NOMexposed.com

As the National Organization for Marriage, or NOM, embarks on a fall election campaign to defeat candidates who support full marriage equality, the Human Rights Campaign, in collaboration with the Courage Campaign, unveiled "NOM Exposed," a live, interactive website which reveals NOM's deep anti-gay affiliations, its long connections to the Mormon and Catholic churches and its quest to keep voters in the dark about its financing. The site is at www.NOMexposed.org.

At the same time, HRC announced the formation of the NOM Project to follow the ongoing political work and propaganda of NOM as it attempts to influence elections and legislative campaigns across the country. The project will be led by Kevin Nix, a longtime LGBT advocate and political and media consultant. A former communications director at both Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and the Family Equality Council, Nix also worked at Media Matters in the 2004 presidential cycle.

NOM Exposed builds off the success of Courage Campaign's NOM Tour Tracker - a blog of first-hand accounts, photos and videos chronicling NOM's "2010 Summer for Marriage--One Man, One Woman" bus tour of 17 states. The Courage Campaign deployed three staffers to follow NOM's tour and file reports from the road, generating more than one-million page views and more than 15,000 comments. During the course of the tour, federal courts declared two of NOM's top policy priorities - California's Proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act - unconstitutional.

The NOM Tour Tracker showed NOM's summer tour consistently outnumbered three-to-one by pro-equality counter rally participants organized by Freedom to Marry and state LGBT organizations. It also showed NOM staff attempting to limit public access to their events, and NOM's sparse supporters doing everything from speaking in tongues, to comparing marriage equality to genocide and advocating the murder of LGBT families.

NOM Exposed, the result of several months of research and collaboration, reveals the following:

• At a time of the country's greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, NOM's financial growth has been explosive. NOM has amassed huge resources - estimated to reach or exceed $10M in 2010 - from modest beginnings in 2007.

• NOM is a highly secretive organization that tries to not only hide the identity of its political donors from the voting public in state after state, but operates in a way to discourage people from knowing who its key players and associates are.

• NOM has deep connections to the Catholic Church hierarchy, to the Mormon Church, to evangelical right-wing pastors and churches and to those who have a long history of anti-gay rhetoric and activity. These are individuals and organizations which not only oppose same-sex marriage, but oppose domestic partnerships, civil unions, hate crimes protections and even fertility treatments for women because some of those women could be lesbians.

• Since 2008, NOM and its allies have engaged in a radical, nationwide plan to flout long-established campaign finance disclosure laws. This is nothing short of a strategic, coordinated plan to hide NOM's political activities from voters. This effort has prompted several state investigations and resounding legal defeats for NOM.

In addition to the rich archive of information, NOM Exposed features a blog where the latest on NOM's activities will be tracked. LGBT leaders will also contribute guest posts to the blog with their own research and experiences with NOM. Freedom to Marry which organized the Summer For Marriage tour in response to NOM has the inaugural guest post up today.

The Courage Campaign is the California partner organization of Keystone Progress. Both organizations are members of the Progress Now network.

Equality Pennsylvania and the Human Rights Campaign Partner in Fight for Equality

New partnership to focus on employment protections and working with communities of faith

HARRISBURG - Equality Pennsylvania (EQPA) - the LGBT advocacy organization for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania - and The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) - the nation's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization - have formed a partnership to secure equality in the Keystone State. The new partnership, which includes a joint staff member, will focus on securing support to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) at the federal level and statewide non-discrimination legislation, as well as improving relationships between the LGBT community and various communities of faith.

"We are extremely excited to join Equality Pennsylvania in their great work for fairness," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. "EQPA clearly knows its mission and has recently undergone significant changes aimed at making it a truly effective state LGBT civil rights organization. We recognize the importance of those changes and we look forward to working with them to make equality a reality in Pennsylvania."

With an eye on the upcoming elections, HRC and EQPA will target six congressional districts, over 50 state house districts, and 25 state senate districts to gain support for employment protections and to elect fair-minded candidates. Special attention will be paid to the faith community to gain support for passing non-discrimination legislation at the federal and state levels.

"Equality Pennsylvania has been working very hard over the past several months to improve our effectiveness and sharpen our message," explained EQPA board president, Brian Sims. "Our goal remains to represent all of the state's LGBT community in finding better avenues to equality, and we knew from the beginning that this partnership was a perfect way to help us meet the many challenges the organization and our citizens face all the time."

The organizations will be sharing the staff work of Allyson Diane Hamm. As the Statewide Organizer, Hamm brings years of organizing experience to the job. Currently the vice-chair of the Allentown Human Relations Commissions, she is also vice president of Interweave, the LGBT organization of the Unitarian Universalist Church. Hamm is also the former president of PRIDE of the Greater Lehigh Valley and worked as a special project and regional coordinator for PA-GALA (Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance). She has campaign experience and has been active in the LGBT community for over a decade.

Hamm's responsibilities will include outreach to groups located throughout Pennsylvania that could be helpful in the efforts to pass non-discrimination legislation on both a state and federal level. Her job will also involve special attention being paid to faith community outreach in the hopes of generating improved support for passing non-discrimination legislation within that large constituency. Hamm will also assist in efforts to educate the LGBT community on the upcoming election as well. She will be based in the Lehigh Valley.

This is one of EQPA's first partnerships with a national LGBT civil rights organization and one of HRC's most in-depth partnerships with a state equality organization.