NORTHERN EXTREMES

NOM Chooses Disgraced Sportscaster Damian Goddard As Their Poster Boy

The National Organization for Marriage has picked its next “traditional marriage defender,” fired for expressing beliefs that gays deserve second-class citizenship. His name is Damian Goddard, he was a Canadian sportscaster and NOM probably chose him because they couldn’t find an American dumb enough to lose their job via Twitter.

When New York Rangers hockey player made a video in support of marriage equality, Todd Reynolds the vice president of Canadian hockey management group Uptown Sports sent out a flurry of tweets calling Avery’s support “misguided,” marriage equality “wrong” and his beliefs “just my personal viewpoint” adding, “I do not hate anyone.”

Canadian sportscaster Damian Goddard says the “awful, hateful things” tweeted in response to Reynolds made him feel compelled to help. And so in May he tweeted, “I completely and whole-heartedly support Todd Reynolds and his support for the traditional and true meaning of marriage.” Very soon after, the broadcast company where he worked tweeted, “Today’s tweet from Damian Goddard does not reflect the views of Rogers Sportsnet.” And the next day they fired him, saying “it had become clear that [Goddard] is not the right fit for our organization.”

In NOM’s video (the same kind that they made for Jerry “gays make me vomit” Buell and Frank “gays are pedophiliac terrorists” Turek), Goddard says that he filed a Human Rights complaint against his employer because, “If we do not do anything or say anything or put pressure on our government leaders to make sure that this does not happen again, if we don’t do that it’s going to get worse.”

So, NOM is worried about Canadian employment practices now? Are they worried that Canada will export marriage equality over to the United States? Are they completely clueless that tweeting against marriage equality is like publicly advocating Jim Crow laws? If legalizing marriage equality will create many more cases like Damian Goddard, does NOM have hundreds of others who have lost their jobs just for “defending traditional marriage”?

The answer to all these questions is no. Because NOM know there’s no connection between marriage equality and what happened to Goddard. The high-profile TV personality was fired for making a negative political statement against his employer’s wishes, period. They didn’t want their company represented by a man who just told tens of thousands of viewers that he considers their marriages false, dishonest and wrong. Keeping him just would have been bad business, plain and simple.

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