Maggie Gallagher, head of the National Organization for Marriage, responded today to questions from the media on whether NOM dropped its relationship with scandal-plagued former Miss USA Carrie Prejean.
Gallagher posted statements at the National Review’s “the corner” blog, but she never says whether or not NOM scrubbed Prejean material from the NOM website, as gay rights group Californians Against Hate has alleged. Even though Prejean has worked to become one of the most identifiable figures with the Christian-right values voting bloc in the country, Gallagher writes that she is baffled at the “newsworthiness” of Prejean’s past, which this week is being filled out by allegations that she made a series of sex tapes for man she met for a hotel fling in 2007.
Gallagher’s blog directly responds to questions posed by Christian news website LifeSite News. At the blog, Gallagher repeats Prejean’s dissembling description of her sex tape(s) as “sexting,” a distinction Prejean is certainly aware of, even if Gallagher isn’t.
Carrie has never worked for the National Organization for Marriage. Out of the goodness of her heart, when we cut an ad “No Offense” featuring the vicious attacks on Carrie — and by extension every California voter who supported Prop 8 — she agreed to appear at our press conference to call attention to our message. I remain grateful to her for that.
I have no personal knowledge of the allegations. Carrie has told the media she participated in some instances of ‘sexting” to her then-boyfriend. I cannot believe that reputable media are featuring said boyfriends as they anonymously dump intimate details about Carrie.
Admittedly, I am getting kind of old. But in my old-fashioned view boyfriends who release such information on ex-girlfriends are scummy. I don’t understand the newsworthiness of these allegations.
Seven million Californians voted for Prop 8. I have no doubt that quite a few of them are people who committed sexual sins of various kinds. Why is this one 22 year old girl carrying the whole weight of that on her young shoulders?
The whole episode is weird, sad and ugly. No-one should face this kind of invasion of their privacy simply because they believe marriage is the union of husband and wife. Period. I hope the people gleeful about this attack are enjoying their phyrric victory. What they have done says far more about them than about Carrie, who is a not-unusual California 22 year old.
Prejean’s “No Offense” ad for NOM:
Prejean became a darling of the values-voter bloc when she told gay blogger Perez Hilton during this year’s Miss USA pageant that marriage should be restricted to straight couples. The episode sparked controversy and Prejean soon began to appear at outlets across the media spectrum and accepted speaking gigs for conservative organizations and causes.
Soon after the pageant, however, topless photos of her appeared, their existence never reported by Prejean in violation of pageant rules. Pageant boss Donald Trump defended her but Prejean proved increasingly difficult for pageant officials to work with and Trump eventually dumped her. NOM championed Prejean throughout the ordeal, saying she had become the target of a national Hollywood culture for articulating her Christian values in defiance of the gay agenda.
In an interview with TMZ, the man who Prejean sent the surfacing sex tapes to said Prejean’s Christian identity seemed a moneymaking pose.
“She’s just using religion to get to where she’s at right now,” he said. “Really, I mean if she was just herself and she’d just take the route of ‘Hey I just like to party and I like to have a great time and I’m hot,’ hey, that sells too. She’s just trying to sell to a different crowd right now, and I’m not buying it, and a lot of people that know her, I mean, they don’t buy it either.”
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