My Dear Friends,

Will pro-gay-marriage millionaires divide and conquer the GOP?

You and I know that marriage is not a partisan issue. Pro-marriage leaders like Democratic Sen. Rev. Rubén Díaz in New York, or Maryland Delegate Emmet Burns, are demonstrating that every day.

But you and I also know that advocates of gay marriage have relentlessly sought to marginalize, stigmatize and suppress the voice of Americans who believe that to make a marriage you need a husband and wife.

An enormous amount of money and brainpower is now directed at muting or silencing the remaining bastions of pro-marriage voices: faith leaders—and the GOP.

Mayor Bloomberg is one voice for this new effort. He's now worried that Mark Grisanti, one of the four New York Republican senators who (after the seductive promises of Republican billionaires) decided to abandon the views of their constituents and vote for gay marriage, may decide to take the hundreds of thousands he's helping raise for him and defect to the Democratic Party.

Gay-marriage advocates from Bloomberg to Tim Gill to Ken Mehlman look across the pond and see that the party of Margaret Thatcher, the "Conservative" Party in Great Britain, is now threatening to pass a gay marriage bill.

Could the same thing happen to the party of Ronald Reagan?

Not while you and I live and breathe and exercise our God-given ability to act!

But the point person for this quiet new effort has now emerged: Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen announced that she would co-sponsor the bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act— becoming the first Republican to sign on to Manhattan Rep. Jerrold Nadler's (D-NY) legislation.

The Manhattan conspiracy against the Manhattan Declaration principles—respect for life, marriage and religious liberty—has now begun!

Rep. Ros-Lehtinen is the very first Republican defector on DOMA. She's abandoned marriage. And in order to please gay leaders, she has actually signed onto an even worse bill—a bill which would put Catholic Charities and other religious adoption agencies out of the business of helping care for foster children under the federal foster care program.

Life, marriage, and religious liberty will hang or fall together. An American society which treats Bible-believers as haters and bigots is not an American society which will stand up for founding principles.

And actually, Ileana appears to know this—she seems pretty nervous about her stance, given that she is not personally talking at all. She's referring reporters to the Log Cabin Republicans, who put out a press release speaking on her behalf.

We sent out an urgent email alert this week asking you to write to Rep. Ros-Lehtinen and let her know: Repealing DOMA is a bad idea for America and a losing issue for Republicans!

So far, more than 2,000 of you have answered our call. And hundreds of you have written to NOM to thank us and to pledge your financial and personal support.

Thank you. Without you NOM is nothing. Together, standing firm on behalf of God's truth and common sense, we cannot be defeated!

Thousands of you have responded to the launch of NOM's new Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance.

And the press is taking notice!

Here's an interview in National Review with Maggie, NOM's co-founder, on the launch of MarriageADA.org:

"GALLAGHER: Marriage ADA's goal is an America where people on all sides of the gay marriage debate feel free to participate peacefully in the democratic process without fear of threats, harassment, or retaliation. I know that Frank is not the only one, because I'm getting e-mails from others who've faced similar threats. The goal of too many gay marriage advocates is to isolate, intimidate, and silence Americans who believe that marriage is the union of husband and wife, because children need their mom and dad. Marriage ADA is a response to these tactics of branding civil, thoughtful participation in democracy as hatred and bigotry.

"I hope, by creating community, to inspire more Americans to stand up for their rights to preach, teach, and live the idea that to make a marriage you need a husband and a wife. There are too many of us to stigmatize if we stand together."

This week the Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance is featuring another brand-new interview with another American hero: Jerry Buell, the 2010 Teacher of the Year in Florida who was disciplined by a public school district for posting to his private and personal Facebook account his personal objections to gay marriage in New York.

Hundreds of Americans, even many who disagree with Mr. Buell's views on gay marriage, turned up to express support for fundamental American civil rights: to speak, to donate, to vote, to write, and to organize without fear of losing your job. (And yes, I believe this applies whether you are for or against gay marriage—no loving, decent, law-abiding American citizen should be afraid to engage in this important public debate!)

See Jerry and his wife on the next Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance video:

And guess what? Jerry won! In face of the disinfectant of sunlight, the diversity police backed down! After all, the taxpayers who fund them don't support bullying.

And here's what I want you to do this week: Thank a hero. If each of us can only do one thing, we can at least do that.

Thank Jerry for standing tall for the right to express personal views in your personal time.

