Remember last year when the National Organization for Marriage did an epic media face-plant with it's #March4Marriage tag, which was supposed to advertise it's march on the Supreme Court but instead attracted more marriage equality supporters that opponents? Would you believe they're actually doing it again?
The 2015 March for Marriage is our last, best opportunity to reach the U.S. Supreme Court before they decide whether marriage as it has existed throughout our history is unconstitutional. For months, activist federal judges across the country have issued illegitimate rulings redefining marriage against the will of 50 million state voters and legislators who voted to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Blah, blah, blah, yakety, smackety.
Their roster of speakers reads like a who's-who of right-wing closet cases and faux-Christian piety. You'd think that'd be enough to attract the bigots who are afraid of catching "the Gay" once same-sex marriage becomes legal. But apparently, they're having some trouble raising the funds to get people to DC.
From their GoFundMe.com page (updated 6 hours ago as of this writing)...
Friends -- We've made good progress over the weekend toward our $40,000 goal -- raising over $19,000 so far -- but we still have a LONG way to go and only a FEW DAYS to get there!
There are thousands of people coming to Washington to stand up for the truth of marriage -- but there are thousands more who wish to come, but lack resources for transportation -- many of whom are from urban, minority Churches and communities. Nobody should be denied the opportunity to march for marriage due to finances.
Now I have no doubt that they can reach their goal in a week. If a bunch of homophobes can raise over $400k to support a bigoted pizza owner in Indiana, I'm sure the NOM nut-jobs can pull in $20k in a few days. Besides, right-wingers love nothing more than to throw hard earned money into worthless causes as long as it supports their self-victimhood.
All of this aside, the thing that actually puzzles me is why keep the Twitter tag #March4Marriage (or #MarchForMarriage)? The reason that many LGBT clicked the tag in the first place was because we thought it was about marching FOR marriage equality. When we found out otherwise, well...the hilarity pretty much ensued from there.
If there is one thing we've learned from these futile attempts to stop marriage equality is that right-wingers in general are really, really bad at social media messaging. Remember back in 2008 when anti-Gay groups came up with #2M4M, which was supposed to mean "2 Million for (traditional) Marriage", but as anyone who has ever cruised the personals in Craig's List know is really code for "2 men seeking a third".
And of course who can forget THIS precious gem.
Yeah. I guess this guy is SUPPOSED to be PRAYING, right?
I submit that groups like the National Organization for Marriage should immediately FIRE whoever is in charge of their social media outreach and go back to just plain old letter writing with pen and paper (or perhaps smoke signals and carrier pigeon). After all, if you're going to continue to cling to a mid 20th century fantasy that only ever existed on 50's TV, you might as well stick to the limited resources of the time, especially since that's all these groups know anyway.
As for the rest of us, we've just been given another Twitter hashtag to take over.