March 30, 2012

How Mitt Romney Funded an Effort to Divide Blacks and Gays

Mitt Romney gave $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage in 2008.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mittromney/7027734697/sizes/z/in/photostream/">Mitt Romney</a>/Flickr

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We’ve known that Mitt Romney helped bankroll California’s anti-gay-marriage campaign in 2008. But on Friday, Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein presented new details—specifically that Romney’s $10,000 donation (did he lose a bet?) to National Organization for Marriage, the nation’s leading stop-gay-marriage outfit, came via his network of state PACs that we reported on last July:

Records filed by Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC with the Federal Election Commission did not include details of that $10,000 donation. Nor did NOM’s public 990 form. In fact, record of the payment was only uncovered Friday when the pro-gay rights Human Rights Campaign was sent a private IRS filing from NOM via a whistleblower. The Human Rights Campaign shared the filing with The Huffington Post.

Asked for comment, an aide to Romney said that the donation was made through the Alabama chapter of the Free and Strong America PAC. State records confirm this. However, the 990 NOM filed lists the donation as having come from PO Box 79226 in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Belmont, of course, is where Romney maintains his nominal address, in the basement of his son’s house.

The NOM donation is particularly dicey given another recent development. On Tuesday, Buzzfeed reported on an internal NOM document detailing the group’s aim to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks” in order to knock down gay marriage efforts. Those documents date back to 2008. Put another way, Romney donated $10,000 to an effort geared at “fanning the hostility” between gays and black voters.

Here’s the full document, via HRC: 

NOMSched2008PDF

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

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