With permission, I am sharing this gem of a piece by Scott R. The endless anti-gay lies of the National Organization for Marriage’s Maggie Gallagher
Beginning with this note:
In April, 2011, when GetEqual’s Michael Dixon presented NOM’s Maggie Gallagher with her “Anita Bryant Unparalleled Bigotry” Award, Gallagher said “There’s no point in conversing with someone who calls you a liar,” as though no anti-gay lie had ever passed her lips.
After noting an early attack from 1996, Scott presents twelve of her more recent most egregious slanders, and ends noting she has blood on her hands. And, no, I will not put that in quotes, it is just the plain truth, that jumps out whenever a young LGBT person commits suicide:
Imagine how it is to be a 14-year-old gay teen of severely embittered anti-gay Massachusetts parents who ceaselessly use Gallagher’s gay-bashing propaganda against you in what is supposed to be your home. In answering the question “Do I have blood on my hands?,” Gallagher in her article alleged that she “felt a moral obligation to find out.” Too bad the gay-bashing monster didn’t feel a moral obligation not to lie about the Youth Risk Survey results for Massachusetts.
...and as the author notes, as he did contact her before posting this article it is also:
.. too bad this gay-bashing horror Maggie Gallagher won’t sign a pledge, never again to tell anti-gay lies.
This is but the tippy-top of the iceberg of the anti-gay lies told by Maggie Gallagher. .. For this article, Gallagher was asked in two e-mails if she regrets — or apologizes for — her anti-gay lies. The gay-bashing bigot did not respond.
Many of you may not know the 'History of Maggie's Lies' ...so his fine abbreviated compilation will be posted below the SQUIGGLE.
However, I also feel like noting, that since Mitt Romney is still looking for his perfect Vice Presidential candidate, and after having so eloquently been presented with just a fraction of Mitt ROMNEY's lies here, by
Rachel Maddow on March 21, 2012 ROMNEY: Etch a Sketch and Chronic Liar
...perhaps liar Romney should chose liar Maggie Gallagher, you know to bridge his widening gender gap problem... oh, and religion problem, as she is Catholic! and NOM gets major support and ideas from the Catholic Church.
NOTE: Please go to original article The endless anti-gay lies of the National Organization for Marriage’s Maggie Gallagher to reach author's many other links.
Back in her syndicated column dated October 25, 1996, though, Gallagher conveys her unshakable conviction that her theocratic contempt for gay human beings should be enshrined in civil law. She wrote that she is not willing to live in a society that gives anti-discrimination protections to gay people. Gallagher’s article is jam-packed with anti-gay lies. She says, for example, that she opposes anti-discrimination protections for gay people out of “a sense of injustice that a small affluent group should be pressing for more economic protections.” Gallagher’s statement that all gay people are affluent is a shameless, propagandistic lie. So is her asinine claim that money is the only rationale — and/or motive — for anti-discrimination laws. She might now be made to take her sham anti-gay “sense of injustice” and provide social services to gay youth made homeless and indigent when their bigot parents abandoned them only because they were gay. For reference; here was my open letter to Gallagher, offering to help her to help the homeless in New York for one week, in exchange for her cancelling her planned July 24, 2011 protest of same sex marriages in the state. That letter was sent to several valid e-mails for Gallagher, who did not reply.
1) In response to Richard Kim’s February, 2012 charges that Gallagher had called homosexuality a “sexual dysfunction” and that she had spoken in support of “Pray-away-the-gay” “therapy,” Gallagher lied by saying “I have not done any of those things!” and “You’ve just made up a bunch of facts that aren’t true.”
In her May, 2001 article “Fixing Sexual Orientation,” however, Gallagher argues in favor of “Pray away the gay” “therapy” and calls homosexuality a “dysfunction.”
2) Gallagher combined anti-gay bigotry with anti-Muslim bigotry for her lies on NOM’s blog on May 3, 2011 when she described the Human Rights Council as being involved in a “jihad” against DOMA-defending attorney Paul Clement.
In preposterously alleging that by opposing Clement, HRC was fulfilling a Muslim religious duty, Gallagher was telling a propagandistic anti-gay lie. NOM’s leaders are, as we all know, guilty of patterns of behavior in which they simultaneously appeal to anti-gay and anti-Muslim bigots.
3) In an April 20, 2011 interview with the Deseret News, Gallagher told the following propagandistic anti-gay lie; “By the very act of declaring that two men in a union are in a marriage we are announcing that marriage has nothing to do with bringing mothers and fathers and children together.”
