Ever notice how uniform the websites of “local” anti-marriage equality organizations are? Below are screen shots from currently-active anti-marriage equality organizations from the far-flung states of North Carolina, Minnesota and Washington.

Here are just a few of the elements that these websites have in common:

  • A stock photo depicting a white heterosexual couple with a boy and a girl.
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  • A silhouette of a heterosexual couple holding hands with a boy and a girl.
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  • The slogan “One Man. One Woman”
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  • Menu bar with the first three options “Home”, “Why Marriage Matters” and “The Threat to Marriage”, in that order.
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    The “Why Marriage Matters” pages are identical on the three websites (NC, MN & WA). With the exception of some added state-specific verbiage, each website contains the same 1,300-word essay including the same reference to discredited “scholar” David Blankenhorn.

    Similarly, each organization’s copy of the “The Threat to Marriage” page contains the same 780-word essay after a brief state-specific introduction (NC, MN & WA). A major feature of this essay is a 7-point list purporting to list examples of how “Those who do not agree with this new definition of marriage…will be punished for their beliefs,” which actually is a complaint about state anti-discrimination laws, not marriage equality laws.

    These websites are uniform because they all have the same shadowy puppet master, National Organization for Marriage (NOM). NOM is a Washington, D.C.-based organization that travels from state to state, delivering the same bag of anti-gay tricks and laundered cash. Although NOM is careful to install locals in positions of leadership in the state-level organizations to maintain a homespun facade, the reality is that state-level organizations like Vote For Marriage NC, Minnesota For Marriage and Preserve Marriage Washington are projects of K Street‘s NOM.

    “They will be involved. They will be in the leadership. They’ve been involved in other states,” Preserve Marriage Washington’s local figurehead Joseph Backholm said of NOM.