NOM, race baiting, and the effort to recruit dumb pretty people

By now you will have heard that as part of the Maine campaign finance investigation of NOM, internal documents have been released that expose a hyper-cynical plan to foment friction between gays and blacks, and to try to direct Latinos into rejecting LGBT rights on a cultural basis. You can read more at CBS, CNN and Salon. There's also a weird bit about recruiting pretty but cognitively challenged Hollywood people.

Here's a quote from NOM's documents (my emphases)

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party. Fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8 is key to raising the costs of pushing gay marriage to its advocates and persuading the movement’s allies that advocates are unacceptably overreaching on this issue.

Barry Deutsch writes:

NOM’s representatives often talk about the value of civil discourse, and in particular complain about the use of the word “bigot” and the hostility of Proposition 8 opponents. 

In light of these documents, I think we have to seriously doubt NOM’s sincerity. In fact, it’s impossible to believe that NOM has ever for a moment desired civil disagreement. NOM deliberately provokes lgbt people into anger, in order to denounce those who they succeed in provoking. I cannot imagine a clearer example of hypocrisy.... 

Did NOM ask, is a bunch of white folks provoking a fight between lgbt people (some of who are Black) and the Black community (some of whom are gay) really what’s best for the Black community? Did they worry about their “wedge” being “driven” right through the families of Black lgbt people? It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.... 

Speaking of trying to drive a wedge into families, the strategy document also proposed paying $50,000 for a staff member to work full-time trying to “identify children of gay parents willing to speak on camera” on NOM’s behalf. Politics doesn’t get any uglier than that.

Indeed it doesn't.  I'm glad the Mainstream Media has picked this up.  And I hope some of the ordure winds up on the faces of the Roman Catholic and Mormon funders of NOM, which peddles hate.