Ah, those silly Republicans who don't get technology

[giza]

First, I'll quote the post from ontd_political:

Well known "conservative," columnist, and hard-core bigot Maggie Gallagher runs an organization known as "NOM." Contrary to the name, "NOM" is not for kittehs eating cheezburgers but in fact stands for "National Organization for Marriage." Their campaign uses many of the traditional stupid arguments to "fight" gay marriage. With the victories for gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont in recent weeks the NOM people decided they needed to "step it up" a notch and launch a NEW branded campaign to "save" marriage.

However, in a stunning show of ignorance the NOM folks decided to name their campaign "Two Million For Marriage" and in their own branding call it "2M4M." Yes, that's right, they named their anti-gay initiative with the acronym for "2 men for male," a personal ad code for a gay couple seeking a third for threesomes. This has invited a bunch of scorn in the media, alongside what's being directed at other conservatives for calling their "anti taxes" groups "teabaggers," again missing out on the sexual context.

In a show of complete Internet ignorance, however, NOM failed to secure the domain for their campaign, 2m4m.org. It was, instead, registered and used for a site called "Two Men For Marriage," which was built-out over the weekend and is featuring content that combats the fear, uncertainty and doubt that NOM is spreading.

I joked elsewhere that the Republican party is quickly turning into the "Grand Old White Guys Party", and an amazing lack of technology clue and slang clue like this certainly doesn't help the perception of that. Come on guys, is it really that hard to type "teabaggers" into Google?

(Incidentally, the Urban Dictionary term for "teabaggers" has already been updated to reflect recent SNAFUs.)

I'd sure like to see a distribution of age and gender in the Republican Party, including the mean and standard deviation on the age data.

Something I still don't understand is that with all of the problems facing our country, especially right now, with the economic recession/depression we have going on, why are these people fixated over denying equal rights to a small group of people? Don't they have better things to be doing, like, giving to charity, or volunteering in soup kitchens? You know, typical Christian values.

Comments

[desteredra.livejournal.com]

Actually, the progressive linguistics expert George Lakoff has had some interesting things to say to this effect: http://tinyurl.com/dkb324

You and i recognize that love is love no matter what equipment someone has had the (mis)fortune to be born with, and see same gender marriage relationships as being about nurturing and honoring a committed long term relationship, not unlike interracial marriages. Conservatives, i believe, still feel that love isn't really love if it doesn't come in the hetero strain, so they see same gender marriage as honoring a relationship between two people who lack the discipline to find members of the appropriate gender, which to them makes it not a proper long term relationship at all--rather like wedding a junkie to his/her pusher, i suppose.

As for why now...I dunno; for those very rich who are still somewhat insulated from the effects of this economic crisis, maybe it's not that big a thing. And of course everyone has their pet issues that are automatic high priorities for them. And in the midst of a loss of economic control and threats of a shift of power away from the multinational corporations conservatives so love, maybe it's refreshing to think about a part of your life you still feel like you're on top of.

It does seem bizarre to me that an organization's PR person, even a conservative one, wouldn't check for alternate meanings to their jargon before creating it, of course. But then i guess some jargon gets created so quickly and organically that no one stops to think the phrase might mean something different to someone else. Ages ago, i think i ran across an alternate definition for keapano's "frabbit" in the urban dictionary that i'm sure he never intended.