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Creep of the Week: National Organization for Marriage

It's no secret that anti-gay right wingers are obsessed with sex. No doubt folks like Tony Perkins, Don Wildmon and Maggie Gallagher think about your sex life more than you do (and yet gays are supposedly the sex obsessed perverts).
So when the National Organization for Marriage nicknamed their new Two Million for Marriage initiative "2M4M," they received plenty of ribbing for being so outside of the gay sex lingo loop.
As MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said, "If you don't know what the abbreviation M4M stands for, I do not want to spoil your Googling fun, but here's a hint: The related search that Google suggests is for the Web site Manhunt."
In other words, don't Google M4M at work unless you're self-employed or work for, say, a self-righteous anti-gay marriage organization.
Even better than the initiative's name, however, is the commercial NOM produced to spread the word. Dubbed "A Gathering Storm," the made-to-be-parodied ad features actors (and I use that term loosely) expressing their fear about gay marriage whilst standing amidst lightning and thunder clouds in what I guess is supposed to be what heaven will look like once gays can legally wed all across this nation.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich described the ad as what would happen "if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic 'The Village of the Damned' with the Broadway staple 'A Chorus Line.'"
Stephen Colbert said, "I love that ad. It is like watching 'The 700 Club' and the Weather Channel at the same time."
The ad opens with a blonde woman saying, "There's a storm gathering" then cuts to some guy saying "The clouds are dark and the winds are strong." A woman who bears a striking resemblance to Ugly Betty says, "And I am afraid."
After parading the multi-ethnic cast of scaredy cats before us, the ad starts presenting real folks who've been discriminated against. The thing is, they aren't real folks, and the discrimination they detail is just hypothetical. There's a tiny, tiny disclaimer in the ad, but clearly folks are supposed to watch the dumpy woman in the dark pantsuit say, "I'm a California doctor who must choose between my faith and my job," and take it as fact.
The ad has inspired countless parodies on YouTube, including a mash-up with the video for "It's Raining Men."
The best one, however, comes from faux-newscaster Stephen Colbert. Using a cast of various ethnicities rotating from line to line and a strikingly similar set, it's far better than the original. "There's a storm gathering," it begins. "A giant gay storm. With rough winds blowing in from the east. And even rougher winds blowing from the west. Before long, the winds will be blowing each other."
Granted, the ad campaign gets more attention every time someone makes fun of it, but I don't think the increased exposure of NOM's original ad will do them much good.
Rich claims that the ad marks "a historic turning point in the demise of America's anti-gay movement."
"What gives the ad its symbolic significance," Rich writes, "is not just that it's idiotic, but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it advances any message, it's mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead."
For the first time in history, my friends, it's going to start raining M4M.

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Topics: Opinions
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