How the National Organization for Marriage Doomed Itself to Collapse

Very interesting article. I'm hoping the "March for Marriage" will be NOM's swan song and they'll crawl back into the woodwork with the rest of their fellow cockroaches.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/06/06/the_national_organization_for_marriage_is_doomed_to_collapse.html
How the National Organization for Marriage Doomed Itself to Collapse
By Mark Joseph Stern

This week, a Reagan-appointed federal judge handed the National Organization for Marriage its first major rejection of the month, kicking the anti-gay-marriage group’s IRS lawsuit out of court. NOM, a longtime opponent of disclosure laws, had claimed that the IRS intentionally leaked a contributor list to the pro-gay Human Rights Campaign, using the accusation as a fundraising tool. On Tuesday, however, U.S. District Judge James C. Cacheris slammed NOM’s claim, noting the group’s utter lack of evidence and criticizing its case as “unconvincing” and “unpersuasive.”

This dismissal would be embarrassing enough on its own. Yet 2014 has brought NOM so many defeats that its IRS loss barely made the news. The day after Judge Cacheris’ ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court swatted down NOM’s attempt to halt gay marriage in Oregon, where the attorney general has refused to defend the state’s recently invalidated ban. (Before that, the group tried, and failed, to make a last-minute defense of the law in district court.) These two failures come on the heels of NOM’s most humiliating month yet: In May, the Maine Ethics Commission hit the group with a $50,250 fine for breaking state laws in its 2009 campaign to overturn marriage equality. The commission went on to note that NOM had also likely violated campaign disclosure laws in New Hampshire and Iowa. The Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board is currently investigating the group.

Was it inevitable that NOM would fall apart so quickly? As the organization stumbles toward irrelevance and impotence, it’s easy to forget just how successful and formidable it once was. The campaign for Proposition 8—which, as I’ve written, was by far the most traumatic and degrading anti-gay event in recent American history—was led, in large part, by NOM. After its success in California, the group took its tactics on the road, successfully batting away marriage equality in Maine and North Carolina while exacting revenge on judges who dared to uphold legal equality.

Through these campaigns, NOM rewrote the modern anti-gay playbook, demeaning the LGBTQ community as promiscuous, predatory, diseased, and disordered. From 2007 to 2011—in retrospect, the last successful charge of the anti-gay warriors—NOM released an unremitting stream of noxious nonsense that successfully poisoned Americans’ views of gay people. By May 2012, after North Carolinians forbade gay marriage in their state constitution, NOM could make the case not just that it was winning, but that it had very nearly won.... MORE at link posted above.