Friday, October 22, 2010

NOM Propoganda

I  recently was on the site of the National Organization For Marriage's  website and on this site they have place an  ad that i am assuming they are running in the state of Minnesota, in this ad they are vilify same sex marriage and the officials working for it by claiming that they are ripping it out of the peoples hands by not having the people vote on the issue. In this ad they invoke images of Martin Luther King Jr, and have his unmistakable booming voice claiming  "give us the ballot."  I find this very amusing myself, the idea of using a famed civil rights leader words to justify a policy of ongoing discrimination drips of an almost  Alanis  Morissette level of irony that is almost choking.

The words of King in this case are taken completely  out of context for what they were really meant to mean.  these words were words that were spoken from the soul of a group of people facing over two hundred years of oppression where society and the government had left them on the bottom of society and took massive steps to make sure that they stayed there. the process that made it well known to these people that there are two types of people in the nation and if you were not in the right group you didn't get to have the gold membership.  These where not the words of a group of people that had enjoyed the power and privilege of dictating the state as they saw fit.  These people where asking for the ballot to have some power of a system that in every way exploitative of them and their families. they where asking for the ballot for away to in someway be on equal footing in some way to people that had been untouchable in any another way.

This Organization should think more about the words of King, his message was not about voting, voting was a symbol for something greater.  To King having a ballot in the hand of everyone was a sign that they had a stake in the system, and his hope was that everyone would get beyond the distentions that separate us.  I am very unclear on how they could have missed this, I mean this not something that has been buried in the footnotes of history,  he stated his beliefs on this matter quite clearly on the steps of the Lincoln memorial in front of millions of people, 
"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness... when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
                Free at last! Free at last!
                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!3

 So my advise for the National Organization For Marriage if you are going to invoke the names of a national hero to get your message across, do your home work and have a God Damn sense of history.
 

No comments:

Post a Comment