In documented reality, same-sex marriage does not at all interfere with marriage bringing mothers and fathers and children together. We hear umpteen married heterosexual couples with children saying that same sex marriages do not negatively impact their heterosexual marriages one iota. With her lie, Gallagher is engaging in anti-gay hate-and-fear-mongering. A NOM strategy document described the anti-gay hate group’s goal of “driving a wedge between gays and blacks“ by “fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8.” Many of Gallagher’s anti-gay lies not targeted at black anti-gay bigots appear conceived to fan all bigot hostility against gay human beings. Tell a fearful, ignorant anti-gay bigot that same sex marriage forces all marriages to have “nothing to do with bringing mothers and fathers and children together,” and the ignorant, fearful anti-gay bigot likely will become even more irrationally fearful of gay people.
4) At the 5 minute point on this video of an April 15, 2011 congressional hearing about DOMA, Gallagher tells various anti-gay lies directly to Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s face. He asks how she would explain to children of gay parents – some of whom were present at the hearing – why they should be excluded from the benefits of marriage. Gallagher never tells Nadler what she would say to those children, though that was his question. (Not answering a very specific question can be a form of lying, too, let’s not forget). Gallagher then tells Nadler that a message of stigmatization and exclusion is not necessary to protecting the “ideal” of marriage for heterosexuals only. (Remember; this same Maggie Gallagher published a syndicated column — arguing against anti-discrimination protections for gays — in which she called homosexuality a “dysfunction.” She surely promulgated anti-gay stigmatization and discrimination there.) Nadler replies that the whole point of DOMA is to stigmatize and exclude. Gallagher says that that is only his “opinion,” forcing him to ask next how “excluding” – (he gives the word a subtle sarcastic and impatient emphasis) — children of gay parents from the benefits of marriage helps to protect heterosexual marriages. In sum, (in addition to the many other anti-gay lies Gallagher told at this hearing) Gallagher argues on the one hand that gay married couples should continue to be excluded from federal marriage benefits, and on the other hand, that excluding them from those benefits is not really excluding them, which is a lie. This is classic Gallagher anti-gay double-speak; Nadler is palpably irritated with the obnoxious anti-gay bigot.
5) In 2010, Gallagher presented NOM’s bogus “marriage protector award” to the gay-bashing leaders of the Church of God in Christ. (One of those COGIC leaders, Bishop Charles Blake, is alleged to have ignored people who complained that other ministers in his church raped them). In presenting the award, Gallagher lied by calling marriage discrimination against gay people “God’s truth.” God has never told Gallagher anything. Whole churches, as well as synagogues, meanwhile, employ married gay clergy. Maggie Gallagher does not know “God’s truth” better than they. Were she under oath in a court of law, attempting to prove that she does, she would fail. Her claim that gay-bashers are righteously bashing in the name of “God’s truth” is an anti-gay lie; hate speech.
6) In her article “The Stakes; Why we need marriage,” Gallagher tells the propagandistic anti-gay lie that marriage equality would spell the end of American civilization. She lyingly equates equality to “losing marriage as a social institution.” In her 2003 article, Gallagher specifically cites Sweden as a country that allegedly already had “lost” marriage. Yet, in 2010, Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, was married to Daniel Westling, Duke of Västergötland. Swedish media were crackling with reports of the marriage, long, long before the actual wedding ceremony took place. Gallagher in this article tells the additional lie that in Sweden, marriage is “a religious rite, with little public or social significance.” Meanwhile in reality, Sweden of course has civil marriage, despite Gallagher’s ludicrous lie that marriage there is a religious rite only.
7) In her May 10, 2010 National Review article “A Vote for Kagan is a Vote for Gay Marriage,” Gallagher attacked Cornell law professor William Jacobson, who had written that he believed Kagan thought of marriage law as being “a matter for the political process, not a constitutional right.” Gallagher lied by saying that Jacobson’s opinion was part of “a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.” She defamed him in additional ways. Professor Jacobson had no intent to mislead the American people. And here is another of Gallagher’s lies from that same article: “A vote for Elena Kagan is a vote for finding a constitutional right to gay marriage that will overturn marriage laws in every state.” Ask yourselves; How would a pro-gay-rights Supreme Court decision on marriage “overturn” marriage laws in Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., or any other place with state-level equality?
8 ) In her August 23, 2011 piece “Defend Marriage,” Gallagher pushes her gay-bashing NOM pledge, and alleges that the right to marriage comes from nature, God and the Bible, and therefore can not come from government. That is an absurdity, and an outright lie: without government, there would be no civil laws relating to marriage, or to anything else. And civil laws in the U.S. do not derive their rationale from the Bible. To learn whether Gallagher scrupulously follows all of the “Judeo-Christian orthodoxy” with which she beats her anti-gay bigot breast in her article, you could ask her directly (maggiegallagher1960@gmail.com) if she wants what Deuteronomy 23:2 says about bastards applied as law to her son Patrick Gallagher, who was born out of wedlock. You might remind her that all kinds of civil laws have been used to enforce the Biblical prejudice against bastards.
