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As if in answer to my observation that it’s almost as if Washington’s Bishops own Preserve Marriage Washington, Washington State Catholic Conference (WSCC), which represents the Catholic Bishops of the State of Washington on issues of public policy, has posted the following comment on their “Preserve Marriage Washington” (PMW) web page. PMW is the campaign trying to roll back Washington’s new marriage equality law.
Preserve Marriage Washington is an entity created by the National Organization for Marriage to conduct the Referendum 74 campaign. Click here to request petitions.
The statement is repeated in “Questions & Answers regarding Referendum 74″ (pdf) which the Bishop of Yakima, Joseph J. Tyson, linked to today in a blog post.
Q. Who is organizing the Referendum 74 campaign?
A. Preserve Marriage Washington, an entity created by the National Organization for Marriage (www.nationformarriage.org), will conduct the referendum campaign.
This may just be a game of semantics since National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is widely believed to be a shell organization for the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Either way, NOM is playing a highly conspicuous role in the campaign to ban same-sex couples in Washington from access to civil marriage licenses, even going so far as to call for a national boycott against Washington-based Starbucks because Starbucks supports Washington’s marriage equality law.
A little something about the group that Washington’s bishops are collaborating with so closely: In state after state NOM pulls the same trick of ignoring state campaign finance laws, presumably in order to hide the identities of its few donors. Indications are that NOM may already be pulling this stunt in Washington state.
One thing is certain, despite NOM hiring Washington local Joseph Backholm to be PMW’s figurehead, PMW didn’t grow organically as a Washington grassroots organization. It was thrust upon the state by Washington D.C.-based NOM. Washington’s Roman Catholic bishops said so.
4 Comments
Bishops.
First of all, none of this should come as any surprise to the people of Washington. Yakima has always been conservatism central, what with the fundamentalists and old John Birchers. Most people in the state pretty much ignore Yakima as an outlyer. Secondly, trying to separate Washingtonians from their Starbucks and Seattles Best (owned by Starbucks) will be about as likely as Sarah Palin winning a Noble Prize. Coffee is not just part of a food group, it is at the top of the food pyramid here. From what I am hearing, most of the polls show this will not go anywhere at the polls even if voting civil rights were allowed, which I suspect will fail in the courts here as in California.
I am a former catholic.
It has been a a year since I decided to leave. I have to laugh now, because every time I read an article about anything the Catholic church/bishops says, I am always on the opposite side. It is great to be free and to be able to think for myself.
Too bad NOM didn’t ask its followers to boycott Microsoft, Apple, and Google instead. That would keep most of them off the Internet…