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NOM’s ‘Dirty Money’ And Dirty Tactics Revealed In Shocking New Exposé

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NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, is accused of skirting campaign finance laws, money-laundering, and being funded by literally a handful of major donors, according to a new, extensive, and shocking exposé by E.J. Graff at The Advocate. In “Dirty Money,” Graff points to NOM’s increasingly harsher rhetoric, greater willingness to attack homosexuality and LGBT people, totuting its ability to protect donors’ identities, and state-by-state lawsuits attempting to overturn financial disclosure laws.

“In internal documents (which came to light because of a lawsuit that NOM brought against campaign finance disclosure, NOM v. McKee), NOM wrote, ‘One key advantage we now have is the capacity to protect the identity of our donors,’” Graff reports.

“NOM puts its hundreds of thousands of dollars into state campaigns in ways that protect its donors from being identified,” Graff writes:

Its campaign finance philosophy is that the best defense is a good offense: With the help of James Bopp, the lawyer who brought the notorious Citizens United lawsuit to the Supreme Court, NOM has repeatedly launched lawsuits arguing that states’ campaign reporting laws are unconstitutional efforts to chill free speech, even though it has just as repeatedly lost.

Watching NOM closely is Fred Karger, a gay California Republican who believes that NOM is a secret cabal actively conspiring to undermine campaign finance laws. Karger writes to state election commissions to convince them of the same. At Karger’s prompting, California, Maine, and Minnesota are investigating NOM’s campaign finance tactics.

Each year, according to NOM’s tax filings, two or three donors give NOM between $1 million and $3.5 million apiece; another two or three give between $100,000 and $750,000; and 10 or so others give between $5,000 and $95,000. In 2009 the top five donors made up three fourths of NOM’s budget; in 2010 the top two donors gave two thirds of the year’s total donations; and in 2011 the top two donors gave three fourths of NOM’s total income. But those funders’ identities are a mystery. Their names are redacted on NOM’s federal tax returns. Under federal campaign laws, none of those names have to be disclosed.

But if, as Karger alleges, those donors are actually using NOM as a way to contribute to state issue campaigns, that would be illegal. The states in which NOM runs campaigns (via locally registered groups) require donors to publicly disclose their names and addresses and sometimes their employers. The allegation is that NOM establishes state campaign organizations against marriage equality as pass-through groups, with local partners that do little. NOM solicits major donations from its large contributors for these campaigns and donates to the local fights so that NOM, not the individual, will be listed as the donor. If true, that’s fraud and “financial structuring,” the technical term for money laundering. (Calls to the four state organizations asking for comment were not returned.)

And then there’s the matter of just how unhinged and on-edge NOM president Brian Brown appears:

When asked why so many more people were willing to be listed as donors to the marriage equality campaigns than to the other side, Brown was impatient and exploded with anger at how LGBT extremists — condoned, in his view, by the marriage equality movement at large — attacked his side with “a campaign of intimidation, hatred, and attacking donors.” Gay extremists, he said, are attempting to “punish people…for exercising their First Amendment rights to speak up and stand for what they believe in, to donate to what they believe in…. They want to hurt people. They want to hurt people! Put that in the article! They want to hurt people!”

When questioned on this, Brown became ever more emphatic. “I don’t think you understand the reality that donors on our side get death threats, I don’t think you understand the reality that it’s not a joke when a guy [Floyd Lee Corkins] comes into the Family Research Council with a gun, I don’t think you understand that creating an environment in which it’s OK to demean human beings because of their views is wrong. I can respect people and I support their constitutional right to give and to support their position to advance gay marriage. What we are asking for is the same respect. And at this point we are not getting it.”

And then comes the truth that NOM is really not willing to publicly promote, but that sits at the heart of the anti-gay organization:

The head of NOM’s nonprofit educational arm, the Ruth Institute, Jennifer Roback Morse, promotes her stance with a prominent article headlined “Why Opposing the Gay Lobby Is Not Antigay.”

