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National Organization For Marriage Wants Starbucks To Pay ‘Price’ In Middle East

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In post-election call NOM president says, ‘These are not countries that look kindly on same-sex marriage”

 

The National Organization for Marriage is pledging to continue its efforts to ensure that companies that back same-sex marriage pay a “price” in Middle Eastern countries that are hostile to gay rights.

The statements came during a NOM conference call Thursday evening, which the organization billed to its supporters as a discussion of the 2012 elections — which resulted in the legalization of gay marriage in three states and the defeat of a gay-marriage ban in a fourth — and of “what’s next in the fight to defend marriage.”

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During the call, NOM’s top leaders said they needed to greatly expand their fundraising efforts. They argued that Mitt Romney should have focused more on the same-sex marriage issue, and they blamed Karl Rove for allegedly pushing Republicans and outside groups to focus solely on economic issues.

NOM also suggested that opponents of same-sex marriage would argue in court that Tuesday’s election results were evidence that gays and lesbians do not constitute a “suspect class” and that the Defense of Marriage Act should therefore not be overturned.

The American Independent obtained an invitation to the conference call and dialed in.

During the call, one participant cited Starbucks, which endorsed gay marriage legalization in Washington, and General Mills, which spoke out against the proposed gay marriage ban in Minnesota. The participant asked what could be done “to stop the wave of corporate sponsorship of gay marriage.”

NOM President Brian Brown responded by saying that NOM was targeting the international business of companies that support same-sex marriage such as Starbucks, which NOM also hit with a national boycott effort this year. Brown said the aim is to make these companies’ political stances known in countries in the Middle East and elsewhere that generally do not support same-sex marriage, or homosexuality in general.

“Their international outreach is where we can have the most effect,” Brown said. “So for example, in Qatar, in the Middle East, we’ve begun working to make sure that there’s some price to be paid for this. These are not countries that look kindly on same-sex marriage. And this is where Starbucks wants to expand, as well as India. So we have done some of this; we’ve got to do a lot more.”

“It takes money to go up against someone like Starbucks,” Brown continued, noting that NOM’s resources had been spread thin. “I mean, we’ve got 50,000 people who’ve said, ‘We’re no longer going to purchase Starbucks products,’ but that’s the tip of the iceberg. Has it had some effect? I think so, but it’s nowhere near enough. An example has to be made of some of these companies if we’re going to get this sort of tidal wave of support for same-sex marriage to stop.”

Listen to the audio

Earlier this year, NOM announced that it was taking “Dump Starbucks” campaign “international.” In a statement at the time, Brown said that “DumpStarbucks.com online ads will also start running in Egypt, Beijing, Hong Kong, the Yunnan region of China, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait.”

“What happens in Seattle won’t to stay in Seattle,” Brown said at the time. “By making gay marriage core to his brand, Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz [sic] is telling millions of customers and partners who support traditional marriage in the Middle East, China, South America and North America that they aren’t truly part of the Starbucks community.”

The theme of the call Thursday was that the fight is not over, which is something NOM has been stressing in the media since Tuesday’s election. Both Brown and NOM national political director Frank Schubert waved away the notion that the marriage equality wins signal that Americas now favor same-sex marriage — they said these were simply liberal states where gay marriage advocates drastically outspent gay marriage foes and won by slim margins.

“The most important, you know, reality is that our work has gotten harder, but we are not defeated,” Brown said. “These are, as I said, four difficult states. We will have more fights, we will have more wins, but we’re going to need to be able to match the other side. We’re not going to be able to win in these sort of states being outspent in the way that we were.”

Looking to the future, Brown warned supporters of upcoming marriage fights in Delaware, Illinois, and Rhode Island, and of potential Supreme Court decisions concerning the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, and the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Brown said he believes the marriage equality wins will actually hurt gay-marriage advocates’ arguments in cases involving DOMA “because one of the arguments of the other side is that gays and lesbians are a suspect class, and that means that there’s some level of political powerlessness. That clearly is not the case.”

“I think that on one level, the fact that we lost in these states may actually help us win in the Supreme Court,” Brown said. “Also, for someone like Justice [Anthony] Kennedy — who has said in the past, has not wanted the court to be too far ahead of public opinion — the reality that the majority of states have voted with us, but recently some states have voted to redefine marriage underscores the idea that the federal government doesn’t need to act here, that the states are dealing with this on their own, and the federal government shouldn’t bypass the democratic process right in the middle.”

Schubert repeatedly said that “marriage remains a winning issue” and blamed Mitt Romney’s campaign and the larger GOP campaign for failing to talk enough about same-sex marriage. He suggested that if the whole country had voted on the issue Tuesday, same-sex marriage would have been opposed by “65 percent of the vote.”

He said this assumption was based on the fact that on average “marriage outpaced the GOP tickets” and also based on a national Election Day survey NOM released Friday. That survey, which was conducted by conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway’s Polling Group, found that “60% of Americans who voted in the election favor marriage being the union of one man and one woman.”

By contrast, national exit polls from this year’s election found that 49 percent of polled voters said same-sex marriage should be legal in their states, compared to 46 of polled voters who said it should be illegal.