9) In her December 20, 2010 National Review article asking what DADT repeal means “for the gay marriage debate,” Gallagher lied about the Department of Defense’s “Report of the Comprehensive Review of the Issues Associated with a Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’”
Gallagher alleged that 58% of Marine Combat Troops said that repeal “is going to make our lives harder.” She put that phrase between quotes. But in the actual report, troops were not asked if, generally, they thought repeal would make their lives harder; they were, rather, asked a group of more specific questions.
Gallagher plucked the very worst of the report’s statistics gathered from all sub-groups within the US Armed Forces, mischaracterized (i.e. lied about) the question — (68a) — corresponding to the statistic, and omitted the context into which the statistic was placed in the report. That context – Risks of Repeal Within Warfighting Units — begins on page 125. Read it to understand more thoroughly the utter hatefulness of Gallagher’s lie.
10) Gallagher repeatedly alleges that same sex marriage is going to lead to a fundamental redefinition of citizenship. That is a blatant, anti-gay, hate-and-fear-mongering lie. Citizenship is too broad in scope to be fundamentally redefined by gays getting married to spouses of their own sexual orientation. Put Gallagher’s tuchus under oath in a witness stand to see how far she gets with this particular gay-bashing lie. Paying sales taxes, serving jury duty, obeying traffic laws, not falsely screaming “Fire!” in a crowded theater — and one million and one additional such matters are fundamental parts of citizenship unchanged by same sex marriage.
11) This gay-bashing Gallagher lie is related to Gallagher’s lie that civil laws involving gay people have to come from God and the Bible. Through her public support for anti-gay bigots who say that gays should all be killed, Gallagher implies the lie that gays don’t have a right to live. In the summer of 2010, when Lauren Ashley justified her anti-gay bigotry with a portion of Leviticus that she believed said that gays deserve death, Gallagher praised Ashley for her “courage in coming forward.” Rob Tisinai of the blog Waking Up Now attempted to clarify with Gallagher whether she supported Lauren Ashley’s notion that God thinks gays deserve death. Gallagher sent him a cryptic three word response and then ignored his request for an actual clarification. One unambiguous clarification finally came the following year, at NOM’s May, 2011 anti-gay hate rally in the Bronx, where a NOM-approved speaker yelled through a megaphone at a mob of anti-gay bigots that homosexuals are “worthy to death.”
Then the attacks in Massachusetts specifically are analyzed. ... Hey, Mitt Romney is from Massachusetts .. only a coincidence.
12) Gallagher lied about Massachusetts gay youth attempted suicide statistics in her October 20, 2010 article Does Gay Marriage Prevent Gay Teen Suicide? In that article, Gallagher purports to answer whether the blood of gay bullycide victims is on her hands – but then lies about the bi-annual Center for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Survey results for Massachusetts. The survey, filled out by live students, does not report on the experiences of actual gay bullycide victims. In her article, Gallagher repeatedly alleges that the survey measured “LGBT” students. The actual survey questionnaires, though, have not yet even ever asked whether respondents identify as transgender. Gallagher’s claim that the survey represents transgender students is a lie. Another of Gallagher’s lies here is her reading of the survey, in which Gallagher very deceitfully implies that youth suicide attempts have not at all lessened since equality became law in Massachusetts. While LGB students have continued to attempt suicide about four times more often than heterosexual students, (just as Gallagher in this same period has fanned anti-gay hostility in Massachusetts) the percentage rates for each group have overall, over time, gone down, confirming Dr. Mark Hatzenbueler’s study which shows that in more liberal areas, both LGB and hetero youth are less likely to attempt suicide than LGB and hetero youth living in conservative areas.
While Massachusetts society increasingly has supported equality, a certain shrinking and severely embittered core of anti-gay bigots remains receptive to Gallagher’s anti-gay hate speech and lies (as well as to her appeals for donations). Same-sex marriages began in contemporary Massachusetts in 2004. In 2001, 31% of LGB and 8% of hetero students attempted suicide in the state. The rates for 2009, the most recent year for which results have been published online, are 24.7% and 5.6%. There has been a clear downward trend in Massachusetts youth suicide attempts, though gay teen attempted suicide remains disturbingly disproportional. Could it possibly be that the general downward trend is attributable to marriage equality, while the continued disproportionate percentage of gay Massachusetts youth attempting suicide exists because of Gallagher & Co.’s fanning of anti-gay hostility in Massachusetts’ anti-gay bigots? Imagine how it is to be a 14-year-old gay teen of severely embittered anti-gay Massachusetts parents who ceaselessly use Gallagher’s gay-bashing propaganda against you in what is supposed to be your home. In answering the question “Do I have blood on my hands?,” Gallagher in her article alleged that she “felt a moral obligation to find out.” Too bad the gay-bashing monster didn’t feel a moral obligation not to lie about the Youth Risk Survey results for Massachusetts.
LET ME KNOW if you'd like me to put up a poll for her very worst.
I think I would pick #12.