Dear Marriage Supporter,

Truth matters. Especially when bullies and bureaucrats conspired to hide it.

Standing Up to IRS Bullies

NOM's decision to stand up to abuse and fight back by suing the IRS is generating a mountain of positive responses with major media outlets. By our rough count, NOM's case has been mentioned over 85 times this past week!

A special shout-out to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a major GOP presidential hopeful, for speaking out about this abuse of power in front of the cameras at a morning press conference:

Fox News took notice on numerous occasions — including this one:

Here's NOM's own fighting law professor and Chairman John Eastman on Neil Cavuto:

But of all the coverage the one that lays bare new and important details is this radio interview between Mike Huckabee and John Eastman:

Mike Huckabee: "...this is pretty explosive. It's one thing to say an application got bureaucratic red tape that's inexcusable and unforgivable but what you're saying is that the information that by law is confidential on your tax return was handed over to the co-chairman of the Obama for reelection campaign?"

Prof. Eastman: "That's right so let me walk very precisely through the steps and the evidence. In March of 2012, a copy of our confidential tax return was posted on the website of the Human Rights Campaign which is the leading pro gay-marriage organization in the country. . . there's portions of our tax return that are as private and confidential as your private 1040 tax returns and it was that portion, that schedule B that lists all of our major donors and their addresses that was given to the Human Rights Campaign and they posted it on their website for the explicit purpose of then targeting our donors and harassing them, intimidating them, trying to chill them away from engaging in the political fights that we engage in."

"We know that it came from the IRS because the copy HRC posted on its website contained some redacted information our computer geniuses were able to remove. Those were codes showing the copy came from the IRS not us. [That means whoever leaked and/or posted it was aware they needed to cover up this information proving a felony had been committed]."

Huckabee: "I mean you literally do have at that point a smoking gun, don't you?"

Eastman: "Yes we do, it's a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison to release private IRS information. It became a felony in 1976 because of concerns about the way Nixon had abused IRS private data for political purposes."

NOM's smoking gun is particularly hot because it blasts open the current IRS narrative that just a few guys in Cincinnati did the wrong thing while trying to be efficient, as Gov. Huckabee astutely notices:

"You know this is really stunning and especially in light of hearing the testimony of Steven Miller before Congress this morning. I'm not sure John if you had an opportunity to hear it but his whole defense was that there were some mistakes made but there was no partisanship and that they were just trying to be very efficient and that's why all this happened, in their attempt to be incredibly efficient. This is not efficiency, what they're after with the National Organization for Marriage. They take information, they feloniously give it away to an organization that hates you and then expect us to believe that that's all in the name of efficiency?"

But as John Eastman says, that's not even the whole story. The evidence of systemic Orwellian corruption gets worse:

"When we discovered the smoking gun that this felony leak came from within the IRS in April of 2012, we filed complaints and requests for information with both the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration [they authored the report that came out this week] and with the Department of Justice.

We know the IRS conducted the investigation because they asked us for a lot of information, mostly trying to demonstrate that the leak came from someone inside our organization. When that turned out not to be true, somehow the investigation just kind of drifted off. We heard no more from the IRS.

The next step was to file a series of Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests trying to determine the name of the individual who leaked this information. We are legally entitled to this information, if the IRS knows it. We wanted the information because while we cannot decide to criminally prosecute anyone, there are also civil liabilities amounting to $1000 for each instances of illegal disclosure, plus attorney's fees."

As John Eastman told Huckabee: "I got to tell you the responses out of the government have just been bizarre."

"In response to our first request, the IRS said, "Well, any info we have is under the jurisdiction of the inspector general's office so ask them." So we did and we got the response "you already made this request and we don't respond to multiple requests for information. You have your answer."

So we then asked for, as we're legally allowed to do, the status of the investigation, whether it was conclusive or inconclusive and whether there was anybody identified as committing this crime who is once their appeals have run we're allowed to have that information.

The answer from your government about this threat to your rights was just incredible:

"The inspector general's office took the position that the very statute that makes it a felony to disclose a taxpayer's tax returns protects the individual who committed that felony because he is himself a taxpayer and the subject of an IRS investigation. Unbelievable," Prof. Eastman concluded.

I have to thank Gov. Huckabee for doing the single best coverage of what is really at stake here. He knows how government works, when an issue is serious, and when you need subpoena power to uncover the truth.

Mostly he understands how important it is not to back down but to stand up and fight back:

Huckabee: "And I want to commend you for just not taking it lying down, maybe even making some noise and not acting on it. I think this has got to work its way through the courts because there's going to be discovery, depositions, judges, a much different kind of atmosphere than there will ever be in a congressional hearing and this is where this belongs so let me say I know this is not going to be pleasant or inexpensive but I think it's critical on behalf of every organization that you guys follow through this lawsuit and I commend you for it."

