The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) was founded in 2007 with the mission to “protect marriage and the faith communities that sustain it.” While the mission of the National Organization for Marriage sounds innocuous enough, the tactics that the organization plans to engage in–and apparently has been engaging in for some time–are much more sinister.

According to Alvin McEwind of Firedoglake, in an unsuccessful fight to avoid financial disclosure laws in Maine, NOM was forced to reveal documents which exposed the organization’s plan to divide the black and gay communities by using gay marriage as a wedge issue. NOM’s document, titled “Marriage: $20 Million Strategy for Victory” is available online.

On page 11 of the document the National Organization for Marriage makes its intentions clear:

3. Not a Civil Right Project
The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key democratic constituencies. We aim to find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; to develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; and to provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party.

Also on page 11 there is a section which discusses the need “to accomplish a sophisticated cultural objective: interrupt the attempt to equate gay with black, and sexual…” Due to the low quality of the upload I cannot tell whether or not the sentence ends with the word sexual and the period is too light to appear on the page, or if there is more to the document.

On page 10 the strategy to “sideswipe” President Obama and paint him as a “social radical” is fleshed out.

The one positive that I can attribute to the document is that it demonstrates a clear acknowledgement of the need and desire to reach out to Latino and Black voters. According to “Marriage: $20 Million Strategy for Victory,” the Latino vote is growing too large and becoming too important to be ignored.

The National Organization for Marriage: Anti-gay? yes; racist? Probably not.