NOM mis-uses MLK’s message in new anti-marriage ad
September 24, 2010
During the Summer for Marriage Tour, Freedom to Marry and other organizations in Courage Campaign, GetEQUAL and dozens of state groups poked holes in NOM's anti-gay rhetoric. Even then, we didn't think NOM would stoop to twisting Dr. Martin Luther King's message of inclusiveness to justify their anti-gay antics. But they have.
That ad is running in Minnesota where NOM is supporting anti-equality gubernatorial candidate and where they are trying to put on the ballot an amendment that would ban the freedom to marry.
There’s one problem with the National Organization for Marriage’s pro-Tom Emmer ad that invokes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message of equality and tolerance to oppose gay marriage: According to his late widow, King supported gay equality.
The TV ad, created with the Minnesota Family Council, uses some tricky rhetoric, equating the right to vote in elections — presumably a reference to the Civil Rights Act, which gave African Americans that right in 1964, four decades after white women got the right — to the right to vote on constitutional amendments, like ones supported by NOM and MFC that would ban same-sex unions. It uses the term “civil rights” — a term some have used for the right of gays and lesbians to legally marry — in a debate that has long talked referred to “civil unions.” And it upends rhetoric used by many marriage equality advocates, who liken the prohibition against same-sex marriage to segregation-era laws that barred whites from marrying blacks.
With imagery of King and civil rights rallies in the ’60s superimposed on the U.S. Constitution, the ad slyly suggests that those promoting marriage rights for LGBT people are somehow in opposition to King’s values.
NOM clearly is grasping for straws as we see the second national poll showing a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples. We can continue to counter NOM's distortions and to build support for marriage by talking to friends, family, and co-workers about why we support the marriage for all loving and committed couples.