Asinine story of the decade:Religious Right Mad at Gays For Using Rainbow Symbol

[BrklynLiberal]

Sounds like something from The Onion, right?? or maybe a National Lampoon movie.... The stupid is soooooo painful....

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/397629/religious_right_mad_at_gays_for_using_rainbow_symbol/#paragraph2

The leader of a National Organization for Marriage (NOM) affiliate has demanded that opponents of marriage equality reclaim the rainbow from “the gay lobby.” Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, the founder and head of the Ruth Institute, which describes itself as “a project of the National Organization for Marriage,” told the right-wing American Family News Network’s OneNewsNow that the rainbow should be the symbol of Prop 8 supporters and Religious Right activists because "the rainbow is a sign of God's covenant with man." According to Morse, who was also a speaker on NOM’s “Summer for Marriage” bus tour, the rainbow has been wrongly appropriated by the LGBT community. Morse appears to channel the famous 2009 NOM “The Gathering Storm” TV-ad which said “a rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color” are uniting to stop the “gathering storm” of gay-rights advocates.


"Proposition 8 was passed by a great grassroots coalition that included people from all across the religious traditions, and also people of every race and color," Morse recognizes. "We are the real rainbow coalition. The gay lobby does not own the rainbow."

She tells OneNewsNow that she wore a rainbow-colored scarf to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on Proposition 8 as a statement to signify that supporters of traditional marriage still own the symbol.

"We can't simply let that go by. Families put rainbows in their children's nurseries. Little Christian preschools will have rainbows...Noah's Ark and all the animals.... Those are great Christian symbols, great Jewish symbols," the Ruth Institute president points out.


The Ruth Institute’s projects include “bringing lectures and debates to pro-life, pro-marriage student groups around the country, at minimal cost to the students” and assisting “students in organizing pro-life, pro-family clubs on their own campuses.”

<snip>

:crazy: :silly: :puke: :puke: :puke:

[rexcat]

1. Oh please...

everyone knows when you see a rainbow god is having gay sex.

:evilgrin:

[Hepburn]

4. OMG...

...:rofl:

Excellent come back!

[justiceischeap]

2. NOM is the public face of the Mormon church (eom)

[xxqqqzme]

3. Grass roots my ass

Since when is funding from the Mormon & Catholic churches 'grassroots'?

[FreeState]

5. FYI - what the Pride Flag colors stand for:

and many used of rainbow flags... most not religious in origin either:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_flag

and the Gay Pride Flag:

Wikipedia Link

The original gay-pride flag was hand-dyed by Gilbert Baker with his boyfriend Jomar Teng. It flew in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 25, 1978. It has been suggested that Baker was inspired by Judy Garland's singing "Over The Rainbow". Another suggestion for how the rainbow flag originated is that at college campuses during the 1960s, some people demonstrated for world peace by carrying a Flag of the Races (also called the Flag of the Human Race) with five horizontal stripes (from top to bottom they were red, black, brown, yellow, and white). Gilbert Baker is said to have gotten the idea for the rainbow flag from this flag. The flag consisted of eight stripes; Baker assigned specific meaning to each of the colours:

hot pink: sexuality
red: life
orange: healing
yellow: sunlight
green: nature
turquoise: magic/art
indigo/blue: serenity/harmony
violet: spirit

Thirty volunteers hand-dyed and stitched the first two flags for the parade.

After the November 27, 1978, assassination of openly gay San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, demand for the rainbow flag greatly increased. To meet demand, the Paramount Flag Company began selling a version of the flag using stock rainbow fabric consisting of seven stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, and violet. As Baker ramped up production of his version of the flag, he too dropped the hot pink stripe because of the unavailability of hot-pink fabric. Also, San Francisco-based Paramount Flag Co. began selling a surplus stock of Rainbow Girls flags from its retail store on the southwest corner of Polk and Post, at which Gilbert Baker was an employee.

[BrklynLiberal]

6. Thanks for the info. I was among many who carried a rainbow flag at peace marches...

[justiceischeap]

7. And just to point out, the current "gay" rainbow no longer has 7 stripes

We're down to a nice even 6. So, the fundies aren't even aware how asinine they're being. They are actually trying to co-opt a unique rainbow specific to the gay community. Apparently, they're all secret homos! :)

[pgodbold]

8. Tell the NOM we fucking licensed the damn rainbow from God him/herself. nt

[ObsessiveAlchemist]

9. Yeah...

Because there aren't gay people of all colors, religions, and creeds. -facepalm- Nice to see they're wasting their time doing something meaningful.

[ShadowLiberal]

10. Rebranding a political image is a hopeless cause, even if it was once a religious image

NOM should do some research on history, and realize that a fight over the rainbow is a stupid hopeless cause. Once a symbol is branded as a part of a political movement there's no unbranding it, until that movement is forgotten about. Would anyone take someone seriously who wanted to reclaim the Elephant or Donkey symbols from democrats & republicans? Would anyone take a group of angry liberals seriously if they started their own Tea parties? Of course not.

The Nazi Swastika commonly associated with Adolf Hitler was actually stolen from a religion before Hitler used it. Even though Hitler's been gone for over half a century you'll find very few people who think of the Swastika as a religious symbol, rather than a symbol of Nazi's/Hitler.

[RetiredTrotskyite]

11. Yawn...

these people really need to get a life and GROW UP! No one "owns" the rainbow! What a lot of idiots!