The National Organization for Marriage and the Catholic Bishops responded angrily and bitterly to the passage of marriage equality legislation in New York on Friday night, deriding as inconsequential the carefully negotiated religious liberty provisions that were essential to garnering the crucial majority-making Republican votes. While LGBT people and their allies celebrated, anti-marriage forces plotted their next steps in New York, Minnesota, North Carolina, and elsewhere.
NOM responded to its “betrayal” by lawmakers who had previously voted or campaigned against marriage equality by vowing political reprisals and pledging to spend $2 million to unseat those legislators.
Meanwhile, the bishops, who were outmaneuvered by a straight, Catholic governor in one of the most heavily Catholic states in the country, are planning to ramp up their rhetorical warfare against marriage equality with a series of DVDs like the ones distributed in Minnesota before the 2010 election. Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of the Subcommittee for the Defense of Marriage says the series is needed to push back against LGBT rights supporters’ “manipulation of language” by the use of such terms as “equality.”
It’s worth noting that during last week’s pre-vote jockeying, Peter Spriggs of the Family Research Council argued that “the principal objection to homosexual ‘marriage’ has nothing to do with religion” – a ludicrous assertion to anyone who has followed the anti-marriage campaigns and heard a variety of religious claims such as the frequently heard assertion that government cannot redefine an institution that was created by God.
