April 19, 2009

Frank Rich: The Bigots’ Last Hurrah

It is justice, not a storm, that is gathering. Only those who have spread the poisons of bigotry and fear have any reason to be afraid.
— Frank Rich

Backstory & Related:

Hugo Schwyzer Explains Maggie Gallagher and the “Increased Franticness of the Right”
Lavender Newswire, April 1, 2009

NOM Makes Super Scary Anti-Marriage Video
Gaytheist Agenda, April 9, 2009

NOM Gets Taken to Task
Gaytheist Agenda, April 10, 2009

Video: D.U.N.G.
Lavender Newswire, April 10, 2009

Video: Night of the Gathering GayStorm… Uh, Waitasec…
Lavender Newswire, April 11, 2009

NOM Gets Rachel Maddow Clip Yanked from YouTube
Lavender Newswire, April 14, 2009

Now, enjoy Frank Rich’s most excellent column in yesterday’s NYT:

The Bigots’ Last Hurrah

What would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube under the title “Gathering Storm”: a 60-second ad presenting homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism. …

Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”

Yet easy to mock as “Gathering Storm” may be, it nonetheless bookmarks a historic turning point in the demise of America’s anti-gay movement.

What gives the ad its symbolic significance is not just that it’s idiotic but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead.

“Gathering Storm” was produced and broadcast — for a claimed $1.5 million — by an outfit called the National Organization for Marriage. This “national organization,” formed in 2007, is a fund-raising and propaganda-spewing Web site fronted by the right-wing Princeton University professor Robert George and the columnist Maggie Gallagher, who was famously caught receiving taxpayers’ money to promote Bush administration “marriage initiatives.” Until last month, half of the six board members (including George) had some past or present affiliation with Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. (One of them, the son of one of the 12 apostles in the Mormon church hierarchy, recently stepped down.)

Even the anti-Obama “tea parties” flogged by Fox News last week had wider genuine grass-roots support than this so-called national organization. Beyond Princeton, most straight citizens merely shrugged as gay families celebrated in Iowa and Vermont. There was no mass backlash. At ABC and CBS, the Vermont headlines didn’t even make the evening news. …

As the polls attest, the majority of Americans who support civil unions for gay couples has been steadily growing. Younger voters are fine with marriage. Generational changeover will seal the deal. Crunching all the numbers, the poll maven Nate Silver sees same-sex marriage achieving majority support “at some point in the 2010s.” …

More crunchy goodness — including mentions of the latest hysteria from Moribund Mormon Glenn Beck, the Rick Warren-like one-eighty of “Dr.” Laura “Biological Error” Schlessinger, and the very fine takedown of Miss Maggie by the New York Post’s “invariably witty and invariably conservative writer” Kyle Smith — and much more, as well as one of the best closing paragraphs, ever, at the link.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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