HRC "Retreat"
This excerpt is from a story (by John M. Broder) in The New York Times (at the beginning of December) called Groups Debate Slower Strategy on Gay Rights.
The leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, at a meeting last weekend in Las Vegas, concluded that the group must bow to political reality and moderate its message and its goals.
Later, in the same article:
Mr. Foreman [executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force] said that whenever the gay rights movement made progress, it generated a "pushback" in the form of hostile legislation, hate speech and even violence.
All this guilt-trip crap makes me want to throw up my hands and shout "Where is Larry Kramer when you need him!"
When I first read this, I wanted to point out that taking any sort of "responsibility" for the disastrous presidential election was both foolish and self-aggrandizing — do they really think they have that sort of influence? The penchant of the current American electorate for reckless action knows no bounds, and the HRC has about as much chance of influencing it as a pairie dog would have with stopping a charging herd of buffalo.
Of course, since that early month of despair, cooler heads have looked at the election polls and discovered that "gay marriage" was not the single issue that won the election for the alledged victors that it was promoted to be (by those who really, really wanted it to be).
However, I don't think we should so quickly look past the institutional character flaw that led the HRC so quickly to embrace the idea that 1) gay people had lost the election; and 2) the HRC and all gay people who are intersted in equality need to tone down their act. Is this sort of pessimistic, lily-livered "political reality" the attitude that should be at the core of the "largest national gay and lesbian political" organization? Pshaw!
I'll write elsewhere, and probably again and again and at great length, about how that is guaranteed to get us nowhere.
Not really expecting anyone to notice, I will, nevertheless, issue right here my call for the creation of a real National Gay & Lesbian Organization.