Ultra-Right Wingers Are Sore Losers After Election Losses
The LGBT community has been celebrating since Tuesday after Barack Obama was re-elected as president. For LGBT Americans, the election marked a watershed moment: For the first time, a popular vote enshrined marriage equality. No, make that three votes: Maryland, Maine and Washington State. In Minnesota, voters refused to enshrine a gay marriage ban in the state’s constitution. And in Iowa, voters did an about-face and rejected judicial interference by refusing to recall the judge responsible for marriage equality in the Hawkeye State.
While union members, Latinos, blacks, liberals, women, LGBT voters and their supporters were all dancing in the streets, ultra-conservatives across the country have been busy throwing hissy fits after being decimated on Election Day. Their constant mantra that, when put to voters, marriage equality would always go down in flames, well, went down in flames.
"Our opponents and some in the media will attempt to portray the election results as a changing point in how Americans view gay marriage, but that is not the case," a statement from the National Organization for Marriage, a group determent to ban same-sex marriage, read. "Americans remain strongly in favor of marriage as the union of one man and one woman."
That so? Then what about these four states (five counting Iowa)? It all comes down money, Brown complained: "The election results reflect the political and funding advantages our opponents enjoyed in these very liberal states."
This was not a complaint when NOM, which received heavy support from the Roman Catholic Church and other organizations, was far outspending its opponents. NOM also showed selective memory in its having trumpeted heavy support in the black community, especially in Maryland, where blacks make up nearly one-third of the electorate. The group also ignored the fact that Maine and Minnesota, while hardly red, are certainly far from solid blue.
in elections, a victory is a victory. A narrow loss is about as meaningful as a near-pregnancy. But no one told NOM’s leader, Brian Brown, who, in an interview with the Washington Post, tried to paint a rosy picture of the Maryland vote. Marriage equality "barely won" in the Free State, he said.
Frank Schubert, who is responsible for creating the group’s devious ads and is responsible for its ground game in the contested states, expressed his disappointment as well. "It appears that we have lost by a point or two in each state. It’s important to consider that these battles occurred in a very difficult political landscape," he said in a statement. "We were contesting in four deep blue states and were outspent very badly in all of them - at least four-to-one, and greater in some states. I have to accept that losing in this very difficult political environment was always a real possibility."
He went on to say that be doesn’t believe "the spin" that America is "in support of gay marriage" and insists that anti-gay marriage activists in Maine, Maryland, Washington Sate and Minnesota, "narrowly lost four difficult contests in four very deep blue states after being badly outspent."
Vowing to ’Fight On’ in These States
The head of Preserve Marriage remarked on Washington State legalizing gay marriage and echoed NOM’s sentiments in saying that Referendum 74 was "narrowly approved."
"We are disappointed in losing a tough election battle on marriage by a narrow margin. But while we are disappointed, we are not defeated," Joseph Backholm told the Seattle Times.
Leaders from the Christian Civic League of Maine, an organization that campaigned to keep same-sex marriages illegal in the Pine Tree State, threatened after Tuesday’s outcome and to take the pro-gay marriage measure back to the ballot yet again. That would make it a third time at the electoral rodeo.
According to a statement from the group’s website, they are trying to work with other anti-gay groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council and Citizen Link "to provide resources for churches, pastors and Christians who will need legal protections for our religious liberties."
"We want to discern the possible impact of redefining marriage as well as the remedies," the statement reads. "Our priority is to help ensure your opportunity to live out your faith and ministry without interference."
For sheer train-wreck value, few can match ultra-conservative politician Eugene Delgaudio, who serves as a member of a county executive board in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., in his spare time. Otherwise, he occupies himself as head, and sole member, of the grandiloquently named Public Advocate of the United States organization. His one-man band has managed to receive the far right’s equivalent of an Oscar: being deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On his website, he complained that the "gay lobby overwhelmingly outspent pro-family forces" in the four states that approved gay marriage.
"Overwhelming majorities still support marriage in most states and if you add up the numbers, it’s a winning issue 100 per cent of the time until now," he wrote. "But with anti-marriage forces stopping us in four liberal states it is not time for the end game and it is not time for the fat transvestite to sing yet." (Whatever that means.)
