HEY MR. POSTMAN!

Ten Mailers New York Should Use To Fight NOM And Win Marriage Equality

NOM and other anti-gay groups want people to equate marriage equality with an attack on religion, community values, and predation on children—but they certainly don’t have the market cornered on any of those, especially as society gets exposed to more calm, rational, and openly-gay TV characters and professional athletes.

We criticized the NYC pro-equality ads featuring two milquetoast lesbians as failing to meet the emotional pitch and engagement of their “queers will turn all kids and churches gay” ad. Well, this week NOM delivered totally predictable mailers with more of the same blather, but we thought, “Why not take off the kid gloves and aggressively respond with some of our own anti-NOM postcards turning their own words back on them?” Here they are:

First, a few quick disclaimers:

We are not professional designers, copywriters, or marriage equality advocates. We designed most of these quickly on Photoshop, wrote them quickly to give an idea of possible messaging, and used some statistics and dollar amounts as placeholders just to get the general strategic idea across. Let’s leave it to the experts to fill them in later.

We tried to focus on compelling emotional issues rather than get into too many potentially confusing specifics. We used angles taken directly from the 10 easy-to-answer yes/no questions we gave to NOM earlier this week (a letter they have still not had the guts or intellectual honesty to respond to or pose to their own members). If we can keep nailing these key messages such as the rights they want to deny committed adults and the lies they tell, we keep the issue simple and easy to understand.

Also, while any commenter can easily say, “These suck” or “They won’t work,” we’d rather hear what might work better—let’s build together, not just tear each other down.

Enjoy the show…

CELEBRITY CARD – A friend suggested we use beloved celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris in our ads to get American audiences to sympathize with denying rights to gays they know and love. But any actor can be written off as a “decadent, West-Coast, Hollywood, elite”, especially when you’ve played a coked-up womanizer on screen like NPH has.

On the flipside, athletes have relatively clean public records and a history of playing great American passtimes for our nation’s greatest teams, stadiums, and sports traditions. So it’s hard for anyone hate on such public heroes. We’re hoping that bigger sports stars will continue to come out to show just who NOM wants to discriminate against.

BAD MARRIAGE CARD – We can also point out the absurdity of anti-equality arguments by showing that NOM and other “protectors of marriage” don’t really care about the quality of marriage. You can be as horrible as your want, just as long as you’re not gay. That shows where their values really lay.

ADULT CARD – Truth is anti-equality groups want to punish thousands of great Americans just for being gay. It doesn’t matter how hard you work to make your community a better place, if you’re a homo they want you to be a second class citizen. The back of the card simply calls this out for what it is WRONG, HUMILIATING, and UNFAIR. We would’ve added HATEFUL, but there wasn’t enough room.

ADOPTION CARD – NOM uses the “gays harm children” angle a lot and they like to portray themselves as a loving Christian group. To turn this back on them, we need to emphasize that their policies would force taxpayers to spend millions just to keep children rotting in orphanages. It’s not an angle, it’s not spin—it’s a fact. Denying loving homes to needy children. How Christian is that?

EDITOR’S NOTE: Our original version of the “adoption card” showed a young Iraqi girl named Samar Hassan the instant she became an orphan resulting from her parents’ murder at a US checkpoint. We found the photo during a quick image search without initially knowing its backstory. Out of respect for Ms. Hassan and the horrors of war, we have decided to replace the image with the one above. While it does show a Mongolian orphan, we consider the image as a placeholder not too far a cry from the reality of some children stuck in New York state orphanages by NOM hateful wishes.

COUPLE CARD – To dismantle the villainous face of homosexual predation, we need to continue showing gay couples and then contrast those loving images with the hateful reality that NOM, the American Family Association, the Concerned Women for America and other anti-gay groups wants. They want gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and intersex couples to never raise kids, be able to care for loved ones in need, and basically die poor since we can’t transfer over pensions and social security. Putting it that bluntly is a shocking slap in the face to everyone.

CHILD CARD – Unfortunately, NOM works hard to convince people that gays are “icky.” Lots of voters may not know an LGBT person and so it’s not always a good idea to focus just on this bill affecting gays. Truth is, NOM and other anti-gay organizations would like to tell our children (young people who will one grow up to become adults) that they can expect a lower quality of life as second-class citizens just for being different. That’s not only hurtful to children, but telling adults to accept it is condescending to adults—who is NOM to treat American adults like children in a bid to take away freedom, rights, and quality of life from our neighbors and children?

RELIGION CARD – NOM and other anti-gay organizations like to paint marriage equality as an “attack on religion” but truth is that THEY want to take away the rights for gay-friendly churches to legally marry their own congregants. By showing images of faith leaders speaking in favor of love, fairness, and equality we not only say that marriage equality is a moral issue, it’s a civics issue too.

MONEY CARD – Some have said that Americans don’t give a crap about civil rights, they care about money. So let’s hot our opponents in the wallet and show New York business owners and community leaders just how much our entire state stands to gain if it begins welcoming loving couples to tie the knot here! The potential financial benefit is undeniably true as it will also encourage more workers and professionals to help make New York state even better.

LABELS CARD – A Joe.My.God. reader said that we wouldn’t accept discrimination against other minorities, so why should we accept it about hardworking members of our community? By putting a human face and some bio information about the people hurt by anti-equality measures, we take fire out of the anti-equality demonization. Plus, its important to show images of just how happy children are to have loving, caring parents.

HATE CARD – By printing the words our opponents use against us, we reveal to New Yorkers the hateful, bigoted slurs anti-equality organizations use to demonize their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members. NYC gay bashing victim Damian Furtch placed the image of himself after his bashing on the web for all to see. We use it here not to disrespect or sensationalize the image, but to show what happens to communities drenched in the hate of NOM, AFA’s Bryan Fischer, the Concerned Women for America and other anti-equality foes. Although this is a horrible design it really drives home the point that NOM’s hateful policies affect hundreds of thousands of people in your family, neighborhood, and place of work.

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