Founder and History
The Alliance for Marriage exists in large part as a response to perceived legal and social challenges to traditional views of marriage, and therefore promotes socially conservative policies. Unlike some other organizations considered part of the Christian right, the Alliance for Marriage has significant support from Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, as well as leaders from minority faith communities, civil rights figure Walter E. Fauntroy, the Rev. Ray Hammond, a prominent Boston pastor, and several religious leaders in the Latino community such as Rev. Samuel Rodriguez who serves on their Board of Advisors.
According to a 2004 profile in USA Today, this diverse support is credited in large part to the unique upbringing of AFM President Daniels, who was raised by a single mother in Spanish Harlem. This also apparently provided his primary motivation for founding AFM:
Daniels' views on family, he says, are based in large part on personal experience. He insists he wants to protect what he did not have himself: a dad who stuck around to raise him in a traditional family.
Daniels' two sister organizations Alliance for Marriage (lobbying) and Alliance for Marriage Foundation (education) shared boards and staff. Flying high in 2004–2005, Daniels was interviewed as Power Player of the Week on FOX News and garnered major profile pieces in the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and USA Today. However, after the defeats in Congress of the Federal Marriage Amendment and the later renamed Marriage Protection Act, the real marriage battle moved out of DC and into the states.
AFM was active in Colorado during the Democratic National Convention, California with partner National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), and Washington.
After peaking in 2006 at $2.6 million according to IRS 990 tax returns available at Guidestar which reveals consultants continued to work with AFM until 2008 building and maintaining their 1.2 million person database of national supporters.
An analysis of the IRS 990 tax forms available at Guidestar shows that as revenues plunged by two-thirds from their 2006 peak to only $817K combined AFM/AFMF in 2009 (last year of available 990s), salary and benefit expenses of $365,000 consumed 44.6 per cent of all organizational income. Daniels received more than half that total at $188,592.
Updates on AFM and AFMF can be viewed at: http://www.afmusa.org
Read more about this topic: Alliance For Marriage
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