NOM's Plan to Divide Blacks and Gays May Be About to Bite It in the Ass

I've noted before how NOM had some secret documents released in the Maine litigation challenging NOM's failure to comply with Maine campaign finance disclosure laws.  One document addressed to NOM board of directions concern the plan to use gay marriage as a wedge issue to divide black voters.  LGBT rights activists jumped on the release quickly and now it appears that more and more in the black community are wising up to NOM's duplicitous ways.  Karma can be a real bitch!  Here are highlights from a piece in the Associated Baptist News that focuses on Amos Brown who pretty much rips NOM and white evangelicals a new one:

African-American Baptist leaders are working together to counter attempts by outsiders to use gay marriage as a wedge issue to divide black voters, a Baptist minister and NAACP leader said in a radio interview Aug. 11.

Amos Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and president of the city’s local NAACP branch, said on Welton Gaddy’s State of Belief radio show that heads of the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc.; National Baptist Convention of America; Progressive National Baptist Convention and Lott Carey Foreign Missionary Convention are all telling their constituencies: “We as black Baptists are not single-issue persons, and we see more important things than getting stuck on this matter of whether or not there should be same-sex marriages.”

Brown said black church leaders “are working to enlighten the people” about a confidential 2008-2009 memo from the National Organization for Marriage recently made public as evidence in a lawsuit in Maine.

The memo to NOM’s board of directors described a project designed to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks -- two key Democratic constituencies.” The strategy was to “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….”

“We contend that this is a racist ploy,” Brown said. “It is divisive, but it was birthed, it was created by, white evangelicals who have shown themselves to be duplicitous and contradictory in their stances.”

Brown charged the strategy was behind the formation of a national campaign in May calling on African-Americans to withdraw their support from President Obama because of his stance in favor of gay marriage.

“I was a part of that movement,” Brown said. “Dr. King taught me at Morehouse, and I know pretty much who was in the vanguard of the movement. Reverend William Owens was no leader in the Civil Rights Movement, and yet this organization, the National Organization for Marriage, has anointed him through misrepresenting who he is for political gain to divide the black community.”

“All of this is happening at the behest of white evangelical fundamentalists who have brought in such persons as Harry Jackson there in Maryland, Tony Evans down in Dallas, Texas, and others who don’t understand how they are being used, how they are being duped to make sure that Mr. Barack Obama is a one-term president,” Brown said. “This is sinister, it’s evil and it is wrong.”

 This effort combined with the NAACP's endorsement of same sex marriage as a civil right isn't playing out as NOM's sleazy strategists planned.  Personally, I am thrilled that at least some black pastors are waking up to the reality that they are being cynically used by white evangelicals and white Christianists.