NOM: Karl Rove’s economic issues strategy was a ‘false bill of goods’

Both Brown and Schubert made it clear that NOM’s immediate goal is to raise more money. They attributed their recent losses to the fact that they were outspent by gay marriage supporters.

“[W]e’re spread thin, and part of the story of this election is, you know, we tried to fight four fights all at once right after putting all our money into North Carolina, and the other side spread us out,” Brown said.

In a press release Wednesday, Brown said that NOM had contributed “over $5.5 million” but that the organization was outspent “by a margin of at least four-to-one.” On Thursday’s call, Schubert said NOM had raised a little more than $10 million and that marriage equality supporters had spent about $33 million.

“We’ve got to attract the support of economic conservatives, who are primarily interested in issues other than marriage, and have them see how it’s important that we operate as a coalition, as our opponents do,” Schubert said. “We’ve got to take their model and apply it to ourselves. We’ve got to do a better job at raising major gifts; we’ve got to do a better job at raising smaller-dollar gifts.”

Brown agreed that the conservatives focused too closely on economic issues during this election. He called out political strategist Karl Rove, whose Crossroads groups were reportedly the largest outside spending organizations of the 2012 election.

“I think that the Republican Party in general was sold a false bill of goods this election, and the notion that we should only talk about economic issues gained the day,” Brown said. “This was really sort of Karl Rove’s strategy. There was hundreds of millions of dollars raised for outside groups, and they wanted everyone to stay on message on jobs. … Clearly it was a mistake, because it didn’t work.”

Listen to the audio

Brown also said NOM wants to keep attacking, through advertising, conservatives that come out in support of same-sex marriage, like the group did with Republican state senators from New York who voted to legalize same-sex marriage in 2011.

“If anything comes out of this election, we need to have what Rove had, which is the ability to have a super PAC-like structure, where there is money that is being used as a help, a sort of carrot, and that there are also sticks,” he said.

Brown also said that voter turnout among NOM’s constituency was low.

“The other side … their get-out-the-vote machine — Obama, and the Democratic Party — was just unbelievable for an election of this type,” he said. “And our people did stay at home. There was actually less Evangelical voters in many of these states. … It was an absolute disaster for us.”

‘We are sort of a baby organization’

NOM has long been criticized for portraying itself as a grassroots organization when so much of its major financial support has come from a few wealthy donors and conservative foundations.

But to the group’s supporters, Brown and Schubert talked about the need for more genuine grassroots support.

“We think that we need to look closely at how we organize at the grassroots level.” Schubert said. “We have a lot of superficial support, particularly in the Protestant community, but we’ve had a very difficult time in operationalizing that support into actual grassroots activities, getting people walking precincts, making phone calls, doing the day-to-day hard work of being grassroots allies for us.”

Brown said the organization is now trying to figure out ways to attract more grassroots supporters.

“Just looking at the battlefield, we are not the Human Rights Campaign,” he said. “They’ve got 40 million dollars; they’ve got multiple grassroots directors. We are sort of a baby organization that’s had to grow very quickly, and we are going to be focusing a lot more on the grassroots.”

 

This article and the accompanying image originally appeared at The American Independent and are gratefully republished here by permission.

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‘You Don’t Care’: Gay Congressman Blasts Defense Secretary Over LGBTQ Troops

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U.S. Rep. Eric Sorensen, a Democrat and the first openly gay member of Congress from Illinois, delivered strong criticism of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, accusing the embattled Pentagon chief of not caring about LGBTQ service members, and fostering an environment where LGBTQ people do not want to join the military. He also brought up the planned renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk, which the Secretary reportedly ordered to intentionally coincide with LGBTQ Pride Month.

Congressman Sorensen told Secretary Hegseth that Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California, who was assassinated in 1978, served “courageously,” but was forced to resign from the Navy because he was gay.

“You see,” Congressman Sorensen said, “as a kid, all I wanted to be was the weatherman on TV. You know, I learned that I could have gone into the Army or the Navy to learn meteorology. But someone like me was not allowed. They didn’t want someone like me, Mr. Secretary.”

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“There wasn’t anything that I could do to change myself, or the way that my nation thought of me. And so I want to keep this very simple. Do you believe that Harvey Milk is a veteran who deserves his country’s thanks?”

Hegseth attempted to dodge the question.

“Sir, the decision to rename the ship was—” Hegseth began.

“I’m just asking, do you believe that Harvey Milk is a veteran who deserves his country’s thanks? Yes or no,” Sorensen pressed.

“If his service was deemed honorable, yes,” the Secretary replied.

“I disagree with your leadership,” Sorensen said, “because I believe that every veteran deserves our thanks. We all walk in the footsteps of leaders before us, and you may not find the value in the fact that many of those people are women, with different skin colors, different backgrounds, different talents, immigrants, gay, straight, transgender, disabled.”

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“You may want to change it, but you can’t. Because the America that you and I both serve is a place where everyone has the ability—or should have the ability—to grow up and be the hero their grandpa was. I wanted to do that when I was a kid.”

