The Human Rights Campaign last week obtained copies of the National Organization for Marriage’s confidential strategy documents, which disclosed the conservative organization’s plan to use despicable race-baiting tactics in its fight against marriage equality across our country. Specifically, the organization plans to drive a wedge between gays and blacks by convincing them to fight over the “civil rights” inherent in the fight for marriage equality, and manipulate Hispanics by making “support for marriage” (for everyone but same-sex couples) an important symbol of the Latino identity.
But what these conservatives fail to understand is that the members of all of these communities—black, Latino, gay and transgender men and women—know that fighting discrimination by drawing upon each other’s experiences is powerfully inspirational. While the National Organization for Marriage wants to pit them against one another and exploit often exaggerated divisions, this leak inadvertently highlights the collaboration that already exists between these communities as well as the broad support from those in our society who are against bigotry, prejudice, and inequity.
A closer look at the organization’s hateful strategy exposes its dangerously manipulative game for what it is—race-baiting prejudice at its worst for an organization that claims a moral high ground in the debate over marriage equality.
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