Anti-Same-Sex Marriage Group’s Racial Wedge Strategy Revealed

The blogosphere is abuzz with the story that broke last night, when the Human Rights Campaign released internal memos from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the nation's largest and most visible anti-same sex-marriage group, calling for the use of a racial wedge strategy to fight campaigns for marriage equality.

“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks -- two key Democratic constituencies,” one of the NOM memos says.

“The documents, marked “confidential,” were unsealed yesterday afternoon in Maine by court order, as part of that state’s ongoing ethics investigation into NOM’s campaign finances.

The memo spells out specific steps to enact, including:

Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots…”

Here is an excerpt on NOM’s Hispanic strategy:

"The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity - a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation."

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