OPINION:
Opportunity for Democrats to Let the Sunshine In Additional Glare of Scrutiny from LGBT Americans Will Benefit Party
By Jo Wyrick, Executive Director National Stonewall Democrats

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once stated, "the best disinfectant is sunshine." Our ongoing discussion as a collective LGBT movement regarding our accomplishments, challenges, and failures, in particular as LGBT Democrats can be compared to that sunshine. Exposure to sunshine sometimes stings, but it remains beneficial to our growth.

The Democratic National Committee recently met in Chicago to approve delegate selection rules for the 2008 Democratic Convention. National Stonewall Democrats was there to ensure that the committee passed an amendment to the rules which requires state parties to take remedial action to correct the under-representation of LGBT Americans at previous conventions. It was adopted with unanimous consent.

Now a little sunshine may help to clear the clouded certainty that shrouds this new language, and to ensure that it is aggressively enforced. National Stonewall Democrats expects each state Democratic party to use these new rules to establish goals that accurately reflect LGBT Americans within their 2008 delegations, and we expect the DNC to reject any proposed state party plan that does not meet this threshold.

The ideal and original language submitted to the Democratic National Committee by the DNC¹s LGBT Americans Caucus included listing the LGBT community in the affirmative action statement, alongside other minority groups. However, the DNC instead chose to create a new rule titled "Inclusion" in order to distinguish between communities historically denied the right to vote, and other under-represented communities who also deserve the right to equal inclusion in party affairs historically denied to them.

This approach was not our initial preference. However, we accepted this revised method even though it means we now have additional responsibility to work with the party to ensure that these new obligations are fulfilled over the next two years. We did so because establishing a new, untested rule automatically invites exposure to this process, and extra scrutiny to the Democratic Party and its progress.

Increasing the number of LGBT Delegates to the 2008 convention has never been Stonewall Democrats' main goal in supporting the new delegate rule. We will have accomplished little if our only achievement in 2008 is enlarging the number of convention delegates representing the LGBT community. Instead, this rule will help to force every state Democratic party (even those who may have been reluctant to acknowledge LGBT Democrats) to develop or expand partnerships with the LGBT community that will help elect Democrats and produce results that last well beyond a nominating convention.

Stonewall and our members are already partnering with a majority of state parties to broaden Democratic relationships with LGBT Americans. In 2004, we worked with 16 state parties who voluntarily adopted the LGBT inclusion goals that will now be required for every state party. The relationships we have built through those activities have helped lead to important policy shifts on LGBT issues, including full support for marriage equality from Democratic parties in states like Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and Washington State.

LGBT Americans can now judge how the Democratic National Committee enforces the establishment of inclusion goals for LGBT delegates within each state delegation. This scrutiny will help shine attention on the progress state Democratic parties should be making in partnering with our community.

Additionally, the DNC and state parties should use this rule to expand their affirmative action and inclusion efforts to reach beyond the easy target of LGBT donors to and engage the full-spectrum, or the full rainbow, of LGBT Democrats. Stonewall Democrats want to help build an inclusive party by ensuring LGBT Democrats are represented across the board within all of the Party's constituency groups.

National Stonewall Democrats is ready to partner with the Democratic National Committee and state parties to ensure that representative inclusion goals and aggressive outreach programs are established and met. We are already beginning to provide state parties with the resources needed to engage LGBT Democrats. We understand that progressive positions on LGBT issues within state parties must be incubated through partnerships like these that expose Democratic officials to the faces of our families.

The Democratic National Committee has indicated it is ready to enforce the rule adopted in Chicago. Stonewall Democrats will monitor the process closely to make sure that the DNC meets its responsibility of guaranteeing that state parties set and work toward goals for fully including LGBT delegates.

National Stonewall Democrats looks forward to working with the DNC and state parties, along with other national and local community leaders and activists to shine the light on the progress of Democratic efforts. LGBT Americans should capture this opportunity to examine and further improve the Democratic Party. With the right care and feeding, and exposure to constant assessment, the Party¹s new inclusion policy will yield a significant increase in political clout for our community. -------

Jo Wyrick is Executive Director of the National Stonewall Democrats, the voice for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Democrats, with more than 90 local chapters across the nation.

National Stonewall Democrats is committed to working through the Democratic Party to advance the rights of all people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Posted by Freedom Democrats at 6:53 AM | Permalink | Comments

OPINION
An Insidious State of Mind: Trickle Down of Hatred
By: Chip Arndt
President of The Freedom Democrats/Miami-Dade GLBT Dem. Caucus
Partner at MerchantAdvantage.com
Winner of The Amazing Race 4

LINDA VESTER, FOX News Channel: "You say you’d rather not talk to liberals at all?"
ANN COULTER: "I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days." - 10/6/2004

*NSYNC's Lance Bass revealed he's gay and dating my former partner, igniting a worldwide media frenzy. Only Mel Gibson's alcohol-saturated, anti-Semitic tirade interrupted the orgy of stories about the boy band star who kisses boys. The day after Lance's People issue appeared, three thugs attacked six gay men in San Diego with a baseball bat and knife about the same time thugs in New Mexico began to use a gay 18-year old they had courageously tied up as a human punching bag, beating him until dawn. Though part of a newsworthy nationwide increase in LGBT assaults, mainstream media ignored their stories, and not simply because no celebrities were involved.

