NOM: Gay College Students a Threat to Marriage

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has identified a new threat to America: LGBT college students who work as resident advisors.

Many people think of Thanksgiving as a time to come together with loved ones and express gratitude, but NOM decided to misuse the holiday as an opportunity to spread more of the barbed intolerance and paranoia they’ve become so infamous for.

In their “Thanksgiving Message,” Jennifer Roback Morse of NOM’s Ruth Institute, the organization’s project targeting young people, warned about the dangers of young people being “pressured” to support LGBT equality. In the video, Morse tells a second-hand story about a Catholic RA who didn’t want to participate in a campus “drag party” (she never mentions the school by name) hosted by a gay Resident Advisor in the dorms, saying that that gay RA—after learning of her discomfort—then pressured her into attending and supporting the event.

To top it all off, Morse closes her conspiracy theory with a bit of fear-mongering for good measure: “The other side has RAs in the dorm where your young people are going to school.” Morse continues pushing parents to ask their college kids whether "they have a gay RA in their dorms” because knowing a gay person is dangerous.

She’s right of course. Interacting with gay peers and having friends who are gay presents an unmistakably real threat—to an agenda that actively fights against marriage equality and is eager to return the country to a state of greater prejudice and intolerance. It’s been a long road, but today, a majority of Americans now support marriage equality and that level of support is 20 percent higher among people who know someone who is gay.

And like on so many other progressive causes, young people have been leading the way. Support for marriage equality has been growing the fastest among young people with 46 percent in favor in 2004, 52 percent in favor in 2008, and recent surveys showing support now as high as 68 percent.

So yes, Morse, more and more Americans are embracing equality because they know how hurtful and damaging it is to treat any group of people as second-class citizens. Cling to outdated ideas of intolerance will only further isolate your organization.

Consider yourselves warned, college students and young people. If you talk to and befriend gay people, you might actually decide equality isn’t such a bad idea.

Abraham White is a communications associate at Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @abwhite7.

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Story Tags

• LGBT
• Ruth Institute
• LGBT youth