Thursday, August 08, 2013

Iowa ethics board will investigate National Organization for Marriage


The anti-gay bigots and self-enriching hate merchants at the National Organization for Marriage ("NOM") like to congratulate themselves on their piety and godliness even as they lie through their teeth, seek to breed discord between blacks and gays, and violate campaign finance laws wherever they operate.  The latest state to launch an investigation of NOM is Iowa where NOM bundled money and participated in a campaign to oust Iowa Supreme Court justices who had joined in the Iowa Supreme Court opinion striking down Iowa's ban on gay marriage.  Here are highlights from the Des Moines Register:

A national organization that opposes same-sex marriage may have violated state law by not disclosing its donors in its fight to oust Iowa Supreme Court justices, ethics officials said today.

The Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board voted unanimously to investigate the National Organization for Marriage, saying that if the allegations against it are proven true, the marriage group’s actions would violate state law.

The decision to investigate is a triumph for Republican former presidential candidate Fred Karger, who filed the complaint against the National Organization for Marriage on June 13.

Karger said the D.C.-based group spent $635,000 in 2010 and about $100,000 in 2012 to try to oust four of the justices who were part of a unanimous 2009 decision that allowed same-sex marriage in Iowa.

Megan Tooker, the ethics board’s lawyer and executive director, noted that the National Organization for Marriage was “absolutely wrong” in several of its interpretations of state law.

Tooker said if the marriage organization solicited and received donations for the purpose of defeating the Iowa justices, by state law, the names of those donors should have been disclosed.

One piece of evidence in the complaint is an email the National Organization for Marriage sent out on Sept. 21, 2012 that asks for cash donations specifically for the fight against the Iowa justices, Tooker said.

In its written response, the marriage organization argued that the release of donors isn’t required if funds are raised through phone calls and emails.  “That’s absolutely false,” Tooker said.

The folks at NOM make tawdry whores look virtuous in comparison.  I continue to believe that NOM's goal is to hide the fact that a handful of big donors - e.g., the Roman Catholic Church and/or other religious denominations - are its principal contributors.

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