NOM And Queers Agree: We Want More Brown People In Our Photos!

Now that National Organization for Marriage defector Louis Marinelli has left NOM’s bigotry bus, he’s revealing their tricks of the trade; namely, the anti-gay org likes getting as many brown people into rally photographs as possible so they can show how people of every color hate same-sex marriage! But is this racial manipulation or just good marketing?

According to Marinelli, Maggie Gallagher and NOM’s other organizers always picked out photographs from their summer hate tour showing the most black people to include in their newsletters and website. Perhaps NOM did this to drive a deeper wedge between the LGBT and the African-American communities piggybacking on the zombie meme that blacks overwhelmingly voted for Proposition 8. Of course, studies have shown that the vote broke down much more along lines of age, party affiliation, and church attendance. But the more NOM can foster antipathy between these groups, the more divided the electorate remains.

The strategy also brings to mind Get Equal’s racial spinoff, Get Equal Now a currently inactive group originally dedicated to addressing racism and racial representation in gay media. Anyone watching LOGO programming or even Queerty can see that caucasians get a majority of the coverage. But does that make anyone attempting to get more color on the canvass a racial panderer or a spin artist? Or does it just make them smart marketers?

Whether queer or anti-queer, if your side presents itself as racially monochromatic it will hardly endear you to a larger audience. Diversity gets clicks, so Marinelli’s revelation seems less scandalous and more like common sense. However, he does warn that it’s a tactic NOM will likely use again this month when they attend New York Democrat State Senator Ruben Diaz’s 40-block long anti-gay anti-equality march in the Bronx, an event he’s graciously scheduled over the Manhattan AIDS Walk—what a guy!

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