Getting rich from marriage inequality

Several times on this blog, I've reflected on the lucrative business model of opponents of marriage equality. (I've grouped the posts under the label of "follow the money"). From the now-discredited George Rekers, who testified for $$$$, to NOM's Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, who have various shell groups that pay them generously, the business of opposing marriage rights generates quite a lot of cash.

Over at JoeMyGod, Joe frequently points at the money-begging emails from another distasteful anti-gay activist, a Virginia county supervisor named Eugene Delgaudio.

And I'm sure Frank Schubert, the "mastermind" behind the Prop8 campaign and most of the other ones state campaigns, is doing very nicely based on this business model.  (Although we wonder if his business will drop off since he hasn't been so successful lately.)

Now, ThinkProgress has done some digging into the finances of Gary Bauer, and shows that his various PACS and action committees pay him VERY generously for....  what exactly?  He's a consultant, apparently.  Here's an example:

So far, Americans United to Preserve Marriage has paid Bauer more than $260,000 — and between 2009 and 2012, Bauer received more than half of the committee’s total spending.

So, you donate money to this group and half of it goes to Bauer.  Hmmm.  And then this:

The Campaign for Working Families PAC, a traditional political action committee first created in 1996, began 2013 with nearly $1 million left in the bank. The committee, which calls itself “the leading pro-family, pro-life political action committee in America,” claims to exist “solely to raise funds to support or oppose candidates based upon their political views.” But starting in March, Bauer began paying himself $13,750 a month for “political and admin” consulting — $68,750 over the past five months, and several times more than the $8,250 the committee has given, total, to federal political candidates so far this year.

The "Great Gay Menace" drives donations to these groups, which use those donations to pay the leaders large amounts of money. So, being anti-equality is big business, and they are getting rich on it.  It may also explain why people like Brian Brown are getting increasingly shrill and more anti-gay, not limiting his remarks to marriage.  Because slowly but surely, his marks are realizing that marriage equality is inevitable.  He's got to yell and instill fear if his big business model is going to keep going.

But do they really want to win?  They'd be out of a job, if they did....

Will equal marriage eliminate the cash cow of the Religious Right?

Joseph R. Murray, II is a civil rights attorney who used to work for the anti-gay American Family association. He now is a supporter of equality and of the NALT Christians campaign.  He writes,

After the Christian Right tapped out the pro-life issue, the captains of Christian industry needed a new sales pitch to keep the coffers filled. These folks thought they saw the light in 2003 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared a fundamental right to same-sex marriage.... 

[T]he Christian Right had invested heavily in a propaganda machine that specialized in promulgating unjust stereotypes. Instead of letting the flock see gay couples as the neighbors next door, the Christian Right made it a point to portray all gays with the wildest pictures they could find from the Castro. 

It was a brilliant strategy, for if groups like AFA could scare the faithful with pictures that portrayed the gay community in the worst light, it could frame the debate as one of deviancy versus decency. There were two problems with this strategy, though: 

First, in order for the campaign to succeed the Right had to forsake the very Christian principles it claimed to be protecting. In typical fashion, a few Ben Franklins made it much easier for them to put profit over principle. 

Second, the strategy would only work if the Christian Right could force gays, as well as those Christians that supported them, into the closet. It was the second problem that would result in the demise of the Christian right.

...Look at the lunacy pouring out of the Christian right. Don Wildmon claims to defend marriage, but endorses twice divorced, three times married Newt Gingrich for president. Mat Staver and Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel are out there invoking Jerry Sandusky to support the medieval notion that you can “pray the gay away.”

And, of course, Bryan Fischer is like a drunken uncle at a wedding who must continually be outrageous in hopes that someone will pay attention.

Why is this happening? Because the Christian right doubled down on gay discrimination and lost. 

NALT, however, will be a devastating blow the Christian Right. Frankly, all the videos pouring into NALT re-affirm one basic fact –- the Christian Right no longer can claim to have a monopoly on morality.

Follow the money: do marriage equality opponents really WANT to win?

It has been speculated that the Right doesn't really want to ban abortion; it's far more effective as a political and fundraising boogeyman if Roe v. Wade stays essentially intact.

I am starting to wonder the same thing about marriage equality. What a great rallying cry it is to trumpet the decline of marriage, to decry the activist judges, and bemoan the legislative process as middle-aged gays and lesbians seize the opportunity to join the married bourgeois and pay the marriage penalty.

In campaigns involving tens of millions of dollars, someone, somewhere, is getting rich.

A case in point is George "Lift my Luggage" Rekers, who made a profession of being a witness-for-hire at anti-gay hearings and trials. His employers didn't do so well because not only did he cost them a lot of money (on the order of hundreds of thousands) but his testimony was so over the top that it was routinely dismissed. Still, a lucrative business for Mr Rekers.

Or look at The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), and its CEO Maggie Gallagher with its hidden lists of donors and millions that it spends.

IRS reports from Gallagher's other organization, the "Institute for Marriage & Public Policy" reveal that she pays herself up to 42% of the donations received by that organization. I wonder if the donors know that over 40 cents of every dollar they give go to Ms Gallagher's bank account. This sounds a bit "excessive" by the standards used to judge compensation at non-profits.