And then he asked his listeners, as we ask you, to support us with the donations we need to fight the IRS:

"Well I will definitely remind our listeners, www.nationformarriage.org is the website and it is going to be a long slog of a process and I know that they're going to need help because they need to raise money for the cause not to have to fight the IRS in court which is one of the things that big government does it forces people to use up their resources to hire attorneys and accountants to fight the government rather than be protected by the government. Our thanks to John Eastman . . . we've got to get to the bottom of this."

And I promise you we will!

Illinois Update

In Illinois it is down to the wire; the session ends May 31. We've spent $125,000 in Illinois helping amplify the voices of thousands of Illinois people and pastors (especially the brave African-American clergy who have stood up the Chicago political bosses and shouted: "Stop!").

I hope they learn the lesson from Minnesota about the deceptions too many gay marriage advocates think are justified in pursuit of their agenda.

Bait, Switch and Lie: Doreen's Story

Our Thomas Peters went on Minnesota NPR alongside gay marriage honcho Evan Wolfson (he's the big recipient of GOP pro-SSM money at this point). He pointed out that voters in Minnesota were lied to; they were told the amendment wasn't necessary; if they voted "no" nothing would change. So the host asked the very next caller, a woman named Doreen how she would respond to that:

Doreen said: "If I had known that [voting "no" on the Amendment] would open the door to same-sex marriage I would definitely not have voted the way I voted. I would have voted YES, should be in the Constitution ... ya know, I was lied to. Plain and simple. I was told nothing would change. And now everything is changing. It's just not right."

You can hear the interview with our able Thomas Peters and Doreen's response here:

Speaking of able, NOM's founding Chairman of the Board, Prof. Robby George appears on a new PBS special on the Constitution (you can watch it here🙂

He appears discussing the Prop 8 and DOMA legal cases at 14:40 to 16:45 — just after a gushing interview with the lesbian couple in the Perry case and a historical review of the invalidation of laws prohibiting interracial marriages.

NOM's other former Chairman of the Board, Maggie Gallagher is up on National Review patiently answering the question we've answered over and over again: "How does same-sex marriage affect marriage's relationship to procreation, given infertile couples may marry? "

Dear [Name Redacted}:

I have made this argument repeatedly. I understand you either disagree with it or can't hear it.

Childless and older couples are part of the natural lifecycle of marriage. Their presence in the mix doesn't imply anything about the relationship between marriage and procreation. They've always been there.

I went around saying for years "marriage matters because children need a mom and a dad" nobody ever said: that's not true because infertile couples can marry. Never, not once. Sexual union of male and female who are co-parents in itself points to affirms, and regulates an ideal.

Whereas two men, if married, clearly, clearly state that either the ideal for a child is not a mom and a dad or that marriage has nothing important or integral to do with that ideal. When anyone says children need a mom and dad now, the response is a powerful rejection from gay marriage advocates: that's a discriminatory idea that has been disproved by science. The logic of marriage equality has a real cultural force.

I think that is playing out in the rapid abandonment of the idea that marriage is related to children among the young. I can't prove it because cultural logic while a powerful force is hard to translate into social science evidence.

I can provide evidence but not proof.

If we cared seriously about marriage's role in regulating childbearing, we would not be disrupting this norm on behalf of the maybe one-half of one percent of the population (and that is generous) who wants to enter this institution. It cannot remain the same institution, as many gay marriage scholars have acknowledged, any more than a boy's school can admit girls and remain a boy's school.

Marriage equality is going to be used primarily to enforce the new moral norm: no differences between straight and gay can matter. Or as Think Progress put it recently "At a basic level, it's logically impossible to say that heterosexuality is better — or should be the norm — compared to homosexuality without simultaneously stating that homosexuality is worse — or abnormal. Either all people are equal in society or they are not; she cannot have her straights-only wedding cake and eat it stigma-free."

And over in Great Britain Patricia Morgan points to the data that explodes the argument Cameron's Tories are making that gay marriage is somehow a conservative idea that will strengthen marriage as a social institution.

It hasn't happened in Scandinavia, Spain, Massachussetts, or anywhere else that has adopted gay marriage. In Holland she points out the number of first babies born to unwed couples has doubled to 40 percent since gay marriage was adopted.

It is as absurd as the oft-repeated argument that gay marriage will somehow improve a state's economy or that a marriage amendment will hurt jobs.

Here's the thing they don't believe that you and I do: truth matters.

If we speak with love, conviction and courage, on behalf of the timeless truths that government has no right to redefine—in the end we will win.

Thank you again for standing up for God's truth about marriage and our Founding Father's vision for what American politics should be.