The National Organization For Marriage late last night released a fundraising email loaded with shockingly offensive commentary about NOM President Brian Brown‘s dinner table marriage debate with noted LGBT author and activist Dan Savage. The email, a whopping 2525 words, uses hackneyed NOM tricks — like hate mongering, fear mongering, claims of religious and biblical superiority — and of course, ends with a fundraising plea, a pretty tacky exhibition of pure greed. Overall, Brown displays the fact that he’s unwilling to engage in true debate, consider anyone else’s position — and is a very bad guest.
Watch: Dan Savage Vs. Brian Brown — The Dinner Table Marriage Debate
“Let me pose a question to the Dan Savages of the world,” NOM President Brian Brown posits, dehumanizing his host as he fear-mongers to his supporters. “Once gay people were a powerless and defenseless minority.”
Now, you have organized, protested, and become powerful through the use of democratic freedoms and intellectual debate, a powerful cultural force in our time. What use do you intend to make of your power?
“Liberty when men act in groups is power,” as Edmund Burke said, and before we congratulate them, or they congratulate themselves, it behooves us to look at what use they intend to make of the growing cultural power.
[All bolding is Brian’s, not ours.]
What does Brian want his supporters to think we’re going to do with our “power”?
As an aside, here’s an excellent graphic, via Zack Ford at Think Progress, that addresses this very issue:
So, what are we going to do with this so-called power that the LGBT community supposedly has (which we don’t)? Get married. Raise families. Try to be happy, and live our lives.
In another breath, Brown states:
Dan Savage called us here at NOM liars. He thinks we are telling lies, because we say things he doesn’t believe.
“Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor’,” he told me. “I do believe NOM is in the bearing false witness business and routinely bears false witness against LGBT people.”
“NOM tends to do it through linking and surrogates,” he said, echoing the absurd arguments of Scott Rose and now also Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
NOM and its related businesses, like the Ruth Institute, have blatantly ignored truth and the law. And  yes, it is true that “NOM tends to do it through linking and surrogates,” as with the pastor who spoke at NOM’s anti-gay marriage rally, and said, as NOM officials stood by, not uttering a word in response to this statement, translated from Spanish:
“Gays are worthy of death.”
NOM did not issue a statement apologizing or refuting that statement. The only acknowledgment of it came fro  Maggie Gallagher, who wrote in the comments section of one of the many articles we published on the subject.
On that note, NOM certainly was quick to blame the LGBT community and the Southern Poverty Law Center for the Family Research Council shooting. NOM not once has come out to support our community or offer condolences — much less take any responsibility for contributing to a climate of hate  — when pastor after pastor after pastor has announced children who might seem to be gender non-conforming be “knocked” and beaten, that all gay people should be rounded up and put in pens, to “die out,” or that gay people are responsible for any one of a number of natural tragedies, like hurricanes and earthquakes.
Not. One. Peep. Courtesy of the folks at NOM, the National Organization For Marriage.
Meanwhile, often, sometimes daily, the anonymous “NOM staff” blogger(s) on the NOM Blog will publish excerpts of articles designed to attack the LGBT community, so NOM can claim it didn’t state those lies and half-truths and cherry-picked items, someone else did. Perhaps Brian should start actually reading the NOM blog?
We should note Brown mentions The New Civil Rights Movement’s own Scott Rose, who has written dozens of articles on NOM, and the Regnerus flawed anti-gay “parenting” study, which Brown brought up during his debate with Savage. Rose is responsible in large part for the actions taken by the University of Texas and the publisher of the Regnerus “study” that have led those associated with the Regnerus study to, as one reviewer employed by the publisher stated, call it “bullshit.”
Certain members of the gay community, embraced and endorsed by as powerful a voice as Dan Savage’s, are out trying to destroy a young scholar’s career—not debating and refuting his study, or accepting the challenge of coming up with random samples of gay parents raising children as Regnerus did—but trying to end his career because he published a study in a peer-reviewed journal—but Dan absurdly claimed that this attempted destruction of Prof. Regnerus’ career is our fault.
Well, that’s false. Regnerus’ peers and the LGBT community are trying to stop NOM, anti-gay organiztions, and hate groups from using a debunked and wildly flawed “study” that harms the entire LGBT community, the children we are raising, and empirical truth and facts. Regnerus’ career is not our focus, but he traded his reputation to advance his anti-gay agenda and his bank account, and that is unacceptable.
Sadly, the Regnerus study has now appeared in Supreme Court amicus briefs and a federal court judgment against a same-sex marriage case.
Almost the entire fundraising letter is skewed, fictional, divisive, attacking, offensive, and just plain ugly, but Brown couches it in religion so thinks that makes him right. It does not.
And he positions himself as the battling warrior hero, which is just plain dumb.
Comments like, “As I told Dan face to face,” “I went on to tell Dan in his own home,” and this gem:
I called for this debate with Dan Savage to show that I—with your support and help— that we would go anywhere to defend the principles that you and I hold dear.
Even into the Seattle, Washington home of a homosexual and his “husband,” right, Brian? Because that’s what you really wanted to say, isn’t it?
Jeremy Hooper at Good As You pointes to this passage from Brown’s email:
But leave it to the National Organization For Marriage, while thanking Dan for having him to his home, to pointedly downgrade Terry and Dan’s status:
Let me first begin by saying thank you to Dan Savage for the invitation to come to his home and the chance to meet his partner and his child.
Dan has since told the moderator, Mark Oppenheimer, that he regrets having the event at his home because his role as host interfered with his full prosecution of me (and through me, all NOM supporters):
“Playing host put me in this position of treating Brian Brown like a guest,” he said. “It was better in theory than in practice — it put me at a disadvantage during the debate, as the undertow of playing host resulted in my being more solicitous and considerate than I should’ve been. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d go with a hall.”
So I want to make sure and thank Dan Savage and his partner for opening their home to me.
And Hooper notes:
Probably not that big of deal to Brian, since his career is quite literally built around taking away certain kinds of Americans’ legal statuses. But surely a huge deal to Dan, Terry, and *their* son.
Perhaps we should just be thankful Brian didn’t go with colleague, associate, or Player #2.
Yes, overall, Brian Brown is a bad guest. But he’s also a bad citizen, working hard to jam down people’s throats his idea that marriage can only be the union of one man and one woman — not two men or two women — and making the LGBT community out to seem evil.
That not just bad public policy, that’s not just bad citizenship, that’s not just bad business practice, that’s just plain bad.