Brian Brown is president of NOM and doled out over $160,000 to a consulting firm he runs called "Common Sense America". It shares an office with NOM. It sounds kinda like a giant shell game, doesn't it? Brown and Gallagher each have lucrative deals with a variety of organizations, all intertwined, while the centerpiece of NOM apparently acts as a money-laundering operation for institutional foes of marriage equality. And despite repeated investigations over campaign finance ethics, NOM keeps rolling on.

And the money keeps rolling in from every side....

I think that everyone was surprised at the weakness of the case that the Prop8 defenders put together to defend Prop8. Most pro-equality activists could probably have done better. The bad guys' witnesses managed to make the case for the equality side. Was that intentional? Losing early wouldn't be a problem, and might be a great fund-raising boon. If that's the case, their real triumph was in hiding the trial from public view. I suspect they are pretty confident of winning at SCOTUS but in no hurry to get there. Those of us they attack, who lose rights, and are materially damaged, are just "collateral damage" .

I know that there are many "true believers" in the anti-marriage equality movement. But increasingly I wonder whether they are all puppets to the most cynical puppet-masters, whose interest is not in the topics of social battles, but in the far more American desire to enrich themselves on the backs of those below.

It was the very American PT Barnum who reminded us "There is a sucker born every minute."

Update More on money at Pam's House Blend, pointing out the same logic is used for opponents of the DADT repeal.

In order for the coffers to remain full, gays must be deemed an enemy to be feared. This worked well forty years ago, but America has grown up to find FDR was right - there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Now, desperate to remain relevant keep the cash flow steady, the religious right must go further and further from the political mainstream to justify their unjustifiable fear of gays. There is just one problem - the more outside the mainstream the religious right ventures, the more ridiculous they look.

The lucrative business of George Rekers

The recent revelation that Dr George Rekers, reliably anti-gay "expert", travels with a rentboy, has led to closer examination of Rekers' activities. What a comfortable scam he has established for himself.

Trading on his education (he's a retired professor of neuropsychiatry and behavioral science at the University of South Carolina), Rekers claims to be an expert in child psychiatry. He is a co-founder of the Family Research Council and a member of NARTH, a group promoting the disproven "treatment" called "reparative therapy". Both those groups have erased his name from their websites in the wake of the current scandal.

He founded the American College of Pediatrics, a small group of anti-gay activists that deliberately mis-states the facts about homosexuality. (It is not to be confused with the actual American Academy of Pediatrics, which like all other mainstream medical associations has depathologized homosexuality, and recognizes being gay as a normal human variant).

But the most interesting aspect of Rekers' career is being a witness-for-hire in cases that attack GLBT rights. Turns out that he was hired by the state of Florida as an expert witness during their recent trial about gay adoption. Initial reports were that this cost the state about $60,000 but more recent reports indicate that Rekers was paid on the order of $120,000, at the behest of Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum.

(Though you have to wonder why, with that much money in the bank, Rekers couldn't afford a better room for his rentboy, who commented that their accommodations were far from deluxe and that their hotel in London was "like a crappy Days Inn or something." )

In fact, McCollum insisted the state hire Rekers despite the expense. It might not have been such a good deal, however, because the judge dismissed Rekers' testimony as inaccurate and clearly biased:

Dr. Rekers’ testimony was far from a neutral and unbiased recitation of the relevant scientific evidence. Dr. Rekers’ beliefs are motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science. Based on his testimony and demeanor at trial, the court can not consider his testimony to be credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy.
PDF source.

Similar results came from a trial in Arkansas a few years ago.

This expensive debacle might cause McCollum a little trouble in his bid for governor. As Steve Benen comments in the Washington Monthly,

Indeed, the heart of the controversy here is McCollum's bizarre judgment and questionable use of taxpayer money. Rekers was, in effect, part of a sad, right-wing scheme -- collecting big checks to say crazy things in court. But the real question is why McCollum personally intervened to deliver Rekers a lucrative, publicly-financed, intolerant payday.

Still, the bigotry in Florida is probably strong enough to survive.

It's quite a deal, don't you think? Travel the country spouting pseudo-scientific bigotry as a professional witness for hire. Is he a really cynical scam artist? Or does he really believe his lies justify the payment?

Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald says,

[T}here is a moral crime here. We are, after all, talking about men in positions of authority and reach, men who could make laws and influence public perception and who used that power against their own.....That's more than hypocrisy, more even than self-loathing. It is a betrayal of one's own, a sellout of the most vulnerable. And what's sad is not just that a George Rekers would do this, but that ours is a culture that would encourage and reward such duplicity in the first place.

So, think about it. Rekers appears to be a deeply closeted gay man who has made a lot of money out of hurting GLBT people. His recent indiscretion with a male prostitute has led to his public shaming. He's been dismissed from the cozy relationship with the prominent anti-gay organizations and he has very likely lost his comfortable livelihood as a professional witness.

Payback's a bitch.

Update: Here's Keith Olbermann on Rekers:

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