I’m sure it was right before he had to dress for an HRC dinner, wherein the wealthy and politically connected a-gays can share their cocktails and congratulate themselves on what they’re doing for– or in my opinon, TO– gay America.

i sent it to that waste of time EQCA. No repsonse.

I sent it to North caorlina. no response.

I sent it to HRC and NGTLF. No response.

I sent it to the Washington campaign–TWICE. No response.

I sent it to the Florida campaign. No response.

I sent it to Mark Leno and… well you get the picture.

And the response.

I agree that the closet is the enemy, partly because keeping our families in the closet allows people to go on imagining them in scary ways. I don’t think most people are afraid of (or threatened by) our REAL families–what they are afraid of is the gay people of their imagination, or of their ingrained assumptions and stereotypes. To put it another way, when they know our actual families, going about our ordinary lives, most people lean toward being accepting or at least feeling comfortable.

To me, it’s baffling that many activists’ response to that fear of imaginary gay families has been to completely avoid mentioning family or children (as you were instructed at your “training” session). As you keep pointing out, hiding the truth of our families and children makes it seem that there is something sinister about that truth. I would think that it would make more sense to show the real families, as often as possible, to give people an alternative that could displace those scary (and false) imaginings.

Printouts of your posts in this thread should be on the desks of every LGBT activist in the United States.

well, actually, Wider works as well.

Since I know I’m not a nutcase, it is clear to me that for whatever reasons, they’re not interested in listening.

If you want to use any or all of either if these, feel free. You’d flatter me immensely just by printing them as is, or i’ll rewrite as necessary.

Or perhaps doh.

I’ve stated a number of times that the closet is the enemy, not the Religious Right. They merely draw their power from it, like Sauron needing the One Ring in Mordor, but without the charm and sparkle.

I see no real reason to change that opinion. In my rant above, I state my belief that the closet is the place where this political mentality seems to, if not MUST, originate from. “We can’t talk about this”, “We will upset them with that”, and “Let us be deferent to their tender sensibilities like good little nigosexuals” are all statements that anybody who was ever in the closet– i.e., just about all of us– ought to recognize as the poison that sits on the top shelf of that closet.

We all know it’s there, but unless Crazy Aunt Minnie gets ahold of it, we don’t think of it as a toxic substance that can kill us. But it can, and like so many poisons, it works it way into the nooks and crannies of your being, poisoning you when you think you’re just enjoying a nice glass of fresh water,

The closet has only one benefit for gay people. It allows us to hide in a hostile environment. But if we’re not actually in a hostile environment, or more importantly, are trying to change that hostile environment, then arguing from the closet undermines our whole strategy and approach.

If we don’t believe it, why would anyone else? If we’re not going to BE and LIVE the changes we would see in the world, how can we effect those changes? If we believe at any level, however unconscious, that we are not as good as heterosexuals, then that is the reality that we’re going to create in the world.

As we have 32 times running. These campaigns have, in my estimation, been conducted from so far within the closet that they’re having Visions of Narnia. Yes, these tired old ideas make your asinine look BIG.

The closet is once again the enemy, and the whole mentality of people who counsel the closet as a strategy are merely the enablers of a codependent, dysfunctional relationship. I always thought it telling that to the best of my knowledge, the lead person in a recent memorable marriage battle had never been in a long term relationship. How could he actually argue what marriage equality meant to him?

I’ll try to state this as baldly as I can, lest someone see me as less than compassionate towards my not-fully-liberated-from-the-awful-closet brethren. (I actually have a lot of compassion. It’s my patience that’s failing).

If our basic political claim is that we are and ought be treated exactly the same as heterosexuals, under the same sets of laws and expectations, if our basic claim is that of EQUALITY–

Then why are we not allowed to talk about our loves, our lives, our families, our children, our assets, and our religious faith? Why are we not allowed the obvious follow up, that these, our treasures, are very bit as important as theirs, for exactly the same reasons, and deserve exactly the same legal protections?

I actually see the political problem as identical to the religious problem that Timothy has been exploring the past few weeks– and admirably well, I should say. The problem, of course, is the failure of religious moderates, and even religious conservatives who don’t try to dress up plain old bigotry in its drag of sincere religious belief, to speak up forcefully against the hate and vitriol that the Reichwingwers have been serving up for decades, but especially the last few weeks.

I wrote a very long letter to a prominent, gay supportive Rabbi, a few weeks ago. I never heard back from him, but then, he might not have appreciated my respectfully-expressed, but expressively clear, directness. What I had to say was this:

” I have listened to every single vicious lie, scurrilous vilification, craptastic fairy story, unjustified condemnation, and obvious projection ever told about us by these “good people of God”, and noticed how very few of the other “good people of God” bother to call it out for what it so clearly is. It’s not their lamb being sacrificed, after all. Those who should be our defenders are in fact merely spectators at the event, failing in the end to defend even their own faith from the slander. Instead, like you, they claim their feelings are hurt, as if that even compares to murders, lies, jailings, hate-filled political campaigns, kids killing themselves, anti-gay bullying, and the destruction of gay lives and families.”

and…

“You write as if Phelps and Worley and their ilk are merely a few people on the fringe. There is a lot of ilk there. They are not an aberration. They are a large, loud, organized, and well-funded plurality that is allowed to flourish rather than be flushed in large part, I believe, due to the silence (at worst), obtuseness (at middle), and moral wishy-washiness (at best) of well-intentioned religious moderates like yourself. Religious moderates enable the sordid behavior of anti-gay religious bigots first by either obtusely failing to see them for whom they obviously are, or obtusely preferring to excuse them rather than offend them.

The second failure, the source of this obtuseness, lies here: the failure to reconcile and resolve what their religion says, what their own issues on this durable prejudice might be, and what basic humanity, common sense, compassion and morality say. You see, frankly, I don’t think you even believe your own religion on this subject, because one of those Levitical passages clearly prescribes the death penalty for what you are calling homosexuality. You have rejected that little tidbit, clearly elevating your basic decency over the religious beliefs you claim, and by extension, the God you serve. I mean no blasphemy here, but if this is indeed the case, you’re demonstrating that you are far more a moral being than He is. I would prefer to believe it is a bad, misused translation, than to believe that the Fount of Morality is immoral.”

As I said, I haven’t heard back from him.

In short, from my perspective as a former social psychologist, the same dynamic that underlies the failure of our political leaders to choose a campaign strategy that actually works is exactly the same dynamic that underlies the failure of the moderate religious to confront the faith-based homohatred that so poisons our society, and to deter the hypocrisy that so viciously informs (for example) Catholic thought on homosexuality.

Let me repeat: ? If we believe at any level, however unconscious, that we are not as good as heterosexuals, then that is the reality that we’re going to create in the world. If we operate from the closet, we remain in the closet.

Personally, as far as I’m concerned, no one has noticed that the that pool is a bright shade of stinking yellow.

take that as you will.

I think they all suffer from Groupthink. All other activists are certain that you can’t really talk about the real issues and no one wants to step outside the box and be first.

Minnesota seems to be a little bit, but they are using Model Two: reeeeaaaalllly old gay couples. I want to see a campaign with a young gay man of, say, 26 wanting to marry his boyfriend of 3 years.

When they go to the polls to ban gay marriage, that’s what they are thinking about. Not reeeeaaaalllly old couples or even lesbians. They are thinking about gay men and marriage (and when you think of marriage, you think young people).

And we haven’t argued – we haven’t even hinted – that this is okay, much less a good thing.