A day after Maggie Gallagher stepped
aside as chairman of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM),
the anti-gay marriage group announced the Marriage Anti-Defamation
Alliance (Marriage ADA), which will be headed by Gallagher.
The new project, according to NOM
President Brian Brown, will shine a spotlight on the people “whose
rights and dignity are denied by too many gay-marriage advocates.”
Marriage ADA is a “supportive
community for those who have been threatened for standing for
marriage, to nip the climate of fear being created in the bud, to
expose for fair-minded Americans on both sides of the debate the
threats being made, to conduct high-quality qualitative and
quantitative research documenting the extent of the harm, to develop
legislative and community proposals to protect Americans right to
engage in the core civil rights: to organize, to vote, to speak, to
donate, and to write for marriage.”
The group highlights the experience of
motivational speaker Frank Turek in its premiere video.
Turek's 143-page anti-gay marriage book
Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts
Everyone has led him to lose
speaking gigs at Bank of America and Cisco Systems.
“I was Googled, I was outed, I was
fired for being somebody who has a traditional marriage viewpoint,”
Turek says in the over five-minute video. “I am open to working
with people of all sexual orientations or political views. In fact,
that's what inclusion and diversity should be about.”
“If we don't start speaking up, we're
going to loose our ability to even make a living in this country,”
the Charlotte-based speaker adds. (The video is embedded in the
right panel of this page.)
Turek has previously warned that gay
people are on a “road to destruction” and said that a
gay gene would not make gay marriage OK.
Writing at Equality
Matters, Carlos Maza notes that NOM's latest project is a flimsy
effort to deflect its own attempts to devalue the dignity of gay and
lesbian people.
“In reality, Marriage ADA is just
another attempt to advance the ridiculous claim that, in the fight
for LGBT equality, anti-gay activists are the real victims,” Maza
wrote. “At the same time, NOM is deafeningly silent on the
'defamation' it direct towards LGBT people on an almost daily basis.
In the past month alone, NOM has promoted articles calling
homosexuality a form of 'sexual anarchy,' 'darkness parading around
as light' and the 'cancer version' of heterosexuality. It also
promoted columns comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and implying
that one's sexual orientation is a choice.”