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Brian Brown, president of National Organization for Marriage
Remember the grand plan that Brian Brown unveiled last year to “reverse same-sex marriage in New York”? He probably hopes you don’t, because he can’t deliver on that bill of goods.
Brown is president of National Organization for Marriage, the K Street group behind the 2012 anti-marriage equality ballot campaigns in Washington, Minnesota, Maryland and Maine. In 2011 NOM failed to prevent passage of New York’s Marriage Equality Act.
Yesterday Brown blogged about National Organization for Marriage’s current effort to unseat four Republican New York state senators whose votes helped pass the Marriage Equality Act last year. His grand plan of 2011 has been whittled down to almost nothing in 2012.
A few months after NOM failed to kill New York’s marriage law, Brown raised eyebrows with his grand plan of expunging marriage equality from New York with an anti-gay state constitutional amendment. Phase 1 of his plan was to happen now, during the November, 2012 elections: “Elect pro-marriage majorities next November [2012] that will approve a marriage amendment in both the Assembly and Senate during the 2013 legislative session.”
At the time of his announcement of the plan, I explained why it was a rather tall order:
Recall that the Assembly passed the Marriage Equality Act by a vote of 80-63 and the Senate passed it by a vote of 33-29. To accomplish this mean-spirited plan, NOM would have to replace at least 18 pro-equality Assembly members and 3 pro-equality Senators (incumbents all) with anti-equality challengers, get a majority of both chambers to approve a proposed amendment, maintain the anti-equality majorities through another election, then get the majority of both chambers to vote anti-equality for a second time.
Then the question would go to the voters, who already overwhelmingly support marriage equality.
With his new, severely scaled back attack on New York’s pro-equality legislators, it would seem that reality has finally caught up with the grand schemer.
5 Comments
I really hope he can find something to be for and support. Such a more helpful approach….maybe like poor or sick children, tutoring immigrant youth, food kitchens. Probably lots of places where he can invest his time/energy/money and make a difference.
Thank heaven for small favors. However, the bigots have the biggest laugh, if not the last.
In every state in which the issue has been on the ballot, voters have chosen to amend their state constitutions to expressly ban recognition of same gender marriages.
In a generation, public opinion will change (I hope). Will those who support gay marriage be as zealous about changing state constitutions as the bigots have been?
One reason the bigots won is that they had more enthusiastic supporters, donors and voters than those of us who profess not to be bigots.
By the way what is government doing in people’s emotional relationships in the first place? It does not say who parties to a business contract may or may not be.
All that those amendment campaigns prove is that if you have a well-organized, well-funded scare campaign founded on lies and wild predictions, you can frighten enough voters to the polls to get your way. And all those amendments are vulnerable to challenge under the federal Constitution — if our side had the resources and organization that the bigots have, there would be challenges in every circuit, and we’d probably win — we have better lawyers.
And government is not doing anything in people’s emotional relationships — those don’t require a marriage license any more than making babies does. What the government is doing is granting the social recognition that underlies the value of marriage. Up to a couple hundred years ago, it was the village that did that — for most people, anyway: the wealthy got married “officially” because they had property to deal with, but most marriages were common law. Now the “village” is a few million people and most of us have property of some sort, so we have governments to handle that stuff.
Also, keep in mind the ‘will of the people’ that groups like the National Organization for Marriage like to whip out is a complete load of crap; it’s more like ‘the will of the slim majority of people that voted’.
Take, for example, North Carolina, during their last election where they voted in the marriage-ban amendment. They had… what, half their total eligible voter base show up to vote? And even then, the amendment barely passed with about 51% of the vote. So, basically, a quarter of the eligible voters (obviously the ones that were motivated to vote by these types of amendments in the first place) altered the state Constitution to affect everyone.
Frankly, this is why I personally wish Boies and Olson’s lawsuit gets to the Supreme Court and we can sweep away all of these stupid amendments… just like what happened with Loving V. Virginia. History being cyclical and all, of course…
Surely the lack of interest in voting by so many of our electorate plays an important role in the type of legislation that passes. But, just as important, the lack of the progressives ability to frame their position with authority and eloquence, to reach out and energize the voter, also has a major role in such poor choices being made by those who do actually vote.
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I seriously doubt that the failure of same sex marriage legislation to win through represents the views of a majority of Americans.