Dear Marriage Supporter,

You know me. You know I'm a happy warrior.

Even as we speak, voting has begun in North Carolina over the Marriage Amendment.

The vote may well be close, but only for one reason: Gay-marriage advocates in North Carolina have abandoned the idea that they can win a vote on gay marriage.

Instead, in North Carolina they've conceded defeat on the main question—should marriage be a union of husband and wife?—and are blanketing the airwaves with lies to scare voters into thinking the amendment will somehow strip women of protection from domestic violence.

We've seen this before, by the way, as the Marriage Law Foundation's president Bill Duncan points out:

"[A] majority of state marriage amendments also prohibit legal statuses that are just marriage by another name so what North Carolina is doing is hardly unprecedented. Some of these amendments have been on the books for eight years with none of the outcomes North Carolina gay-marriage advocates have predicted. On the other hand, to understand why the proposed amendment's drafters felt it necessary to include a prohibition of civil unions, one need only remember that a Ninth Circuit panel cited the fact that California had a marriage amendment and a civil-union statute simultaneously as a reason for invalidating California's Proposition 8 just months ago."

(A group of law professors at Campbell have carefully refuted these ludicrous claims in this PDF.)

Thirty-one states have marriage amendments, some with wording quite similar to North Carolina's. In none of them have women been deprived of domestic violence protection because they are not married to their abusers.

The good news is that gay-marriage advocates in North Carolina have conceded that gay marriage is a losing issue with voters. And they're not the only ones.

Washington Post blogger Jonathan Bernstein notes a strange disconnect between the triumphalist rhetoric on gay marriage in the mainstream media, and the way Democrats are treating the issue:

Greg has been reporting recently on a fascinating issue: how Democrats will handle same-sex marriage in their 2012 party platform. The general sense has been that Barack Obama is lagging behind his party on this issue, and that it'll be hard for him to block a marriage equality plank without angering core Dem voters.

That may be true. But if so, he may have company: Dem candidates for the U. S. Senate also are generally avoiding or downplaying the issue, at least if their campaign web sites are any guide.

For the first time, some polls show majority support for gay marriage. But if this is any guide, Democrats are still being extraordinarily reluctant about an issue they seem to think can still backfire on them.

(Maybe they are watching the carnage in New York state among Democrats who came out for gay marriage in conservative districts!)

On the incredible scandal and potential politicization of the IRS I have a bit of good news to report: We spoke with the Inspector General of the IRS, who has assured us that the IRS takes the misuse of taxpayers' private data very seriously and will conduct a serious investigation.

We are glad. But the IRS will only prosecute a crime if the crime was committed internally by an IRS agent. The other possibilities—that the IRS database was hacked into by an outsider, or that an individual criminally impersonated a NOM staffer to obtain this data—must be pursued by the Department of Justice.

The Human Rights Campaign scrubbed its website of any mention of NOM's stolen 990s, after our lawyers demanded they do so. The Huffington Post remains in violation of federal laws that forbid "knowingly" retailing illegally-obtained IRS data.

Thanks to Red State's Erick Erickson, the Weekly Standard, and GOPUSA for covering the story.

But thanks especially to Alliance Defense Fund's Brian Raum for his column, "In Defense of the National Organization for Marriage":

"The unfounded attacks and insults lodged against the National Organization for Marriage have increased recently by an ever ravenous opposition. The Human Rights Campaign has shamelessly published NOM's confidential IRS records, and last month a federal judge unsealed some of NOM's constitutionally protected internal reports.

"Not surprisingly, those who seek to redefine marriage immediately seized upon the opportunity to attack NOM based on these documents with salacious accusations and vilifications," writes Raum.

He goes on to ask this important question, "So why are HRC, The New York Times, and others attempting demonize NOM simply because they have sought to marshal the black and Hispanic communities to speak out for marriage...?

"The reason why NOM's opponents are so enraged is because NOM is effective."
I think he's right about that. It's not because we speak hatefully or intemperately. You and I have always bent over backwards to remind our opponents that we believe gay people are human beings like us with legitimate rights that need to be respected. But none of us have the right to redefine marriage.

Let me pause to say thank you for all the good together you’ve allowed us to accomplish. We are drawing fire because we are effective, thank God!

