Mr. Brown Goes to Washington
The National Organization for Marriage moves to Washington, D.C. and tries to couch its bigotry in non-personal, intellectual language. Or so says the Washington Post.
By Emily Rutherford
September 1, 2009
Brian S. Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage stands on the street in Princeton, N.J. (AP Photos/Mel Evans)
I have a strange fascination with the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay marriage group of Miss California fame. Perhaps it stems from the fact that until recently, their national headquarters was a mere stone’s throw from my dorm at Princeton University. But now my obsession has moved a bit farther away. NOM’s headquarters has moved out of their 20 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ digs and is headed to H Street NW, Washington, D.C. My friends and I will no longer be able to organize dance-party protests outside their national headquarters without taking a bus or a train down to Washington. Spearheading the move to Washington, D.C. is Brian Brown, NOM’s executive director that was profiled in the Washington Post on Friday. From H Street, Brown will be managing anti-marriage equality campaigns in Iowa, Maine, California, and New Jersey, among other states. The move means NOM is serious. They’re no longer a kooky pop-culture phenomenon, with a campy "Gathering Storm" ad or a 2M4M campaign.
What is most disappointing—and disturbing—about the Post’s profile of Brown is the degree to which the writer, Monica Hesse, fell hook, line, and sinker for NOM’s marketing in its entirety. Hesse positively fawns over Brown, saying that in contrast to "the people who specialize in whipping crowds into frothy frenzies, who say things like ‘Katrina was caused by the gays,’" Brown speaks to a "country [that] is not made up of people in the far wings, right or left, [but] is made up of a movable middle, reasonable people looking for reasonable arguments to assure them that their feelings have a rational basis." Hesse seems to have missed that fighting against same-sex marriage becomes a more and more unreasonable position as the public warms to it. The idea that Brown’s cause is rational is just a tactic: it’s exactly what he and other social conservatives want the public to think.
Brown is a husband and father, though his wife seems somewhat ashamed of what her husband does and initially had a hard time understanding what the "big deal" was with same-sex couples getting married. Brown has apparently has devoted his life not to his family but to his cause of stopping the gays from getting married. Hesse mistakes Brown’s single-minded obsession for a reasonable, fair-minded, logical, and rational argument seemingly because he has a degree from Oxford and started a history Ph.D. at UCLA. Hesse’s perspective is that obviously his education protects him from accusations of bigotry. "He takes nothing personally. He means nothing personal. He is never accusatory or belittling. His arguments are based on his understandings of history, not on messages from God that gays caused Hurricane Katrina," Hesse writes.
Brown believes that because Western civilization has historically not recognized same-sex marriages, they shouldn’t have a place in our modern legal system. (As Stephanie Coontz writes, what’s actually most common in Western civilization’s history of marriage is polygyny, not monogamous heterosexual marriages.) The comparison means little when you factor in differences among regions, time periods, and cultures. But Hesse rolls with this flawed understanding of the glorified tax status that is marriage in the 21st-century United States, developing in its modern form fairly recently.
The Post’s profile does not hide the fact that Brown is a devout Catholic (like many of the crusading conservatives, he converted as a young man while studying at Oxford). In doing so, it gives away the tried-and-true tactic Brown is using—placing a dummy wall between his Catholicism and his "family values," which he tries to defend on other-than-religious grounds. The modern social conservative movement uses supposed "logic" and "reason" to advance arguments which have traditionally been presented on religious grounds. Princeton Professor Robert George, chair of NOM’s board of directors, does the same thing with his arguments, using his distinguished academic pedigree and his debate skills to distance his social conservatism from his ardent Catholic faith.
Indeed, NOM’s messaging itself speaks to the extent to which this is just a tactic: the emails the organization sends to its supporters use religious language that doesn’t make it onto the public face of NationForMarriage.org. Brown, for example, sometimes signs his emails "Yours in Christ," despite the secular language used on the website. All this "reason" and "logic" is just a ruse, one as transparently false as the notion that NOM is a grassroots organization.
The Post is not always the best at calling out idiocy that appears in its pages (see, most recently, certain op-eds by conservative leaders), and so it’s worth emphasizing that opposition to marriage equality is an inherently ridiculous premise. “‘People mature,’ he says. Their views change,” Hesse writes. But data indicate a steady increase in support for marriage equality; the mainstream position is becoming one of approval of same-sex marriage.
In terms of pure and simple logic, it’s patently absurd to declare that what "marriage" means in 21st-century America should be decided based upon what that word connoted in Victorian Britain, Reformation-era Germany, ancient Rome, or Biblical-era Canaan. Cultural attitudes are not static, and the fact that Brown and NOM couch their misapplication of the historical narrative and their prejudicial activism in less hellfire-and-damnation-esque tones does not make what they’re trying to do less insidious or problematic.
