Eden sent me that Brian Brown fantasy tour summer video last night. I dropped what I was doing to watch it because I needed a break from reality. Thank you Brian, for delivering!
Mr.
Yes, “Gathering Storm Chasers” was funny, but your video can be serious as well. Whatever inspires you to get creative.
If you need more material, just scroll back through the NOMTourTracker.com archives for a month’s worth of posts, pics and videos.
Let’s show the real Brian Brown summer vacation video, the one that has no followers, no energy and no future. The one that wants to divide families, attack judges and that does not trust America.
What do you say? You always rise to the occasion. Give it a go!
UPDATE BY EDEN: Not that I need to say so, but feel free to use this as an Open Thread to talk about Rick’s post above or whatever is on your mind…
Number of equality supporters, as hand-counted by NOMTourTracker.com: 3,419
Number of NOM supporters, as hand-counted by NOMTourTracker.com: 1,274
But you wouldn’t know it from the tight shots employed by Louis and the NOM videographers, showing handfuls of people selected to make the crowds look much larger than they actually were.
Check it out for yourself:
As Brian Brown put it:
Pulling 3 minutes of highlights from more than 30 hours of footage taken at 23 rallies over the past month is no small task!
Especially when there are fewer people at your rallies than NOM staffers!
As Jeremy Hooper says over at Good As You, Brown predictably chose to use the screaming match in Providence as the primary framing on the video, setting up the victim narrative yet again, even though he was using a bus tour to attack the legitimacy of same-sex couples merely wanting the same right he enjoys.
And Jeremy points out that Brown fudged the truth yet again. It’s not a “new” web site, Brian, it’s a relaunching of the same web site that failed the first time (back in 2009):
We’re producing our own video version of events and let’s just say that it will be a bit more, er, accurate.
Meanwhile, let us know in the comments what other fabrications you see in this video — and what you think about them. (In the extended entry, I’m posting Brian Brown’s full email)… (more…)
As the NOM tour came to a close this past weekend, I thought it’d be fun to do an overview of all the highs, lows, and everything in between… with some numbers. I’ve compiled some top-line numbers as an overview, and some on-the-ground numbers from our intrepid team. (Meanwhile, if you want to go down memory lane here are the full NOMTourTracker.com archives for your reading pleasure).
Enjoy!
Number of states visited: 17 + District of Columbia
Number of locations NOMTourTracker.com was on hand: 22
Number of equality supporters, as hand-counted by NOMTourTracker.com: 3,419 (counts in the extended entry)
Number of NOM supporters, as hand-counted by NOMTourTracker.com: 1,274 (counts in the extended entry)
Number of views on NOMTourTracker.com and Prop8TrialTracker.com combined: 2,926,416
Number of comments on NOMTourTracker.com and Prop8TrialTracker.com blog posts combined: 53,803
Number of NOMTourTracker.com videos: 171 (we’ll be showcasing some of the extra footage later)
Highest number of tolls the NOMTourTracker.com car has gone through in the shortest number of days: 35 in 4 days (while driving through Maine, New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts)
Number of times lead in the wrong direction by “Miss GPS”: “Too many to count.”-Anthony
Number of brown suits worn by Brian: 1
Number of questions actually directly answered by Brian: 0
Number of interviews of Brian Brown by Arisha in which he throws his head back and cackles: Every single one.
Most common song played on the NOMTourTracker.com car radio: Hands down, it would be Adelle (this is largely the choice of Arisha and Phyllis)
Number of tornado warnings issued on the tour: 3
Number of times luggage was forgot in another city: 1 (cough, Phyllis, cough, 2 hours after leaving Atlanta)
Number of times Phyllis’ phone battery died because of Miss GPS: Once a day
Number of times NOM Tour Trackers spotted NOM bus driver texting or talking on cell phone: Every time we had seen them
Number of hotel keys collected: 14
Number of times NOM Tour Trackers had to buy new clothes because there were no washing machines: 4
Number of bug bites: Countless
Number of times Arisha has made us laugh: Countless
In the extended entry, check out our tour hand-count of attendance at each location, both for equality supporters and NOM supporters… (more…)
Well, have I got some videos (and other coverage) for you. We have our videos uploaded from the NOM and “The Big Commit” Freedom Plaza rallies in DC. Here are some barnburners along with other coverage:
First and foremost, Courage Campaign Founder and Chair Rick Jacobs confronts NOM President Brian Brown. The results are pretty epic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWJJ67aqG9E]
He
Because we can’t end the NOM tour without one more video of Christian theocrats spouting their interpretation of God’s will, here you go:
I didn’t find time to post this before the event, but Kate Clinton’s giving Maggie a talking-to, via GetEqual, is pretty funny.
