No one believed that the passing of California’s Proposition 8 would be the end of the gay marriage debate in this country, especially since there are 49 other states in this great union of ours. This spring, the states of Iowa and Vermont became two new tourist destinations for gay couples looking to get hitched — and in the process, kicked up the discussion up a few notches.
Last fall’s pro-Prop 8 video campaign was pretty damn savvy, but taking on the cause now is the unfortunately acronymed NOM. Nope, nothing to do with adorable kitties eating their cheezburgers — the National Organization of Marriage is a nonprofit seeking to protect heterosexual marriage from the “gathering storm” of gay marriage. Which they’re trying to do with ads like Gathering Storm, which points to same-sex marriage as just one facet of America’s war on faith.
Gathering Storm, however, made a few key mistakes — the immediately recognizable set-up (a diverse group of people standing in front of rainclouds), the extreme earnestness, and the over-reliance on the storm metaphor have made it an easy target for video mash-ups and parodies. Barely Political is hosting Gathering Storm Chasers, which combines ad footage with clips from the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers — meanwhile, It’s Raining NOM rescores the ad with the Weather Girls’ It’s Raining Men. And in case you think I went to any effort to find these videos, let me assure you I did not — they were two of the four top Related Videos on Gathering Storm’s YouTube page.
(There is also a star-studded Funny or Die parody, featuring Sarah Chalke, Jason Lewis, Alicia Silverstone, Lance Bass, Sophia Bush, George Takei, and Jane Lynch.)
Oh, and the people featured in the real Gathering Storm ad? They’re actors. How do we know this? Because the Human Rights Campaign found the complete audition footage — and instead of claiming that it was faked, NOM filed a copyright claim with YouTube to have it removed, thus proving its veracity (the footage can still be found on Vimeo). It’s served to give anyone with a webcam yet another idea for mockery — there are at least 20 results currently on YouTube for “gathering storm auditions”, of which “Gathering Storm” Audition #34 is a pretty good example.
Given all the increased attention the issue’s been getting, it made sense that celebrity gossip fiend Perez Hilton, serving as a judge at this weekend’s Miss USA pageant, asked Miss California what her thoughts were on it. Her response — which refers to man-and-wife marriage as “opposite marriage” — kicked off a new round of debate that was well-captured by the WSJ’s Digits blog. But my favorite thing to come out of it is the always wise Jay Smooth’s observation in today’s Morning Doctrine that perhaps Miss California’s answer to the question reflects a more fantastical truth.
Each side of this debate comes to it from an incredibly personal place — after all, at the core of it we’re discussing the definition of love in the eyes of the government — and sometimes it seems like each side is more focused on energizing its base than actually trying to have a discussion about the issues. But along the way we get dozens of videos, millions of views, and thousands of comments. Whether it succeeds in changing anyone’s mind when it comes to such a personal issue is tough to say. But somewhere in this mess, people are actually trying to talk about it. Which is something.
