Storms are Gathering

After the disappointment that was the voting of Proposition 8 last November in California, gay marriage has made important progress in the last week. Vermont and Iowa now both allow gay marriage despite legal opposition from religious haters. And Washington DC will recognise the marriages that have taken place in other states.

People who claim to be opposed to gay marriage for religious reasons are getting fearful that they are loosing battle after battle and are more and more looking like they are going to lose the war. On 9 April, the "National Organization for Marriage" (NOM; NOM!?) launched a $1.5m (yes, $1.5m!) campaign with a 60 sec video featuring actors (the audition rushes were shortly made available on Youtube but have now been deleted) making unsubstantiated and irrelevant assertions about what gay people want to do to their lives and liberty by fighting for their own (the clip can be viewed on Youtube here).

Two interesting point about the rhetoric they use in the spot is the reference to a Rainbow Coalition (isn't that our lot, normally?) and the title of the spot, “A Gathering Storm”, which very close to the title of the first volume of Winston Churchill’s chronicle of World War II, thus (more or less sublety) likening gay people to Nazis. Nice.

Already reactions have been strong (including through parodies on YouTube) and the Human Rights Campaign has launched the End the Lies website. Below is one of such responses that debunks the NOM advert thoroughly:

updated on 15 April

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