Lie about gay assault backfires on NOM in North Carolina

Maggie Gallagher

In 2008 in the aftermath of the Proposition 8 vote, the National Organization for Marriage was able to spin a story of gays allegedly assaulting an old woman to raise its profile and embarrass the gay community.

Four year later, this tactic has backfired in North Carolina regarding the fight over Amendment One - an amendment that if passed would cause chaos in North Carolina

Yesterday, Maggie Gallagher herself wrote the following post:

The Vote YES For Marriage NC campaign is reporting on Facebook that an elderly woman who refused to surrender her "vote yes" sign was beaten by a gay marriage advocate.

I knew of at least one case like this in California. This comes from "de-legitimizing" your opponents, claiming there is no possible argument for any point of view but your own.

I hope North Carolina does not become a repeat of the harassment and occasional violence we saw in California:

Gallagher was probably referring to the case of Phyllis Burgess, a woman who was allegedly assaulted by gay equality supporters during the aftermath of the Proposition 8 vote. On camera, Burgess was shoved and had a styrofoam cross ripped from her hands.

NOM and the rest of the religious right consistently brought up this camera footage as proof that gays are pushy and violent when we allegedly can't get our way.

However, they only told part the story.  The real story was that Burgess did not inflame the crowd by her views, but her actions. She allegedly elbowed her way to the front of the group so that she could be seen on camera. And in doing so, she allegedly knocked a disabled man to the ground.

How the religious right spun that story was no doubt fresh in the mind of Joe Jervis from the blog Joe.My.God because he investigated the North Carolina incident. This is what he found:

Guess what? The story was a lie.

According to Detective Branch, the woman in question was not in her own yard, as was implied by Vote For Marriage NC, she was at another house "looking for her sister." Branch told me that there the woman may have argued with a man about a yard sign, but Branch didn't know where that sign may have been located or for which side of the marriage issue it advocated. It's possible that she was complaining about the other man's own yard sign. There may have been no yard sign at all.

Robeson County officers advised the woman that if she wanted to pursue charges about having her car door slammed on her as she left the man's house, she could file for a misdemeanor charge of simple battery. Branch said no such claim was yet on record.

Does anybody want to take odds that Vote For Marriage NC confesses to their numerous outrageous lies about this concocted event?

Check out the rest of the Jervis's blog entry for how many times Vote for MarriageNC changed its tweets on the matter.

The irony is that while NOM and Vote for MarriageNC  spins their false story, they conveniently miss an actual story of a man shooting an anti-Amendment One sign allegedly on his neighbor's property:



Kismet is indeed a harsh mistress, isn't it, NOM?