'We are being outgunned,' NOM leader says in conference call

by Mike Andrew - SGN Staff Writer

In a remarkable October 3 conference call taped and posted online by Good As You blogger Jeremy Hooper, the leaders of the four current anti-marriage-equality campaigns spoke candidly about their shortcomings.

The mood was somber as they followed NOM mastermind Frank Schubert in confessing that things are not going as planned for their efforts to prevent marriage for Gay and Lesbian couples at the ballot box this fall.

'In all cases we are being outgunned, out-fundraised, and certainly have very little support in the popular media,' Schubert reported.

The call was facilitated by right-wing Southern California pastor Jim Garlow and included Schubert, Preserve Marriage Washington chair Joseph Backholm, anti-equality campaign leaders from Minnesota and Maine who reported on efforts in their respective states, and a number of conservative church leaders who listened in.

NOM OUT OF MONEY
In spite of NOM's promises to pour millions of dollars into anti-equality campaigns in all four states where the issue is on the ballot, Schubert confessed that 'we're completely dependent on the people of faith, across faiths, no matter their religious background to rally together, to come together - first to give us the funds that we need to fight this campaign, secondly to become volunteers, to provide the ground troops that we need to get the message out, and finally to pray that the Holy Spirit will bless our efforts, and come down and move minds and hearts in these four critical states.

'Marriage is on the ballot, it's a national referendum, and we cannot afford to lose,' Schubert concluded.

Backholm reported that the campaign to reject Referendum 74 is not catching fire, even among churchgoing Washington voters.

'What I've noticed here in Washington,' Backholm said, 'what I've sensed is there's still a degree of absolute - you know - not even awareness of what's going on, and I - as I talk to people all over the state, there are still, you know - thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who are in churches who aren't even aware that this is happening.

'They're not aware that marriage is on the ballot, and I think that speaks to the culture in some of our churches where we're just literally burying our heads in the sand and acting like it doesn't exist.'

Echoing Schubert's reliance on 'people of faith,' Backholm called on the pastors who were listening in on the conference call to motivate their colleagues for an all-out push in the final weeks of the campaign.

'What I think really needs to happen is a lot of conversations between pastors need to take place,' Backholm said.

'It needs to be friend-to-friend, colleague-to-colleague, pastor-to-pastor, where they are encouraging each other to understand why this matters - not just, yeah, as a matter of policy, but why it matters to the gospel and why it matters culturally for the church to engage in those things.'

'It's not a stretch to say that quite possibly in some of the states, maybe Washington being one of them, that the majority of evangelical, Bible-believing pastors are not aware of the implications of what is about to come in November should we fail to deliver on this,' Garlow added.

IS SATAN TO BLAME?
After a report from Carroll Conley of the Christian Civic League of Maine, Schubert returned to report on Maryland and to reiterate NOM's notorious divide-and-conquer strategy of pitting the LGBT and African-American communities against one another.

'Particularly for African-American pastors who may be with us,' Schubert said, 'I would ask for you to be bold and challenge this wrongheaded idea, that somehow redefining God's institution of marriage is a civil right, that it somehow equates to the great struggle of the black community.

'With lynchings, with the denial of basic human recognition, with all the sufferings that the black community has gone through, now there's an attempt by largely white Gay activists to hijack the civil rights movement and to cloak themselves in it, in an attempt to break the support of African-American voters away from their church.'

Garlow then launched into a tortured Biblical exegesis, asserting that Satan wishes to destroy 'covenantal' one-man-one-woman marriage because that system is a metaphor for Jesus's relationship with the church.

After comments by several pastors reporting that their congregations were solidly opposed to marriage equality, Garlow urged the participants to 'get this [audio] viral' by sending it around to like-minded clergymen.

'We only have 30 days to get this done,' he warned.

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