Monday, June 22, 2009

White House Conference Call with LGBT Leaders

This is from AMERICAblog's John Aravosis:
White House deputy chief of staff, and the political director, have a 2pm conference call scheduled with the members of the gay caucus of the DNC. The administration has also scheduled a meeting this week with the top non-profit gay rights groups.

Privately, I also wrote to four White House contacts on Friday night and asked that they also schedule talks with the top gay rights leaders with constituencies online - the top leaders involved in the uproar over the past week - including, if those leaders are interested, Pam Spaulding, Andrew Sullivan, Joe Jervis, Dan Savage, and Andy Towle (I suggested those names as a starting point, not exclusively), and of course Joe Sudbay and me as well. I received no response.

Joe and I have been talking about this, and we've been fascinated how the White House's response to gay issues has been very 1990s. Thinking that the gays are the third rail of politics, when in fact the polls are pretty darn great on our issues (even with Republicans, conservatives and churchgoers, when it comes to DADT). Thinking that the major issues confronting the community are hospital visits and changing the names on our passports, instead of growing community anger over Don't Ask Don't Tell and marriage. It's as if the White House is stuck in 1993.

Then we started thinking about the White House's last-minute effort to reach out to the gay groups for cover (holding the hastily-arrange benefits memo signing last week, and now holding conference calls and meetings with the DNC's gay caucus and the traditional non-profit gay rights groups. It's all very 1990s in that the White House fails to recognize the importance of the online community overall, but also to this particularly uproar.

Back in the early 90s, if you had HRC on board, you could pretty much write your own ticket as a politician trying to woo the gay community. Towards the middle 90s, you had new groups like Service Members Legal Defense Network (SLDN), and established groups like GLAAD coming into their own. You also had NGLTF, and others of course. Zoom ahead to 2009. Not only is it not a certainty that having any one of the top gay groups on board is enough to win over the community, but it's no longer clear that even having most of them on board is enough.

Why? Because of the Internet.
The community at large is getting more and more agitated, even angry at the DOJ brief comparing our relationships to incest and pedophilia and I don't think the WH is going to get out of this one easily. Unless of course, the champagne and caviar make our "leaders" swoon and sign on to whatever the WH is selling this time.

Read the rest here. Stay Tuned.

And check for updates.

More later
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3 comments:

  1. Sad to say, but I don't trust the leaders of the GLBT organizations. To me they seem to be more concerned about holding onto their positions of power and high salaries than going to the barricades and demanding the end of DADT and DOMA. All the rest of this tea and crumpets is BS. The DNC isn't getting my money nor is the Human Rights group. "Top gay rights leaders" - isn't that an oxymoron? They don't lead me until they start showing some results. The majority of the American public is ahead of the White House and the so called gay rights leaders. It is interesting to observe that any support of gay rights still invokes fear.

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  2. Quite frankly the latest attempt to calm the waters (the conference call) is such a patronizing insult to the larger community as to create more anger. I'm sure the subject of the call was what can we do to quell this anger and reopen the pocket books instead of what do we need to do that is right and just.

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  3. Lemuel is right, the conference call was a patronizing insult. Won't work this time.
    The gig is up.

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Your comments are welcome if they are positive and/or helpful.
If they are simply a tirade or opinionated bullshit, they will be removed, so don't waste your time, or mine.

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