The two greatest factors in the initial indifference to AIDS were the Reagan administration and mainstream media. It wasn’t just Reagan’s long silence. The month I turned 16 (just recognizing my attraction to men), Reagan’s spokesman made a joke of a reporter’s question about AIDS, mocking him for even asking. "Trickle down economics" might have been fantasy but their attitude about "the gay plague" was very real and trickled down to local governments and straight media. Now we have a President who has embraced the antigay agenda, using his office as a bully pulpit, emphasis on both words, to demonize gay Americans—red meat for red states. And, while Bill Clinton created job protections for gay federal employees, the Bush administration has tried to gut them. This has trickled down to reenergize those who already hated us to retarget our civil liberties. As in the 80s, it has trickled down to some media, too. And, in the words of NGLTF Executive Director Matt Foreman, it “poisons culture and inspires some to believe that it is open season on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.”

Respected media stopped providing platforms years ago to anyone who used the Bible to justify denying people of color or Jews full civil rights. Yet, for almost as long, antigay-for-pay pros like the Ayatollah Jerry Falwell have been exploiting us with impunity. Falwell remains their superstar despite a history of outrageous claims such as insisting gays with AIDS were purposely trying to infect others by donating blood, or that gays and lesbians were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He's paid lip service to job protection but his hefty haunches are bent busily milking his latest cash cow; warning his flock that “There is no end to the slippery slope of same-sex marriage.” Falwell and his bleating brethren continue to be as welcome at the doors of TV news divisions as the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol would be at yours.

Still, their hate speech remains within the PG lexicon of the Bible, and while epithets for Blacks and Jews were banished decades ago from national airwaves, it's very different at the Church of Cable News. MSNBC, for instance, employs their very own sultan of slur, Don Imus, and frequently features freelance hit woman Ann Coulter. Before television, people with their lack of shame and addiction to attention made a living biting the heads off of chickens at carnival side shows. Today, they grow rich digging their teeth into those politically weaker than them.

With his perpetual smirk, Imus described out Wimbledon champ Amelie Mauresmo as “a big old lesbo,” and drooled about “Fudgepack Mountain” while MSNBC star Chris Matthews chirped about “Bareback Mounting.” Which brings us back to Fraulein Coulter, cable television’s Cobra Woman; all venom all the time. To her, arrest of a Bush advisor was “revenge of the queers,” and it's “about even money” Hillary Clinton's a lesbian. She told Matthews that Bill Clinton is probably a latent homosexual because his “wild promiscuity shows a fear-hostility of women,” simultaneously sliming gay men and a former President. Then, fangs totally bared:

MATTHEWS: “How do you know that Bill Clinton's gay?”
COULTER: “He may not be gay, but Al Gore, total fag. No, I'm just kidding. ...”

Matthews and MSNBC can protest their own innocence while disgracing the First Amendment until they are red, white, and blue in the face, and Coulter can call it a joke, but this imagined slightly different exchange, relative to past discussion about Clinton's personality, would never have aired:

MATTHEWS: “Do you think Bill Clinton could actually be black?”
COULTER: “He may not be black, but Al Gore, total nigger. No, I'm just kidding. ...”

Would Matthews have called her “brilliant” and thanked her for coming as he did after she called Gore a fag? Would he have still said he'd “love to have her back”? Or would he have said, “That language is unacceptable. Get the hell off my set and never come back.”?

Would Mel Gibson's career be hanging by a thread if he had asked the cop, “Are you a fag?” Until we insist that “fag” equals “nigger” (Madame Coulter’s word) equals “kike,” we will not only not be fully free, we will not be safe. “Animals” like those San Diego’s mayor referred to will still be crushing our skulls; there will be more Matthew Shepards, Billy Jack Gaithers, Gwen Araujos, Stephanie Thomases, Ukea Davises, ad infinitum.

Their killers don’t have to be regular Imus listeners or Coulterites. The slurs and lies of all of those who vilify us eventually merge into one great toxic cloud; each evil individual voice enlarging the chorus cheering our victimization. Matthews, et al., may deny their own blood-stained hands, but we stay silent before them at our peril. Are the strategies we're using as successful as some we've used in the past; as successful as the tactics of those waging “holy war” against us?

From the White House down to the house of worship next door, homophobia has mutated into homo-hysteria. The trickle down erodes how others see us and legal protections we wrongly thought were inviolate. Allowed to rise to a river, its sound will drown out the voice of Liberty itself; returning us to a time when our lives were but toys tossed between the hands of the powerful.

“Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment." – Bayard Rustin

Posted by Freedom Democrats at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments

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