Remember, they want us to feel alone, so we can be isolated and stigmatized—so that we will back down.

When we stand together, there are too many of us to punish for exercising our core civil rights in the United States of America!

How bad can it get if we do not speak truth, even in the face of power?

Here's a look from Great Britain, where a Christian café owner was told by local police in Lancashire that a video screen showing all the verses of Bible in sequence was a criminal violation, after a "customer" called the Bible "homophobic."

That's right: Displaying all the verses of the Bible was criminal violation of "Section 5 of the Public Order Act," which makes it a crime to:

"(a) use[] threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

"(b) display[] any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby."

In a supposedly free and democratic country, it's already come to that. That the police can even imagine that they have this power is a very chilling sign, regardless of how the case actually plays out. It's already come to that, even though a new report in Great Britain shows that the majority of the British people continue to oppose gay marriage.

That’s because in Great Britain, political elites can succeed in freezing out the will of the people. When all party leaders agree that gay marriage is good, the people have no political vehicle to record their opposition. Shutting down political debate has been a key factor—another reason why we are so determined to make sure that Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen hears from you!

In Great Britain, it is still a defense to this alleged crime of violating "Section 5 of the Public Order Act" that an individuals comments were "reasonable."

But of course the gay marriage movement, even in this country, is dedicated to the idea that all disagreement with its views is inherently "unscientific" and "unreasonable."

We are fortunate to have the strongest free speech tradition of any nation on Earth. But the tree of liberty must be nurtured, if it is to survive and eventually thrive. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

In addition, we need respect for rational debate, even where we disagree. In this context I wanted to report to you a little piece of good news from the scientific community. In spite of the pressures to be politically correct, a major social science journal has just published a study of "religiously mediated" change in the behavior and self-orientation of religious people who experience same-sex attraction.

From the press release:

"Psychologists Stanton L. Jones (Wheaton College, IL) and Mark A. Yarhouse (Regent University) have just published in the respected, peer-reviewed Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy the final results of their longitudinal study of individuals seeking sexual orientation change through involvement in a variety of Christian ministries affiliated with Exodus International.

"The results show change to be possible for some, and the attempt not harmful on average. These results stand in tension with the supposed professional consensus; more information is available at www.exgaystudy.org."

Managing sexual desire can be hard for any of us; it's always easier to amend our standards to match our sexual behavior than vice versa, as too many straight guys in politics show us over and over again.

But faith in human freedom and human reason should be bigger than any given political debate. In this context it is heartening to discover that the majority of motivated religious individuals in this sample who sought to bring their sexual behavior to conform to their religious ideals succeeded—some by changing their self-reported sexual orientation, even more by exercising the difficult virtue of chastity.

Even those who disagree with us about gay marriage (or Christian sexual ethics) should feel good about this this scientific verification of the possibility of free will triumphing over desire. We are all more than our instincts, sexual or otherwise.

The whole American tradition of respect for the rights of human beings is grounded in this vision that through the rational exercise of our God-given desire to find truth, we can succeed—both as individuals and as a community.

Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention recently told me that he was re-reading all the books which influenced his youth, including Witness, the great autobiography of the former Communist who became a crusader for freedom, Whittaker Chambers.

Chambers's autobiography is moving precisely because he decided to stand against Marxism and stand with the great truths of what we then called Western Civilization—faith in ordered liberty, reason, democracy, and above all, moral truth governed by a just and loving God—even though he strongly suspected that Communism would be the winning side.

He had enough faith, in other words, to stand for what is right, but not enough faith to believe than in the end truth cannot be defeated by untruth.

The laws of nature, and of nature's God, cannot be gainsaid by any merely human power, whether it is the will to evil, or merely the will to self-deception, or even ignorance of the truth.

Major powers in society can conspire to preach and teach an untruth, and conspire to suppress voices standing for truth—but in the end the project will fail. It will crash against the rock that truth does exist, human nature does exist, and children do need their mother and father.

I'm so proud and humbled to be standing with you in defense of these great truths—winning victories that no one predicted were possible, until you stepped forward to make them happen.

Faithfully,

Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage

P.S.: As we stand with you for the truth about marriage and human nature, we rely on you for support. NOM needs people willing to give what they can, whether that is $100 or $20 or a monthly donation of just $5. Know that when you give to NOM, you are preserving and protecting marriage not only for yourself, but for your children and grandchildren as well. Thank you for all you do!