The New York Times‘ editorial board today suggested the recently unsealed memos from NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, refute their designation as a “social welfare organization” and suggest NOM is committing fraud “to avoid federal disclosure.” The Times also mentioned Mitt Romney by name, wondering why he, and other Republican politicians who support NOM have not denounced their tactics of racial division, and, as The New Civil Rights Movement reported last week, point to John Boehner’s appointing NOM co-founder Robert P. George to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
“When a light is shined into the dark corners of American politics, it’s never pleasant to see what scurries away,” the Times piece, “Divide And Discriminate,” begins.
“The group uses its designation as a social welfare organization to avoid federal disclosure, but the memos dispel any notion that the claim has any legitimacy. National Organization for Marriage is a political group, through and through,” the Times states:
These are not the musings of a marginalized group. The day after the memos became public, National Organization for Marriage’s co-founder and chairman emeritus, Robert George, was appointed by John Boehner, the Republican House speaker, to a United States commission focused on addressing religious intolerance and extremism around the globe.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have publicly aligned themselves with the group and signed its pledge to work aggressively from the White House against same-sex marriage.
Now that the group’s poisonous political approach is out in the open, Mr. Romney and the others should be racing to make clear their disapproval.
We detect no stampede.
Nor will we.
If NOM’s very creation as a “social welfare organization” is illegitimate, then how can anything that comes from it be legitimate? Fruit of the poisoned tree, to quote a phrase.
Every politician who signed NOM’s marriage pledge should hold a public burning of the document and denounce NOM for the un-American, racially-divisive, anti-gay, hate-mongering organization it is.