Every so often, purveyors of political slime screw up and are investigated. That often means all of those memos that they really don’t want anyone else to read are read (oops). The National Organization for Marriage (aka ‘NOM’), which has long opposed gay marriage or anything else that could conceivably make a single gay person happy, is under investigation by the State of Maine for possible campaign finance violations. By way of Paul the Spud, we find that the Human Rights Campaign has unearthed some real doozies:

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots…

And:

The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity – a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.

It’s not the casual acceptance of bigotry that shocks me: there are assholes and they do walk among us. It’s the absolute cynicism of using bigotry–and to them, what is legitimate religious belief–for naked partisan advantage.

It’s just a revamped version of the Southern Strategy.