You Councilmember Marion Barry told a crowd, “We want to be moral, and moral leaders. I’m a politician who is moral, standing on the moral compass of God.”
Yes, this is the same Barry who was arrested for smoking crack cocaine, when he was in a hotel room with a woman 15 years his junior while he was married to someone else.
Openly gay D.C. Councilmember David Catania said in reply, “I want to do what Marion Barry has done four times. I want to get married.”
If you’ve seen any other noteworthy coverage, feel free to leave in the comments.
This is the a photo of members of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property from the event in Harrisburg. Here’s an interview with two of the members:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-3kZGceHhc]
Key
Or these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx4KeRagkDE]
They’d? Is that a family?
NOM supporter: It’s half a family. <chuckles>
Anthony: But you said a family is one man, one woman, what if there is no man?
NOM supporter: What if there is no man? It’s half a family… the man that was part of that left, so the family isn’t really left.
Wait. Let’s see that one again:
Anthony: But you said a family is one man, one woman, what if there is no man?
NOM supporter: What if there is no man? It’s half a family.
I’m not selectively quoting anything, and this wasn’t just some random person with a sign, either. The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property is an organization with, according to Wikipedia, 135 staff members, claiming 120,000 members worldwide, and offices across the country. They were given a prominent space in which to demonstrate at the NOM’s Harrisburg event with their own outfits, banner and all. Given that those with opposing points of view were confined to the space across the street, and their prominence both as demonstrators and as an organization, it would be a fair point to say they were doing so under the auspices of NOM.
And under those auspices, they just called single-parent families an oxymoron.
UPDATE (8:13 PST): I want to pull out a comment from JuliaL:
So the wife of a serviceman, caring for their three children while the husband goes to war, is part of a family so long as the husband lives. When he dies heroically in the service of his country, she and the children no longer count as a family.
I was watching HBO’s True Blood yesterday, whose character Lafayette reminded me of the memorable Belize from Angels in America. I’ve seen the amazing Tony Kushner play twice (and the made-for-TV version a third time), but I was driven to watch clips of it this morning. As I watched the moving portrayal of the stigma around HIV/AIDS, I wondered how NOM and their rank and file supporters would have reacted to such an epidemic and “homosexual disease” racing across America. Would they have shown the same intolerance and disdain for a debilitating disease as they do for equality?
Then I watched this video Anthony took in Harrisburg, PA. Take special note of this man’s comments about AIDS and “homosexuals”:
Absolutely stunning. This is the ugly face brought out and exposed by NOM’s “Summer for Marriage” tour.
In a coincidence, Frank Rich’s NYTimes column from yesterday happened to be titled “Angels in America”. In it, he describes Judith Peabody and her mother-in-law, Mary Peabody, two “high society” women who shook up the circles in which they traveled by volunteering for civil rights and AIDS activism. Rich writes:
The Peabody women were among the countless players in these larger civil rights dramas. They are testimony to the courage, big-heartedness and sense of fundamental fairness that can flower in our country in the most unexpected quarters even as the angrier and more malign voices dominate the debate.
Voices like this man’s- who refused to even give his name to Anthony because Anthony is gay- are among those faces Rich describes, which we’ve seen exposed into the sunlight over the course of this tour. While it is painful to watch, I don’t believe it is a bad thing. Videos like this man’s will become the new version of firehoses spraying civil rights activists in Birmingham, footage which shocked many Americans and led to an awareness of the evils of discrimination and segregation during the civil rights movement. So while NOM’s hate and the hatred and bigotry of men like this may be dominating the debate, I say: let them talk. We will document their language and show it to the rest of this country.
I believe doing so will help us continue on the path to defend constitutional rights from a majority vote. As I wrote this afternoon, election law by design prevents civil rights from being put to a popular vote in the District of Columbia. Ted Olson memorably told Chris Wallace on FOX News “Would you like FOX’s right to free press put up to a vote?… These are fundamental constitutional rights.” This reminds me of a quote from Rich’s piece and one of my favorite quotes from Belize in Angels in America (bolding mine):
We are still a young, imperfect, unfinished country. As a young black man working as a nurse in a 1980s AIDS clinic memorably says in Tony Kushner’s epic drama “Angels in America”: “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.”
But sometimes we do hit that note, however tentatively. How one wishes that the many gay Americans who were left to die in the shadows during that horrific time — and, in most cases, without a Judith Peabody, let alone a legal spouse, by their side — could hear Judge Walker’s clarion call.
Sometimes we do hit that note- and if we do, let’s make sure we expose the face of those who helped make it so, so it never happens again.
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