Org that infamously vowed to 'drive wedge between gays and blacks' equates marriage rulings with slavery

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03/20/2015

by Jeremy Hooper

I've lost count of how many social conservative commentators, many of whom are clearly working off of some sort of coordinated intra-movement script (yes, they have those), have made the truly heinous logic leap of connecting the infamous Dred Scott decision with the US Supreme Court's potential ruling granting fifty-state marriage equality (see here and here and here). But somehow the National Organization For Marriage's attempt to connect the expansion of freedom for a minority population to the cruel denial thereof—complete with eighteen fundraising links—manages to be somehow more disgusting than the others:

Dear Marriage Supporter,

Imagine the barbaric nature of the logic used and the opinion adopted: a person, a certain type of person, is a piece of property who can be owned, traded, bought and sold. Whether man or woman, no matter where born this type of person could not be considered a citizen and an act of Congress adopted to protect them was invalid.

The type of person involved was African American, whether free or slave, and the decision is the infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford decision. We mark the 158th anniversary of this unimaginable decision by the US Supreme Court this month.

The Dred Scott decision was wrong on so many levels that it’s difficult to cover them all in this email. But the most important thing to realize about the decision is that it ignored both natural law and the principles of the American founding to impose a political ideology on the country.

Does that ring a bell for you with anything in the news today?

Some people think that the US Supreme is the final arbiter of controversial topics — whether slavery or marriage — and we must accept whatever they decide.
FULL: Avoiding Dred Scott[NOM]

I'm not sure if the anti-gay movement is deliberately seeking that one nasty element that will really make their team seem that much nastier when future documentarians start assembling their inevitable films on this fight. But whether they are or they aren't, they seem to have found it in this truly disgusting Dred Scott talking point. It's a new low, even for a movement that has spent so much time in the rhetorical basement.

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*Oh, and in case you don't know what I'm talking about in the headline: NOM admitted, in strategy documents that they never wanted the public to see, that their whole game plan is based around dividing gays and blacks: