The appeal espouses the notion that LGBT-rights groups are “desperate to divide the Republican Party,” given Ros-Lehtinen is the lone Republican joining 124 Democrats co-sponsoring the repeal of DOMA.

In a newsletter emailed to donors Tuesday evening, NOM President Brian Brown asked supporters to tell the congresswoman they are “outraged that she would abandon marriage and the millions of voters who have adopted state amendments to protect marriage.”

To make it easy, NOM has crafted a letter for supporters to send:

Dear Rep. Ros-Lehtinen,

I am writing to express my disappointment and deep concern that you would abandon traditional Republican principles of marriage, family, and democratic self-government. Marriage is a bedrock of our society, and I urge you to re-consider your position on DOMA.

By co-sponsoring Rep. Nadler’s bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, you are placing in jeopardy the laws of marriage in more the 40 states, threatening to impose same-sex marriage on voters across the nation who have resoundingly rejected same-sex marriage at every turn.

I urge you to drop your support for the repeal of DOMA, and to respect the voice of the American people, including the people of Florida, who have already voted to keep marriage as it has always been — the union of a husband and wife.

In a statement issued by the Log Cabin Republicans last week, Ros-Lehtinen explained that she co-sponsored the repeal of DOMA because, ”I firmly believe that equality is enshrined in our constitution and in our great democracy.”

The Florida representative has consistently co-sponsored LGBT-friendly legislation and recently joined the brand-new Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus.

“Gay marriage activists know they don’t need to persuade the Republican grassroots to support same-sex marriage – they just need to split off enough GOP elite opinion to provide cover as they force SSM on the entire nation,” Brown writes in Tuesday’s newsletter. “Several prominent GOP elites have already signed on, and gay marriage activists are spending millions of dollars to pressure and persuade more Republican lawmakers that they can support same-sex marriage without consequence.

“And maybe it’s time Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen started looking for a new job,” he added.

While accusing groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, the Log Cabin Republicans and Freedom to Marry of using money and influence to sway lawmakers on the same-sex marriage issue and to “gut the [Republican Party] platform of its traditional support for life and marriage,” Brown reminds supporters that NOM has committed to spending $2 million “to defeat the turncoat senators” who broke party ranks to vote for the marriage equality in New York in June.

NOM has taken credit for former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s congressional seat in New York’s 9th District recently going to Republican Bob Turner rather than Democrat David Weprin — because NOM donated money to the race.

NOM’s most recent defeat on this front was in Minnesota, a state where the organization recently helped pass a proposed constitutional amendment to appear on the ballot in 2012 that defines “marriage” as being only between one man and one woman. On June 30, the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board ruled that NOM and faith-based policy group the Minnesota Family Council must disclose their corporate donations.

The ruling forced NOM leaders to roll back on a promise they have been making to donors since the group formed in 2007: Their identities would never be revealed. And while the arguments made before campaign-finance boards in various states have remained consistent — to protect donors from violence and harassment — the arguments made to supporters and donors have been much more complex and carefully crafted. Over the past four years, NOM has carved out a narrative that its movement is one of religious integrity, grassroots nobility and subject to intense persecution from violent radicals.

The American Independent has analyzed redacted fundraising emails (PDF, large) from the early years of NOM’s anti-marriage-equality campaign collected and archived by the University of California – Los Angeles Department of Statistics. NOM has used different rhetorical tactics to solicit donations while simultaneously making the case for opacity, among them: painting NOM supporters as persecuted victims and marriage-equality advocates as violent perpetrators, and telling donors their livelihoods would be at risk were their names to be revealed.

NOM President Brian Brown’s emails through 2008 and 2009, and even today, often end in similar ways, with a postscript below his signature. From Nov. 14, 2008:

P.S.: Can you help us continue to fight? Donations to the National Organization for Marriage are not tax-deductible–but they are also not public record. Given the attacks on donors, I’m pleased to tell you: You can help us continue the fight without fearing for your family in these troubled times.