This week we released a new video: Is gay marriage a civil right? Listen to these African-American and Latino leaders explaining in their own words why they oppose same-sex marriage:

I defy anyone to say that leaders like these are speaking because NOM is manipulating them. That's a racist idea. Clearly these brave men and women are, like other Americans, standing up for what they believe is right for America!

The crisis we face, together, is that fewer Americans are willing to speak for marriage; when you hear of a loss in the polls, it stems from the communications breakdown in the mainstream media.

At NOM we are fighting this in multiple ways, including by bringing you news you will not hear anywhere else:

NOM's Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance now has a new spokesman, Damian Goddard.

You may remember Damian Goddard as the Toronto sportscaster who was fired one day after tweeting that he believes in the "true and authentic" meaning of marriage.

This week he introduces Daniel Glowacki, a 14-year-old Michigan boy, who was persecuted by a teacher and kicked out of his classroom for raising his hand and saying the "homosexual lifestyle" was against "my Catholic religion." Daniel was told he did not belong in a public school by this public-school teacher, according to eyewitness accounts.

When the school disciplined this out-of-control teacher, the teacher went to the press and was lionized for standing up to homophobia. The school district backed down. Daniel and his mom were left hanging.

Please watch this video. And do as Damian asks: Send a word of encouragement to Daniel and his mother. The Thomas More Law Center is defending their rights legally. But we need to send a message to Daniel: You are not alone. Together we will fight against the injustice descending on our great country.

To see the future we must fight against, all we have to do is look at our sister democracies.

In Great Britain, it's just now been ruled illegal for counselors to help clients fight unwanted same-sex attractions. If you want help controlling your sexual impulses so you can lead the life you believe is right—you have to go it alone.

As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey, just warned the European Court of Human Rights, "In a country where Christians can be sacked for manifesting their faith, are vilified by State bodies, are in fear of reprisal or even arrest for expressing their views on sexual ethics, something is very wrong."

Yes, something is very wrong. Our core faith traditions are under sustained attack. But just as importantly, we are losing marriage as a social institution, under the twin pressures of the sexual revolution and the gay-marriage juggernaut.

Young people are being told repeatedly, by authoritative voices, that marriage has nothing to do with its deep, cross-cultural purpose of bringing together mothers and fathers for children. "Marriage is a right!" "Marriage is about soulmates!" "Marriage is—well, what exactly is the point of marriage?"

The young are responding by eschewing marriage in record-breaking numbers: ABC News is reporting the demographic decline under the headline, "The End of Marriage?" For the first time the Census Bureau is reporting that fewer than half of all households consist of a married couple. The numbers are from 2010—down from 52 percent in 2000 and 78 percent in 1950.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of babies born to unmarried cohabiting couples skyrocketed, from 14 percent in 2002 to 23 percent in 2006-2010.

In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last reports on another aspect of this crisis, in "Demography Is Destiny": an unwillingness to give ourselves to children at all.

Israel is the only developed country in the world where women have enough children to sustain the current population.

A new report shows a huge rise in middle-aged Americans entering old age alone:

The proportion of adults ages 46-64 who are not married climbed from 22 percent in 1980 to 34 percent in 2009. In 1980 45 percent of those were divorced, 33 percent widowed, and 22 percent never married. Today 58 percent are divorced, 32 percent never married and only ten percent widowed.

These are all practical problems for a society. Much suffering has already ensued and more is on the way. But the root of this crisis surrounding generativity is a spiritual crisis. At the heart of this crisis is our inability or unwillingness to commit to marriage and all it represents.

Marriage binds us together, but only on the condition that we surrender the grandiose idea that we can make up what marriage means. To put the self at the center of marriage is to surrender what marriage is and what marriage alone can do.

The untold crisis of what used to be called Western Civilization is that we have not yet found a way to revive our commitment to marriage. Not to marriage as a romantic fantasy, or marriage as a civil-rights cause, but marriage as a symbol of the great truths embedded in Genesis: We are born male and female, and ordinarily called to come together in love to make and raise the next generation.

Some truths are too precious to abandon, too foundational to surrender.

Thank you for being a leader for marriage. For being one of those Americans who understands what is at stake and who will show the Daniel Glowacki's of the world: You are not alone.

You are our future.