Did gay marriage foe the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM) call Carrie Prejean and David
Tyree dumb?
On Monday, gay rights advocate the
Human
Rights Campaign (HRC) posted four of NOM's internal strategic
memos from 2009, which were unsealed in the course of NOM's ongoing
legal challenge to Maine's campaign reporting laws.
The memos
have caused an uproar for stating that the “strategic goal of
this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key
democratic constituencies.”
The documents also reveal that NOM
sought to “recruit glamorous but unintelligent celebrities.”
“Hollywood with its cultural biases
is far bigger than we can hope to be,” the group wrote. “We
recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the
disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather
and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens
and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries.
(This is applying the Witherspoon and IAV model to non-intellectual
elites.)”
In 2009, NOM
released an ad featuring Carrie Prejean, a former Miss California
beauty queen who is opposed to marriage equality. Two years later,
the group promoted an interview with former Giants wide receiver
David Tyree, in which he said gay
marriage will lead to “anarchy.”