However, since Maggie Gallagher ceased being NOM’s board chair, the Ruth Institute has skated over the edge of being actively antigay. Last year Carlos Maza of Equality Matters attended the Ruth Institute’s annual training program for “emerging leaders” in how to talk about marriage and LGBT issues. He writes, “What I saw at the conference — selling a book that labels gay people as pedophiles worthy of death, distributing Bible quotes to college students similarly calling for gays to be killed, hosting entire speeches devoted to condemning gays and lesbians as deviant sinners — represented a brand of antigay extremism that I assumed even NOM would have shied away from.” He listened to a lecture from antigay author Robert A.J. Gagnon announcing that homosexuality was “self-degrading,” inflicts “measurable harm,” is unhealthy, emotionally dangerous, unacceptable to God, and leads to depression, substance abuse, and disease. The weekend, Maza writes, taught “that gays and lesbians — including me — are unstable, dangerous, and unworthy of raising their own families.” The reading list included materials saying that lesbians and gay men are in a “rebellion against God,” that our relationships are inherently “unstable, unhealthy, and promiscuous,” and relying on such discredited authors as George Gilder and Paul Cameron.

Graff notes an important point, one with which we agree: since Gallagher’s supposed resignation, NOM has become increasingly hate-filled and “religious” — and it seems clear Brian Brown is, if not the cause, at the very least the messenger.

Graff’s article in The Advocate is important and one that many need to read. For all those who think this is a simple case of differences of opinion in the culture wars, Graff proves it’s anything but.

 

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Republicans Are Using a Secret Super PAC to Pour $1 Million Into Democratic Primaries

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13 hours ago

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May 12, 2026

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Super PACs with ties to Republicans are spending money to promote weaker, left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries, in an apparent effort to help Republicans retain control of the House, The New York Times reports.

“They’re going into Democratic primaries and literally trying to boost the most extreme candidates and oppose the Blue Dog-endorsed candidates that, if they win, are going to beat the Republicans in the general,” U.S. Rep. Adam Gray (D-CA) said in an interview with the Times. The Blue Dogs are more centrist Democrats.

One “new mystery super PAC with ties to Republicans has spent more than $1 million meddling in at least three Democratic congressional primaries to select preferred opponents,” the Times reports. That group is spending money to promote “a left-wing sex therapist in Texas who has been accused of bigotry and antisemitism by leaders in both parties.”

It is also running ads in Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania and Nebraska.

In some of these races the spending is an effort to disrupt Democratic candidates “who are part of the Democratic Party’s ‘red to blue’ program, a special designation for top recruits in key races that could determine control of the House.”

READ MORE: Republicans Moving to Give Trump Something He’s Wanted Since 2019

The Times calls these “interventions in the opposing party’s primaries,” and reports that they are “apparently to elevate Democrats viewed as weaker candidates,” suggesting that “the race for control of the House has entered an intensive new phase in which both parties are vying for every imaginable edge.”

“Some Republicans privately believe the party’s best chance to hold power this year is to cast Democrats as extremists,” the Times reports.

Another super PAC formally aligned with Republicans is promoting a progressive Democrat in California.

Maureen Galindo is running for a Democratic seat from Texas. Party leaders are backing Johnny Garcia, who has worked in the local sheriff’s office. Despite having raised less than $10,000, Galindo finished first in the primary, advancing to a May runoff.

“In a text message,” the Times reports, “Ms. Galindo suggested the money for the mailer had come from ‘a billionaire zionist who made the pac to sabotage candidates,’ using the type of language that has previously prompted charges of antisemitism, including from Senator Jacky Rosen, Democrat of Nevada, and Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who called her ‘openly bigoted.'”

Galindo told the Times, “Dems and Republicans uniting against me in the same week with the same message is evidence that theyre [sic] working together for the zionist billionaires that control our government and tax money.”

There are more races that Democratic strategists expect Republicans to meddle in, including in California, Michigan and Colorado.

READ MORE: ‘Bad All Around’: Republicans Privately Fear Backing Trump Request Sends Tone-Deaf Message

 

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Fetterman Says He ‘Fully’ Understands Why a Pennsylvania Judge Left the Democratic Party

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14 hours ago

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May 12, 2026

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A longtime Pennsylvania judge who ran as a Democrat is dropping his affiliation with the Democratic Party over what he sees as antisemitism, and U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) is weighing in.

Justice David Wecht “said in a statement he is switching his party affiliation to independent due to an ‘acquiescence to Jew-hatred’ becoming ‘disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,'” Politico reported.