And from Jan. 30, 2009:

Help us defend Prop 8 now and in the future: Can you give $100, $500, or even $5,000 to support marriage? Donations to National Organization for Marriage are NOT tax-deductible but they are also NOT public information. So you can fight back against the bullying in good conscience without any anxieties.

Reason to donate and donate privately: Religious persecution

Once speculation began to buzz around LGBT-rights groups that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was heavily involved in pushing Proposition 8 in California in 2008 by donating money, time and volunteers to the campaign, NOM rushed to vilify the backlash spilling out from the gay community. Repeated in email after email are supposed threats faced by “traditional marriage” supporters “to people’s property, to their persons, to their livelihoods, and to their place of worship.”

In early November 2008, envelopes containing white powder were mailed to two LDS temples, in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, and to the headquarters of Knights of Columbus (which donated $1.4 million to NOM in 2009, as The Washington Independent previously reported) in New Haven, Conn. On Nov. 15, 2008, the Associated Pressreported that the packages — anticipated to be anthrax or another bioterrorist substance — tested nontoxic by the FBI. The source of the white powder mailings was never determined, and several LGBT advocacy groups condemned the threats, but the LDS and NOM blamed gay-rights groups and used these incidences as evidence that marriage-equality supporters were harassing anti-same-sex-marriage activists.

In an email dated Nov. 20, 2008, three weeks after Californians voted to strip homosexuals of their newly-received marriage rights, NOM President Brown announced the launch of AbovetheHate.com, a website (which doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2008) run by NOM and erected in response to the purported anger members of the Mormon church were facing for investing millions of dollars into the amendment to ban gay marriage in California. The main feature on the site is a letter addressed to Thomas S. Monson, president of the LDS church, and co-signed by 5,583 Evangelical, Catholic and Mormon leaders. The letter essentially defended the Mormon church’s extensive monetary contributions that went to defeating same-sex marriage in California and Arizona.

“In the wake of our Prop 8 victory, gay marriage activists have singled out the LDS Church for protests, hate mail, petitions to remove tax-exempt status, a lawsuit alleging election reporting violations, and even an anthrax hoax,” Brown wrote in the Nov. 20 email. “Reading some gay marriage blogs over the past few days, I was shocked by the venomous anti-religious bigotry being leveled against the LDS Church.”

The “anti-religious bigotry” Brown refers to partly exemplified by a Daily Kos blog postlinked on the AbovetheHate homepage (no other blogs are cited). The post, written by Dante Atkins, is dated Oct. 20, 2008, before the California marriage amendment vote:

“[T]he No on Prop 8 folks told me recently that the “Protect Marriage” campaign has raised $30 million dollars–over half of it from the Mormon Church. Now, I have nothing personally against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They most certainly have the constitutional right to worship in their own way. They have the right to minister in whatever way they see fit and to marry whomever they see fit in their churches. … But when the church and its members invest millions of dollars in an attempt to write discrimination into my state’s constitution and divorce my friend Brian against his will, there will be hell to pay.“

In the post, Atkins included a spreadsheet of donors to anti-gay-marriage campaigns in Arizona and California, which revealed their names, cities, amount donated and affiliation to the Mormon church. Atkins then asked marriage-equality supporters to research top donors’ backgrounds to find evidence of support for “less than honorable causes,” in the name of creating negative publicity for the Mormon church. Atkins encouraged readers to use “any LEGAL tool at your disposal.”

Brown wrote in reply:

This sort of targeted harassment against a minority religious community – simply because they have chosen to exercise their constitutional rights to vote, organize, and donate in support of a cause they believe in – has no place in American politics.

On Dec. 12, 2008, Brown updated his email subscribers, writing, “We have 5000 courageous signers so far. (Can you sacrifice $5 a month to help us keep the message going? For the price of a Big Mac you can counter the campaign of hate directed at religious people across this country.)”

A television ad from October 2008 — again, before the Prop 8 vote — produced byCourage Campaign depicted Mormon missionaries invading a lesbian couple’s home and stealing their wedding rings, ripping their marriage licenses. The ad was repeatedly excoriated by Brown, who on Nov. 14, 2008, wrote:

“A TV ad campaign viciously attacking a religious minority has been followed by a week of public intimidations, threats, calls for retribution, and attacks on people’s livelihoods, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. And this unprecedented flood of sheer hatred against Americans who think marriage is the union of husband and wife has been applauded and encouraged by mainstream, powerful politicians and organizations.”

Reason to donate and donate privately: If outed, donors could lose revenue/jobs

NOM launched another website on Dec. 10, 2008, the now-defunct BustTheBlacklist.com, a response to gay-marriage advocates launching boycotts against select California businesses that donated (or whose employees donated) to reverse marriage equality. Brown’s December 2008 emails focus on the small-amount donors attacked by anti-Prop 8 protesters, one being a Pollo Loco franchise employee from Lakewood, Calif., who, according to Brown, donated $100 to the Prop 8 campaign as an individual, not a representative of the restaurant chain.

Around this time, NOM and California-based coalition ProtectMarriage.com filed a jointlawsuit (PDF) against California Secretary of State Debra Bowen — in an effort to conceal the identities of their donors– and California campaign finance law, specifically the part that requires those who donate $100 or less to reveal their personal information. The lawsuit also challenged state campaign-finance policy that required reporting donations after a proposition had been voted on.

“Some people who supported Proposition 8 had their home and churches vandalized, were forced to resign their jobs, and were even threatened with violence and death,” Brown wrote in a December email defending the lawsuit.

NOM accused gay advocates of driving down A-1 Self  Storage’s Yelp ratings because the storage company donated to the Prop 8 campaign. In an email on Feb. 6, 2009, Brown asked supporters to go Yelp and write positive ratings for the business.

In an attempt to demonstrate that businesses were being harmed by the gay-marriage advocacy, in November 2008, the NOM team brought up the dating service eHarmony, which had been ruled by New Jersey’s attorney general to open up its online matchmaking services to same-sex couples. In fact, the ruling was the result of a 2005 lawsuit.

On Nov. 21, 2008, Brown wrote:

That New Jersey’s attorney general wanted to do so is just weird, given the large number of online dating (and, er, other) services available. Forcing eHarmony to provide a gay dating service makes sense only when you recognize what the architects of this movement really have in mind: using the law as a club to reshape the culture totally, so that people who believe in marriage – and the rest of traditional sexual morality – are forced out of the public eye altogether.

Reason to donate and donate privately: Protecting African Americans

Another oft-used NOM strategy has been to pit two minority groups — African Americans and the LGBT community — against each other, claiming gay-marriage advocates in California were specifically targeting African Americans by protesting Prop 8. NOM has also suggested that, generally, gay marriage threatens the black community.

In an email dated Nov. 21, 2008, Brown wrote:

Religious minorities (Mormons and African-Americans) are bearing the brunt of a new wall of licensed hatred, approved and encouraged by formerly responsible voices. No Americans, and especially not a religious minority, should face these kind of ugly threats because they have exercised their core civil rights to vote, to speak, or to donate in support of an idea like: marriage is the union of husband and wife.

In an email dated Nov. 14, 2008, Brown attempted to draw a correlation between former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to repeal Prop 8 and racism:

“What is Arnold Schwarzenegger, a white Republican, doing calling on courts to invalidate the votes of the 70 percent of African-Americans who voted to uphold marriage as one man and one woman?”

Another email, dated Aug. 26, 2009, discussed a Netroots Nation conference and picked out pieces of LGBT activists discussing their strategies to fight proposed state amendments banning same-sex marriage. Brown noted that a New Jersey woman making a documentary said she was having trouble finding members of the “minority” community who would speak in favor of same-sex marriage in the film.

“Maybe New Jersey minority community members understand that the ideal for children is a husband and wife working together in marriage, and that gay marriage will change what all our kids are taught by our own government,” Brown wrote in response. “Maybe they do not want to see the moral education of New Jersey’s black or Latino children co-opted to serve the interests of wealthy donors to the Democratic Party. Maybe they understand that there is something wrong when ‘civil rights’ is taken over to mean the right of two men to insist that we all view their relationship as a marriage, whether we like it or not.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (WDCpix)

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) almost certain to become President-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state, some foreign-policy experts in the Obama orbit are expressing frustration.

Clinton herself isn’t so much the problem, they say. It’s the loyalists and traditional thinkers Clinton is likely to bring into the State Dept. if she becomes secretary.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The dispute is only partly ideological in nature. While the coterie of foreign-policy thinkers around Obama have been more liberal, in an aggregate sense — on issues like Iraq and negotiations with America’s adversaries — the Obama loyalists question the boldness of the Clintonites. They fear that Obama’s apparent embrace of Clinton represents an acquiescence to the conventional Democratic foreign-policy approaches that they once derided as courting disaster. Some wonder whether a Clinton-run State Dept. will hire progressive Obama partisans after an acrimonious primary.

In addition, some Obama loyalists wonder whether the same people who attacked Obama on foreign policy during the primaries can implement Obama’s agenda from State Dept. perches. “Look, Clinton and Obama are both smart people,” said one Democratic official who would not speak for the record, “and I’m sure their one-on-one relationship would be OK. But when you hire a Clinton, you hire more than just that one person, you get the entire package.” If Clinton becomes secretary of state, it’s possible that the fissures between her loyalists and Obama’s would be a significant undercurrent of the administration’s foreign-policy decision-making.

No one would comment for the record for this story from either the Clinton or the Obama camps. Several people were reluctant to speak even on background, whether out of an exhaustion with a dispute that has lasted for more than 18 months within the party or out of reluctance to jeopardize their own prospects for jobs with the Obama administration.

Some in the Democratic foreign-policy community worry about the implications for a cohesive diplomatic message, given the differences in substance and tone between the supporters of the two Democratic giants.

“Foreign policy is probably where Clinton and Obama differ the most,” said the Democratic official. “They just have fundamentally different instincts. On the big decisions, Obama can and will certainly call the shots, but the consistency of follow-through could really be a problem. And the instincts on the smaller decisions will be very different. Cohesion of our foreign policy could suffer.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY)

Most directly at issue is the nest of appointments within the State Dept. — which in a Democratic administration is where most of the foreign-policy resumes go, as liberals traditionally gravitate toward issues involving diplomacy instead of defense. Since the terms of a prospective Clinton appointment are not yet worked out — ABC’s Jake Tapper cited an Obama aide on Thursday saying an announcement would likely come after Thanksgiving — it is unclear how much control Clinton would have over staffing the department, though veterans of previous administrations say it would be unheard of for her not to be able to bring in her own team.

“Sometimes, if you offer me a cabinet job, I take it but [only if] I get to pick all Senate-confirmable appointments, down to assistant secretary,” said one such veteran of prior administrations. “Or I get the top three and then we work out the rest.” In George W. Bush’s administration, for example, Dick Cheney placed his ally John Bolton as undersecretary of state as a check on a Foggy Bottom team that conservatives distrusted, Secretary Colin Powell and Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage.

Some progressive Obama supporters think the arrival of Clinton at the State Dept. will mean they’ll be frozen out. That would have implications for their advancement in subsequent Democratic administrations.

“Basically, you have all of these young, next-generation and mid-career people who took a chance on Obama” during the primaries, said one Democratic foreign-policy expert included in that cohort. “They were many times the ones who were courageous enough to stand up early against Iraq, which is why many of them supported Obama in the first place. And many of them would likely get shut out of the mid-career and assistant-secretary type jobs that you need, so that they can one day be the top people running a future Democratic administration.”

In the foreign-policy bureaucracy, these middle-tier jobs — assistant secretary and principal-deputy-assistant and deputy-assistant — are stepping stones to bigger, more important jobs, because they’re where much of the actual policy-making is hashed out. Those positions flesh out strategic decisions made by the president and cabinet secretaries; implement those policies; and use their expertise to both inform decisions and propose targeted or specific solutions to particular crises.