“We’re going back to that time,” the congressman warned. “Gay kids like me, they don’t want to go into the Army. They don’t want to go into the Navy, because you don’t care for them. It’s happening all over our country.”

“My grandpa taught me never to judge the value of a veteran’s service. And I hope, Mr. Secretary, you learn to do the same in your capacity, and you can find it in your heart, to make that part of your process.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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‘Coup’: What DHS Secretary’s ‘Liberate’ Comment Means, According to Experts

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Before her protective squad forcibly removed, detained, and handcuffed a sitting U.S. Senator asking a question at her Los Angeles press conference, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem delivered remarks that legal and political experts warn are explosive.

“We are not going away,” Secretary Noem vowed, regarding herself and her Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, other DHS operatives, and the U.S. Military, all of whom she promised would “continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city.”

“We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country here,” she declared, referring to Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Experts are once again sounding the alarm.

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“I think the governor and mayor of Los Angeles are right,” declared U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) on MSNBC on Thursday night. “I think they’re testing out their ability to essentially commandeer National Guards throughout the country, and use them for their own purposes.”

“One thing that got lost in the horrendous treatment of Alex Padilla today,” Schiff continued, “was what Kristi Noem said at that press conference in saying that it was necessary to have these troops there to ‘liberate’ the city from the socialists. That’s the kind of rhetoric the administration is using.”

He went on to say that “the fact that they would abuse the military that way and justify it that way is unconscionable.”

Other critics weighed in as well.

Quoting Secretary Noem’s remarks, Harvard University Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe, a top constitutional law scholar, wrote: “Using military force to displace a democratically elected state government is called a coup.”

Former prosecutor and former Hill staffer Stephen Rodio remarked, “Trump’s regime is going to liberate us from the people that we elected to represent us.”

“Be clear on what she’s saying here,” wrote podcaster Joe Walsh, a former GOP Tea Party Congressman and now a Democrat and political commentator. “She’s saying that Trump is going to use the U.S. military to overthrow both the duly elected Mayor of Los Angeles & the Governor of California. I understand she’s not very bright, but, in essence, she’s saying the federal government has declared war on California.”

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“Quiet Part Out Loud?” asked U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). “Sounds a lot like she’s saying they’re there to liberate the city from its elected government.

Lincoln Project senior advisor Stuart Stevens also quoted Noem’s remarks, then wrote: “That’s a statement of intent of a coup, to ‘liberate’ a state from legally elected officials. Then armed men tackle and shackle one of those leaders. Nothing about we are here to arrest violent offenders and support law enforcement.”

“The declared purpose is to undo the choice of voters. Nothing like this has ever happened in modern America except the insurrection of Jan. 6th, which Noem supported, including her support for pardoning those who assaulted law enforcement.”

“Greeted as liberators, you say?” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Alex Ward, appearing to echo former Bush 43 Vice President Dick Cheney’s fated 2003 Iraq War claim.

“Do the decent thing and resign, Noem,” urged former U.S, Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH). “The world is watching.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Not Today Hegseth’: Dem Slams Defense Secretary as ‘Unfit to Lead’ in Fiery Exchange

 

Image via Reuters

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In Reversal, Trump Uses Term Tied to Ethnic Cleansing Amid Renewed Mass Deportation Demand

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Facing backlash from his base over an announced, possible exemption for undocumented immigrants working in agriculture and hospitality, President Donald Trump has entirely reversed course, now calling for the mass “remigration” of all undocumented individuals. The term “remigration” is closely associated with ethnic cleansing and far-right European movements, including the neo-fascist political party backed by both Trump and his vice president.

In a wild rant steeped in fascist and ethnonationalist rhetoric, Trump baselessly attacked the Biden administration and characterized all undocumented immigrants as takers costing the country billions—despite the fact that the undocumented population is a net economic positive for the United States.

“The Biden Administration and Governor Newscum,” Trump declared Tuesday evening—using his derogatory nickname for California Governor Gavin Newsom—“flooded America with 21 Million Illegal Aliens, destroying Schools, Hospitals and Communities, and consuming untold Billions of Dollars in Free Welfare.”

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These claims are not supported by evidence.

“All of them have to go home, as do countless other Illegals and Criminals, who will turn us into a bankrupt Third World Nation. America was invaded and occupied. I am reversing the Invasion. It’s called Remigration. Our courageous ICE Officers, who are daily being subjected to doxxing and murder threats, are HEROES. We will always have their back as they carry out this noble mission. America will be for Americans again!”

Just one day earlier, Trump had declared that undocumented immigrants working on farms, in agriculture, the hotel and entertainment industries are “very good, long time workers,” who are “almost impossible to replace.”

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Changes are coming!” he vowed.

“Our farmers,” Trump also said Thursday at a press conference, according to The New York Times, “are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years.”

“They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be, you know, great. And we’re going to have to do something about that. We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have maybe what they’re supposed to have, maybe not.”

“We can’t do that to our farmers and leisure, too, hotels,” he said, suggesting an executive order was in the works. “We’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”

All that appears to have been a blip.

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Image via Reuters

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