I haven't been around as much the last few weeks because I've been guest-blogging at NOM Tour Tracker, a project of Courage Campaign Institute's Prop 8 Trial Tracker. NOM Tour Tracker was founded to cover anti-equality National Organization for Marriage and their "Summer for low turnout in empty parking lots with crazy Christian right supporters Marriage" tour across 17 states and DC from mid-July through mid-August. The tour was meant to scare elected officials into anti-equality positions, and convince voters that those who don't support the freedom to marry for same-sex couples were on the attack from vicious, God-hating homosexuals.
They put out this promo video today, which is so bad both in terms of rhetoric and production quality that it makes my head hurt (and, as Rick says, a perfect opportunity for a spoof):
What NOM didn't tell is a couple of things:
1. Their tour turned out to be a failure of epic proportions in terms of turnout. I published a summary of the statistics here, but to recap: they were outnumbered by pro-equality supporters, both LGBT and straight allies, at nearly every single stop- sometimes by factors of 3-1 (Indianapolis, IN) or 8-1 (Madison, WI). They held three separate sparsely-attended "rallies" in parking lots- you read that right, parking lots. The overall counts were 3,419 equality supporters to 1,275 NOM supporters.
2. The crazies became the ugly face of NOM, such as Larry Adams with his "The solution to gay marriage=[noose]" sign:
or the one from the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property arguing that a family without a mother and a father is no family at all:
or this man in Harrisburg obsessed with female/female sex and closing down porn shops:
or the woman in Raleigh who spouted incredibly offensive stereotypes about black communities, and that children of same-sex parents were unhappy children:
They came along with the speakers NOM had at it rallies, like Mary Forrester, who spouted debunked "research" like the life span of an average "homosexual" is some 40 years younger than a straight male (research so debunked that the Christian Action League actually pulled it from their website):
3. The nation actually moved towards supporting equality, as the now-famous CNN poll demonstrated that a majority believes same-sex marriage should be a Constitutional right.
And no amount of bad video teleprompter reading by Brian or ugly rhetoric and production quality can spin what their tour amounted to: an epic #FAIL.