The responsibility conferred on those offices, and the expertise developed and deepened by their occupants, shape the future luminaries of U.S. foreign policy. Susan Rice, for example, served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in Bill Clinton’s second term and is now a leading contender for a top job in the Obama administration.

“These are your foreign-policy change agents,” said the Democratic foreign-policy expert.

Additionally, there are only so many jobs to go around. Many State Dept. positions go to Foreign Service officers and career bureaucrats. Important ambassadorships tend to go to large campaign contributors. And while the State Dept. was known as a repository of resistance to Bush during the past eight years, it has its share of Republicans, Obama-skeptics and even Bush supporters.

“State is already, like most agencies, riddled with Bush loyalists,” said a Democratic official with ties to the foreign-policy community. “If you add in a camp of Clinton loyalists, plus career staffers, none of whom are directly tied to Obama, I think it should be a serious concern to Obama. Clinton folks are known for their loyalty to the Clintons.”

There is an ideological component as well — though it is more complicated than either side typically admits. During the Democratic primaries, the Clinton campaign attracted more familiar Democratic faces from the foreign-policy community — the people derided by the liberal blogosphere as self-styled Very Serious People — who tended to be less progressive than their counterparts in the Obama campaign. The foreign-policy wing of the Obama campaign, during the primaries, considered itself as a force for redressing the timidity of the traditional Democratic foreign-policy community that acquiesced to disasters like the Iraq war.

Samantha Power (Wikimedia Commons)

“You’ve already begun to see it even before Sen. Clinton gets to the State Dept.,” said the foreign-policy official who has served in previous administrations. “Look at the people on the transition team. These are not people who necessarily supported Obama in campaign, and had different views on Iraq.”

Some Obama loyalists pointed to a 2007 memo written by Harvard’s Samantha Power — a former leading Obama adviser who resigned from the campaign after making an untoward remark about Clinton — that summarized the Obama campaign’s ideological meta-critique of many of the people who might staff a Clinton-run State Dept. Titled “Conventional Wisdom vs. the Change We Need,” the campaign released Power’s memo to the press after the Clinton campaign labeled Obama naive for proposing negotiations with dictators without preconditions; for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and for proposing highly-conditioned military strikes in Pakistan against senior Al Qaeda operatives.

“It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Power, who declined to speak for this story. “The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced and even naïve.”

Some in the Obama camp are left wondering whether picking Clinton as secretary of state represents an acquiescence to such conventional wisdom. “That memo was emblematic in many ways of the difference between the two groups,” said a Democratic foreign-policy expert and Obama loyalist. Asked about the ideological implications of the difference, the expert said, “The early Obama supporters were generally much more opposed to Iraq and you can draw out assumptions from there.”

Yet those assumptions are not entirely clear cut. Susan Rice opposed the Iraq war, but she was still a member in good standing of the traditional Washington foreign-policy community, ensconced at the ultra-establishment Brookings Institution. Her Brookings colleague, Lee Feinstein, signed on with the Clinton team and often criticized Obama, but he also wrote in favor of “unconditional negotiations with Iran” even before Obama entered the race.

Richard Holbrooke, a longtime progressive bete noir — and assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton — was an Iraq war supporter, but also been a leading voice with the Campaign to Ban Torture, a bipartisan pressure group devoted to rolling back Bush’s interrogation policies. And Clinton’s campaign gained the ardent support of liberal heroes like Gen. Wesley Clark and retired Amb. Joe Wilson, both of whom opposed the Iraq war.

The Democratic official noted Obama’s stated intrigue with presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals,” which documented the ultimately-constructive fissures in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, but rejected the comparison.

“The situation is fundamentally different today than in Lincoln’s time,” the official said. “The agencies are much more vast, so the people under the secretary, who aren’t directly controllable by the president, are a much bigger part of the equation these days. And when they are part of a group like the Clinton folks, it’s a real issue. Besides, even the Lincoln cabinet was much more dysfunctional than Goodwin’s book portrayed.”