religious bodies . . . .

And to do that in a morally repugnant way, through well-funded propaganda campaigns in which these hate groups seek to play on the basest and most unfounded fears of citizens by disseminating lies about a vulnerable minority group, in order to achieve a bare popular majority vote that strips this minority of rights . . . .

As Joe Sudbay notes at Americablog Gay, Malone and Mutty’s attempt to remove a right from a targeted minority and their willingness to overturn the vote of a majority of democratically elected legislators in the process are not playing well among Maine’s Catholics. Sudbay’s parents live in Maine.

He reports that they and many of their friends, who are Bishop Malone’s “target market,” are extremely upset at their church’s assault on the human rights of gay persons and on their state’s democratic institutions. They see the behavior of Bishop Malone and Marc Mutty as a violation of core Catholic moral principles.

There may have been a time in the history of the assault of some religious groups on gay persons when it was barely possible to assume that this movement is a misguided but high-minded attempt to return the nation to its foundational moral principles. What’s happening in Maine challenges that interpretation.

These homophobic religious operatives can no longer claim to be fighting to protect citizens against activist courts. They are now fighting to protect citizens against themselves. They’re assaulting the will of a majority of state voters as represented by their chief legislative bodies and duly elected governors.

And the tactics to which they’re willing to resort in this crusade reveal their crusade as morally reprehensible in the extreme. Two days ago, Bishop Malone’s ally in his assault on the rights of the gay citizens of Maine, the National Organization for Marriage, sued the state to prevent disclosure of NOM’s financial wheelings and dealings in Maine.

NOM (presided over by Catholic Maggie Gallagher) is under investigation by Maine for possible violations of the state’s laws requiring full disclosure of donors to political campaigns. NOM is now contesting the constitutionality of Maine’s campaign finance laws.

On the same day, an unregistered political action committee calling itself the Family PAC, which is an affiliate of Focus on the Family, sued the state of Washington for the very same reason. In the next election, Washington voters will vote on referendum 71, which proposes to extend some benefits of marriage to same-sex couples. Groups opposing this measure have been fighting very hard to keep the names of donors and supporters concealed. The current lawsuit moves their battle against Washington’s political disclosure and finance laws to the courts, as it mounts an attack on state laws in these areas.

These are not morally admirable crusades. Political objectives pursued by such ethically compromised means cannot be admirable. Morally admirable objectives are pursued in the light of day, not by cover of darkness.

When religious groups have to resort to lies and trickery to attain goals they have defined as moral, and when they do so in violation of the moral consensus of citizens in a pluralistic democratic society as they seek to impose their peculiar religious beliefs and practices on those citizens, something is radically awry at a moral level. The way to moral influence in a pluralistic democratic society is through open discussion in which all the pertinent facts are on the table and everyone has a voice in the discussion, with no one trying to impose his or her will by fiat.

Catholic leaders and groups intent on assaulting the human rights of gay persons, which are willing to subvert the democratic process as they do so, are not morally admirable agents. They are doing evil, not good. And it continues to grieve me that so many of my Catholic brothers and sisters of the center apparently do not see or are not perturbed by this, as they remain completely silent while the humanity of their LGBT brothers and sisters is under attack by the leaders of their church.