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Written by Lisa Neff, Staff writer
Nov 17, 2010
The National Organization for Marriage waged a national campaign against legalizing same-sex relationships in the midterm election without placing a single anti-gay measure on a statewide ballot.
NOM waged its campaign with the endorsement of 29 anti-gay candidates in Nov. 2 races and with a successful push to oust three Iowa justices who ruled that denying same-sex couples marriage rights violated the state’s constitution.
An analysis of NOM’s political activities by the Human Rights Campaign found the organization invested an estimated $5 million into federal and state campaigns in the 2009-10 election cycle.
More than half of NOM’s candidates lost at the polls, yet the organization has become what HRC president Joe Solmonese called a “political force.”
“It’s clear they will stop at nothing, including repeatedly ignoring state campaign finance laws, to elect anti-gay candidates and punish elected pro-equality officials,” Solmonese said. “And nothing illustrates NOM’s cynicism more than the defeat of the three supreme court justices in Iowa who were part of a unanimous decision that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. An independent judiciary is now threatened, and no organization is more responsible for that than NOM.”
Judicial elections, even at the state supreme court level, tend to be low-key elections for the retention of incumbents. NOM spent about $600,000 on television ads, phone calls, rallies and a 20-city bus tour in the campaign to defeat justices on Election Day.
NOM president Brian Brown, explaining the organization’s goal in Iowa, said, “Many people … are looking at the Iowa judicial retention election (and) actually saying this is the most important election because it will send a clear signal to the Supreme Court and other judges that they don’t have the right to make up the law out of thin air. If the people of Iowa … remove these judges, there will be reverberations throughout the country, all the way to the United States Supreme Court.”
David Lane, director of the American Family Association, another anti-gay group that spent about $100,000 to defeat the Iowa justices, warned of future campaigns: “For those who impose what we perceive as an immoral agenda, we’re going to take them out,” he said.
The tactic has LGBT civil rights advocates concerned about judicial intimidation.
But civil rights advocates also expressed concern last week about NOM’s fundraising abilities. The organization began just three years ago, operating on a $500,000 annual budget. NOM’s annual budget now is about $10 million.