“I can no longer abide this. So, I won’t,” said Wecht, who once served as vice chair of the state Democratic Party. “I am no longer registered within any political party.”

Judge Wecht said that antisemitism used to be found more often on the far right, but since the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018, he said, “that same hatred has grown on the left.”

“Increasingly, it has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. It is the duty of all good people to fight this virus, and to do so before it is too late,” he said.

READ MORE: Republicans Moving to Give Trump Something He’s Wanted Since 2019

Lamenting that the Democratic Party has “changed,” Wecht said that “hateful anti-Jewish invective and actions are minimized, ignored, and even coddled.”

Senator Fetterman, whose own intention to stay affiliated with the Democratic Party has been questioned, knows Judge Wecht, according to Fox News.

“I know David and his legendary father, Cyril,” Fetterman wrote in a post on X. “As I’ve affirmed, I’m not changing my party — but I fully understand David’s personal choice.”

Fetterman also appeared to agree with Wecht, saying that the “Democratic Party must confront its own rising antisemitism problem.”

Pittsburgh’s NPR station WESA reports that Fetterman, “like Wecht a Pennsylvania Democrat, has also criticized the party, particularly in recent days as Democrats in Maine seem all but certain to nominate Graham Platner, who had a Nazi tattoo, as their candidate to challenge Republican Susan Collins for her Senate seat.”

READ MORE: ‘Bad All Around’: Republicans Privately Fear Backing Trump Request Sends Tone-Deaf Message

 

Image via Reuters 

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America’s ‘Winner-Take-Everything’ War Has Already Begun: Columnist

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16 hours ago

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May 12, 2026

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Republican efforts to wipe Democrats off the face of their states’ congressional maps — the redistricting wars — are not the end of a “winner-take-everything” political “cold civil war,” but merely the beginning, argues Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark.

President Donald Trump started the redistricting war when he demanded Texas redistrict mid-decade to gain five Republican seats in the House of Representatives. GOP-led states have followed suit, but in some, like America just saw in Louisiana, Republicans are now pushing to send only Republicans to the House. They are redrawing their maps to get rid of districts that voted for Democrats.

Pointing to journalists and analysts, Last argues that that will become a problem some day for Republican states that have no Democratic members of Congress. Because one day there will be a Democrat in the White House, and it will be disadvantageous for there to be no Democrats for those red states to help get their voice out to the new administration.

Last also notes that in this “winner-take-everything” political world that America may be entering, what President Joe Biden did for red states proved to be unhelpful for Democrats, and helped voters push him out.

READ MORE: Republicans Moving to Give Trump Something He’s Wanted Since 2019

“Joe Biden was, famously, a president for all of America,” Last writes. “He pumped hundreds of billions of dollars in federal credits and investments into red states. Biden didn’t just give red states their fair share—he gave them much more.”

Biden’s theory, Last argues, was that “the way to leach the poison of Trumpism out of America was to forgive Republicans and shower them with goodies to prove that he was on their side, too.”

“The notion was that, in exchange, they would reward him politically, or at least be less hostile in their overall political outlook.”

That did not work.

“Instead of conveying to Republicans that the cycle of recriminations could be broken, Biden inadvertently conveyed a different message: That Democrats did not believe in recriminations,” he writes. In other words, the message was that for all of the GOP’s bad faith actions, there would be no political price to pay.

“What message would it send to Republicans if, in 2029, President Raphael Warnock passed an infrastructure package that, just to pick an example, shoveled money for battery factories into Tennessee, after Tennessee gerrymandered its lone Democratic district out of existence?” he posits.

“Democratic deterrence didn’t work,” Last writes.

He points to Democratic states that moved to redistrict after Texas, and notes that the two sides were coming up about even.

But then, Florida moved to redistrict, with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis “doing an end run around the law” to get more GOP seats.

And then, the Supreme Court “rushed to insert itself into the fight by pushing out the Callais decision in time for Southern states to get rid of a bunch of black congressional districts.”

At this point, for Democrats to take back majority control of the House, they will need to “win the national popular vote by more than 4 percentage points.”

This status quo, says Last, is “not sustainable.”

READ MORE: ‘Bad All Around’: Republicans Privately Fear Backing Trump Request Sends Tone-Deaf Message

 

Image: Public Domain by Architect of the Capitol via Flickr

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