Ruffled feathers

Some videos to share with you:

Romney said he would cut funding for PBS even though he likes Big Bird. In response Big Bird was a guest on Saturday Night Live. It's a couple minutes and quite tame for SNL (though I don't watch the show), meaning Big Bird doesn't do anything strange.

John Corvino, the Gay Moralist and Ethics Professor at Wayne State University, has been debating Maggie Gallagher of National Organization for Marriage. They even wrote a book together each making their case and critiquing the other's. Now Corvino has created a series of nine videos outlining, from the moral viewpoint, why gay marriage is a great idea. He even does it with humor (stick around after the brief credits). The whole series is about a half hour. This link is set up for autoplay so the whole series will play automatically.

Sally Field received an Ally for Equality award from the Human Rights Campaign at their annual dinner. She is introduced by her son Sam, who is gay. The intro and thank-you are together 15 minutes.

Drive a wedge and claim victimhood

The National Organization for Marriage has been fighting against marriage equality in several states. They recently lost a lawsuit in which they claimed they could keep campaign donors secret in spite of state disclosure laws. They haven't released donors yet, but they were forced to reveal campaign strategy.

It includes such tactics as:
* Highlight Latinos who support straight marriage, "an identity marker, a badge of youth rebellion to conforming assimilation to the bad side of 'Anglo' culture."

* Highlight racist gays and homophobic blacks to drive a wedge between the two groups. Democrat politicians won't want to touch the issue in fear of alienating one of the groups. This worked well in the Calif. marriage battle a few years ago.

* Highlight stories of people who feel harassed, threatened, or intimidated by any aspect of the debate. This includes such people as the mother confronting the school board about her kids being taught about gay couples.

* Claim victimhood for those with traditional views.

* Attack politicians who support gays by raising issues of protecting the children, pornography, and religious liberty.

* Expose Obama as a socialist radical. Marriage protection will only happen with a GOP president.

Actual NOM documents here.

Not really susceptible to evidence

Mark Oppenheimer has a big article in Salon about Maggie Gallagher. She started the National Organization for Marriage and "Gallagher has done more than any American to stop same-sex marriage."

I'm a bit torn between knowing our enemies and giving them more attention than they deserve (that being any). But, on the recommendation of bloggers I trust, I read the article and found a few things worth sharing.

Just before she graduated from Yale in 1982 Gallagher became pregnant and was not married. The father split, which left her raising the child on her own (though she did fall in love and married about a decade later). That pushed Gallagher into her life's work of trying to strengthen marriage. Her early writings were attacks on feminism -- men and women have particular roles and sex cannot be separated from procreation. And a child needs both a mother and a father. Gay marriage didn't enter into this work until 2003, 20 years after her son was born.

For Gallagher, the principal problem with gay couples is not the act of sodomy: It’s that they cannot be a mother and a father. Gallagher believes that what is best for any child is to be raised by its natural mother and father — what happens when Marriage succeeds — and any law that honors an alternative arrangement is thus harmful. Adoptive parents may succeed in raising a child well, single parents may succeed, but they are both inferior to biological mother and father, the paradigm that Marriage has always supported, throughout history.

…

Gallagher is not claiming that same-sex-couples are preventing proper heterosexual rearing for any actual, existing children. Rather, she is asserting what to her is a timeless social fact: that institutions and norms are delicate, and that if you mess with them — say, by expanding the definition of marriage — bad things are likely to happen.
There is an obvious problem with this sort of argumentation: it is not really susceptible to evidence. Gallagher is unwilling to make any predictions of what doom will befall families after the legalization of same-sex marriage. She just has faith that marriage, the central institution of good child-rearing, will be weakened if same-sex couples are allowed its prestige and protections.
…

[Gallagher] explains why her opponents are mistaken: “One of the lessons I learned as a young woman from the collapse of Communism is this: Trying to build a society around a fundamental lie about human nature can be done, for a while, with intense energy (and often at great cost); but it cannot hold.” Same-sex marriage is just a big lie, she believes, like Communism. It is weak at its foundations, like the Iron Curtain. It may get built, she seems to concede — in 10 years, or 20, there may be more states that recognize same-sex marriage, more shiny, happy couples raising rosy-cheeked, well-adjusted children, children who play with dogs and go to school and fall from jungle gyms and break their arms, children often adopted after being abandoned by the heterosexuals who did not want them or could not care for them — but in time (big time, geological time, God time) the curtain will be pulled back, or it will fall. Because it has to. It cannot be otherwise. Because a son, as Maggie Gallagher will tell you, needs a dad.

Yes, there is a lot of what she says that is only her personal belief. All the research is against her or her opinions cannot be researched.