The Post ends its profile by telling us that NOM’s executive director is "off to quietly crusade for the hearts and minds of people who, like Brown, pride themselves on being rational, mainstream, and sane." It strikes me as far more "rational, mainstream, and sane" to advocate for the equality of all Americans in our legal system, whatever the gender of the people whom they love. And if I have to leave the comfort of small-town New Jersey and schlep down to Washington, D.C. to do it, so be it.
Emily Rutherford is a staff writer at Campus Progress. Follow her on Twitter.
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Comments
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Who the hell would marry THAT Neanderthal?
He looks as though he’d have trouble writing his name in the dirt with a stick.
— Terry C - Sep 1, 12:11 PM - #I think NOM is an unfortunate acronym, which could lead to riducule (like “teabagging” did).
A better name for the organization would be:
National
— EssJay - Sep 1, 12:12 PM - #Association For
Marriage
Between
Ladies
And Men
I can understand it if people find the idea of gay sex disgusting (or worse). Frankly, dude-on-dude sex is not something that appeals to me either. Which is why I don’t spend any time thinking about it.
What I will never understand is the idea that we should discriminate in the law against people who do like dude-on-dude sex or chick-on-chick sex. I mean, this is truly what it all boils down to… some people who think it’s disgusting for one guy to suck another guy’s cock.
Shall we also discriminate against hets who have anal sex? Some people think that’s pretty gross. What about those who live in open marriages or married folks who share a third partner in the bedroom?
It’s really nobody’s fucking business at the end of the day, but apparently some folks think it is so important to make it their business that they form a DC lobby over it.
THAT is what is truly sick.
— r€nato - Sep 1, 12:55 PM - #This seems to be exactly it: “people looking for reasonable arguments to assure them that their feelings have a rational basis.”
Just like the huge intellectual industries devoted to “proving” that black people are inferior or that jews run the financial industry.
— paul - Sep 1, 12:57 PM - #This guy sounds like someone I know who works for an “immigration” think tank. Though that person would strenuously disagree, their job is to provide lots of intellectual smoke for their real agenda: help R’s by keeping our populace in a tizzy over immigration. Institutionalized racism, basically.
I don’t know how these people sleep at night, I would certainly hate to be them in old age, with that much blood on my idle hands.
— Mr. Bunched Undies - Sep 1, 01:08 PM - #WELL YOUR OBVIOSULY JUST JEALOUSE OF BRANDON BROWNS’ LOOKS BECASUE HE CAN PRETTY MUCH WALK UP TO ANY GUY OR GIRL AND SAY ‘HEY WANNA LAY ME?’ AND THEY WILL SAY ‘O.K.’
BUT HE CHOSES NOT TO DO THIS BECASUE THE LORD HAS A PROHIBISION ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE BEFORE SEX SO YOU THINKING ‘HE IS WAISTING HIS LOOKS ON CELLIBACY’ WELL IN HEAVEN WITH JESUS THEIR’S PLENTY OF TIME FOR SEX THEN
— JUST A NORMAL GUY (THE ORIGINAL) - Sep 1, 02:57 PM - #The John Yoo approach: as long as you speak in quiet, measured tones, you can say pretty much anything. Once it was established that it would work for torture, then folks like Mr. Brown (was Ted Haggert passing through his hometown twenty-some years ago? Bit of a family resemblance there) correctly conclude that any manner of vile hate can be pushed in such a manner that the Villagers will just eat it up.
Yoo sold torture and succeeded. Hate and legal discrimination is just a walk in the park for Mr. Brown, particularly in Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post.
— LittlePig - Sep 1, 04:21 PM - #Monica Hesse is a hack who recently moved from the editor of the AARP mailer/bulletin to reporter at the Washington Post. She embodies all that is wrong and fatal about today’s so-called journalism: villager herd mentality, a total acceptance of her superficiality, and no regard for any larger concerns that might be affected by this moron’s rightwing ideas. Hesse is just as bad as NOM in the sense that NOM would not get its exposure with Hesse.
— price vincenz - Sep 1, 04:46 PM - #“Brown believes that because Western civilization has historically not recognized same-sex marriages, they shouldn’t have a place in our modern legal system.”
Talk about a slippery slope. There go our laws against slave ownership, against child labor, and against establishment of an official state religion. There goes out right to elect our leaders, too.
Don’t worry about all the changes, America. It is really just an effort to preserve traditional Western Civilization. Who could be against that?
— ottnott - Sep 1, 05:18 PM - #well western culture was traditionally non-democratic and supportive of slavery. I’m not thinking it’s a good thing to be doing now.
— jamie - Sep 1, 06:55 PM - #No tie means that he loves terrorists.
— AB - Sep 1, 08:12 PM - #A Ted Haggard clone – has anyone else noticed?
— Daphne Chyprious - Sep 2, 02:58 AM - #A lot of numb-skulls, passing as intellectuals, have way too much time on their hands. Give ‘em work and mind your own business!
— RESISTFACISM - Sep 4, 02:54 PM - #A lot of numb-skulls, passing as intellectuals, have way too much time on their hands. Give ‘em work and mind your own business!
— RESISTFACISM - Sep 4, 02:54 PM - #