On Tuesday, Sept. 14 – with a wide swath of primary elections across the country – the National Organization for Marriage focused its attention on one race: a challenge to marriage-equality supporter D.C. City Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr.
NOM failed.
Thomas, a Democrat who voted for the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009, is confident that his vote was not just right, but also good politics, saying, ''[I]f I had been on the other side of this issue as a councilmember, I wouldn't have been as successful [in my re-election campaign].''
Thomas represents Ward 5 in Northeast D.C., which – as he described it to Metro Weekly at his campaign headquarters during a victory party on Tuesday night – has ''a large African-American population, a large Catholic community, a large Baptist and religious community.''
Referring to NOM's perceptions of his ward, Thomas said, ''People automatically assumed they would be so adamantly against someone's rights.''
NOM was wrong about the bigotry of that ward. Thomas won the race with 65 percent of the vote in the four-person race. The NOM-supported bigot got 17 percent.