Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of the San Diego based Ruth Institute, says that the rainbow symbol needs to be reclaimed from “the gay lobby” because “the rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant with man.”
In an interview with the ultra conservative American Family News Network’s OneNewsNow, Morse said the rainbow should be the symbol of Prop 8 supporters and religious right activists, and that the rainbow has been wrongly appropriated by the LGBT community.
“Proposition 8 was passed by a great grassroots coalition that included people from all across the religious traditions, and also people of every race and color,” said Morse. “We are the real rainbow coalition. The gay lobby does not own the rainbow.”
A staff writer from Right Wing Watch noted that Morse appeared to be channeling the National Organization for Marriage’s famous 2009 television ad, “The Gathering Storm,” which said “a rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color” are uniting to stop the “gathering storm” of gay-rights advocates.
Morse, who describes her group as “a project of the National Organization for Marriage,” was a speaker on NOM’s “Summer for Marriage” bus tour.
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She told OneNewsNow that she wore a rainbow-colored scarf to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on Proposition 8 as a statement to signify that supporters of traditional marriage still own the symbol.
“We can’t simply let that go by,” she said. “Families put rainbows in their children’s nurseries. Little Christian preschools will have rainbows … Noah’s Ark and all the animals … those are great Christian symbols, great Jewish symbols.”
The rainbow flag was popularized as a symbol of LGBT pride and diversity by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978.
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