Maggie Gallagher: Prop 8 Campaign Ads Were ‘Not-Very-Cruel’

Maggie Gallagher, the co-founder and former Chairman of the National Organization For Marriage, is taking issue with the reminders some marriage equality supporters have been making recently about just how incredibly ugly the 2008 Yes On 8 campaign that fueled the passage of Prop 8 in California was. Gallagher’s NOM in previously-sealed court documents claimed to have been “the largest single contributor to the Prop 8 campaign.”

Writing about the resignation of Brendan Eich as Mozilla‘s CEO, Gallagher took particular umbrage with Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern, who last week published videos of the campaign to pass Prop 8.

In a meaningless act of self-defense (though, sadly, not actual shame,) Gallagher writes that the “actual ads produced by the Prop 8 campaign were apparently not cruel enough, so Stern mixes one not-very-cruel ad from that campaign (the one featuring a Pepperdine professor on the religious-liberty consequences of gay marriage) with a spate of YouTube videos that were not produced by the Prop 8 campaign and never aired on TV.” [Bolding ours]

Stern writes, “it’s easy to forget the vicious tactics of the pro-Prop 8 campaign. Or, I should say, it’s easy to forget them if you’re not gay—because almost every gay person I know remembers the passage of Prop 8 as the most traumatic and degrading anti-gay event in recent American history.”

Here’s the ad by the Yes on 8 campaign Gallagher’s referring to:

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

Meanwhile, over 800 ads — the vast majority supporting Prop 8 — managed to make their way to YouTube in 2008. Voters likely did not distinguish these videos as being from the Yes On 8 campaign or not. They merely ingested hundreds, maybe thousands of minutes of anti-gay hate and outright lies, and then voted their “conscience.”

Yes On 8 was a campaign of ProtectMarriage.com.

Here are some more of their “not-very-cruel” ads. You be the judge.

//www.youtube.com/embed/7352ZVMKBQM

//www.youtube.com/embed/l61Pd5_jHQw

//www.youtube.com/embed/4kKn5LNhNto

//www.youtube.com/embed/3YRQZwNfQ0o

Meanwhile, as the head of NOM, it must be noted that Gallagher presided over the infamous (and highly-mocked) 2009 “gathering storm” ad:

//www.youtube.com/embed/xGi2r-M_gQ8

 

Hat tip: PapalPutz