8/2/2019 HRC Freedom to Marry Letter to Cardinal Dolan

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April 10, 2012

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, President

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

3211 4th Street, Northeast

Washington, DC 20017-1194

Dear Cardinal Dolan:

On behalf of the Human Rights Campaign and Freedom to Marry, the two largest organizations working to secure

marriage equality in America, we are writing to ask that you and affiliated groups such as the Knights of Columbus end

your financial support and collaboration with the fringe group known as the National Organization for Marriage or NOM.

Last week, HRC uncovered a series of documents that shed light on the racially and ethnically divisive strategies and

tactics used by NOM.

The documents reveal that NOMskey goals are to drive a wedge between gays and blacks, and to manipulate Hispanic

communities by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity and to make opposition to gay marriage anidentity marker, a badge of youth rebellion to conformist assimilation to the bad side of Anglo culture. Perhaps mostshocking, NOM planned to identify the children of gay parents willing to speak on camera, essentially tricking minorsinto publicly criticizing their families.

Sadly, the evidence shows that the funding provided to NOM has been used to exploit people of color and the children of

gay parents in this country as pawns in a political chess game. NOMs attempt to manipulate these communities andfan hostility has outraged fair-minded Americans and civil rights leaders all across the country. The NAACP,the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the National Council of La Raza are just a few of the many

national organizations condemning NOM and these poisonous strategies.

It is hard to believe that the Catholic Church hierarchy, which professes to promote the greater good which the Church

offers humankind, would continue to funnel funds into, and align itself with, an organization that explicitly uses suchtoxic tactics to pit American against American, minority against minority, family member against family member. The

Knights of Columbus, to give just one example, has acknowledged pouring at least one million dollars into NOM.

The truth is the great majority of Catholics support the freedom to marry. The Public Religion Research Institute recently

found that 71 percent of American Catholics support civil marriage for same-sex couples. Increasingly, church-going

Catholics question why hospitals, soup kitchens, and even parish churches are being closed for lack of funds at the sametime their Church leadership is spending millions of dollars to divide families.

Freedom to Marry and HRC implore you to stop collaborating with, and to immediately stop funding, the National

Organization for Marriage and such tactics. By doing so you would send a resounding message that race-baiting, ethnic

exploitation, division, and anti-gay campaigns have no place in the Church, or in America.

Sincerely,

Joe Solmonese

President, Human Rights Campaign

Evan Wolfson

President, Freedom to Marry