Maggie Gallagher, former Chairman of NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, says that if gay marriage becomes the law of the land it will make any anti-gay person seem “like a racist.” So, it also seems Gallagher has just redefined NOM’s mission, admitting her overriding motivation is not so much “to protect marriage,” but to protect the reputations of people in “the faith communities that sustain it.”
Gallagher has never been shy about speaking what’s in her heart, despite the fact that it generally does make her sound like a bigot and a racist. It’s good to know that this is what’s truly in her heart: protecting people who are bigots and racists from seeming like bigots and racists.
The comments seem to have ben made by Gallagher in a recent Newsweek/Daily Beast interview, which was posted without commentary by Andrew Sullivan yesterday.
“It’s because the heart of the same-sex marriage idea is that there is no difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, and if you see a difference there’s something wrong with you, you’re like a racist,” Gallagher admits.
“You put that idea in the heart of a public institution like marriage and it’s going to have enormous consequences,” Gallagher adds. “I realize that many people disagree with me but if you ask me why I am involved in this it’s because the framing ideas of marriage are the most important and most powerful thing about it, and you cannot get to same-sex marriage without de-norming and changing and really transforming the basis of marriage in the public square.”
So, if same-sex marriage becomes legitimatized by the government, people who don’t believe it should be legal will be viewed as racists and bigots and that’s Gallagher’s issue? Really?
She adds that “the framing ideas of marriage are the most important and most powerful thing about it”? I thought the most powerful thing about marriage was the creation of family, the knowledge that you’re part of something bigger than yourself, you’re investing in the future — not that you’re involved in some political movement.
The responses came after Gallagher tried to answer a question asking “why those who defend the sanctity of marriage” focus on gay marriage instead of divorce?
Gallagher’s comments are reaffirmed by her latest project, NOM’s “Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance,†a support network for people who feel they are living in fear because of gay marriage., and which searches for people who feel victimized by gay marriage. Their most-recent campaign is spotlighting a student who was punished for his anti-gay rhetoric disrupting a Spirit Day lesson — not even a same-sex marriage issue.
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