“Voting for Obama, you should all be ashamed.”
Oh please! No one should be ashamed for voting in an election. We can disagree about choices and such, but there is no shame in going to a booth and giving your vote to a candidate.

James

We need to do BOTH. But I wish everyone would realize how we won in Mass: we backed supportive candidates. We changed the minds of sitting reps that were not supportive. We did this by lobbying and by being visible to their constituents.

So, yes, maybe the march can start to change Obama’s positions. I doubt it as I am convinced he is no friend to gays. I don’t see him as even comfortable with us. I simply see someone who grew up in a bigoted evangelical church and did not possess the moral clarity to stand up, speak out and walk out of that building when the pastor was preaching his sour brand of hate.

So go ahead and try but to Gerry’s point: Obama TOLD US he did not support equality. WE KNEW THIS. HE DID NOT LIE as everyone says, he told us he DOES NOT support marriage equality.

Yet we backed him anyway. We seem to have blindly followed Democrats vs. candidates. What a shame all our power has been wasted. We are more powerful than we realize, because if not why would they pander to us?

We need to start NOW supporting candidates that support our equality. Voting for Obama, you should all be ashamed. There are always other options and not voting as a stupid block as we always do would send the message that only true supporters get our votes.

Obama never was and won’t ever be an advocate for GLBT equality. He admits it, it is in his position papers, on his website.

So smarten up and start supporting candidates that support us. Saying it is better to get a Democrat elected than a Republican so we are going to support a 50% good candidate is political suicide. We have taught the establishment that we vote as a stupid, uneducated block.

Please, lets not ever do that again!

I will have to see if the October 11th march is mentioned in the Join the Impact website as an event for the DC area. My gay friends are not talking about the October 11th march at all. It’s not anywhere on their gaydar screen. And I had almost forgotten about it myself.

Thanks for the reminder, James.

More importantly, I’ve found it hard to connect with most other gay people. The other 4 at my school are, at best, considered extremely bizarre (one smears cow blood on himself for Halloween…) or extremely effeminate. I’m pretty much the Combo Breaker as far as gays at my school are concerned.

So what do I do? I don’t really feel a huge sense of kindred spirit going on. Whenever I bring up something gay-related to my straight friends they react in different ways. One rolls his eyes and says “Please, it’s not that bad.” Another one tells me that I’m developing a martyr complex. Another asks me, “Do you always get this worked up over this?”

YES, I do! It’s extremely important to me! I’m seventeen years old and I’m about to grow up and the world in its current state.

I don’t -want- to sound like a martyr, I don’t know how to not, but I want the deaths to end and the discrimination to stop. As the advocate article says in a quote:

“The president and Congress have really big items on their plate. I’m sure some politicians think, Why can’t the gays be patient? Well, every day that we’re patient we have more gay kids killing themselves. We have more soldiers getting their careers destroyed. We have more religious bigots convincing people to stay in the closet. You can’t get rid of bigotry with legislation, but you certainly can stall it. You can shut it up. Every day that we sit quiet and stay patient, we are losing people.”

I don’t know what to do, but it’s something to think about.

But for 2 days time, you don’t think it would be worth it to go to D.C.?

I can’t say what this march will bring about. I’ve never been. My mom most likely wouldn’t have signed THAT permission slip when I was 15…
I am realistic though, at least I like to think so, and do realize that Obama is not going to greet us out of the oval office Saturday night at the candle light vigil at the elipse. Heck, I’d be surprised if he even gave a speech during the rally on Sunday. I don’t expect results from them on the 12th.

I hope that we as a community return from D.C. with more civil rights activism across the country.

Don’t forget, a huge population of GLBTQ youth that was under 30 the last time something like this happened quite possibly didn’t go, myself included. We need a push. We need something to light the pilot light.

I feel the more my peers hear about this, they will feel inspired to do SOMETHING and hopefully find ways to afford going, whether individually or in groups. I hope they go and get what they’re expecting, and come home on Monday still pumped up. Then may you see a huge influx of new, young blood entering the ranks of people like for example Ted, who devote careers to advocating for the civil rights of ALL americans. Lets hope so.

If I’m blowing up the effects of a march, my appologies.

I think Generation NOW needs things blown up for them to realize whats going on around us. Life isn’t all clubs, clothes, and martini’s, Oh my…

I liked it, but I found it intriguing that it did not speak to two of the dynamics that were so important in the recent successes here in MA. (Sorry, but I’m a *firm* believer in recognizing your successes and trying to replicate them.)

First, in MA, between 1989 and the early 00s, our openly-gay community members migrated from the inner city ghettos out to the suburbs, and many people began raising children. This was possible, in part, due to an ENDA like law that passed in MA in 1989, reducing the social penalty for coming out. Sorry, but it just gets really *difficult* to argue against gay marriage, when the two dads help out at your little league games and the two moms are on the PTA alongside you. It just…well…stopped making sense to oppose same-gender marriage when our families were looking and behaving way too much like their families.

The second dynamic was that we changed, for a lack of a better term, our “point of entry” into the political process. I know that this idea came to me when Al Gore became the nominee for the Democratic party in 2000. I remember thinking, “Is this the best we can do? Why don’t we have a better choice?” (He’s since become a LOT more impressive.) But, then it occurred to me that the way to have a better nominee is to find a supportive candidate *early*, support her, and then get her past the nomination and into the office. We tried it with Howard Dean, but we weren’t able to overcome The Scream. We tried it again here in MA with Deval Patrick, and it *worked*! And it was improved upon and replicated with Obama.

Even during the heat of the legislative action on marriage equality, you could see the shift in strategy. By the time the vote came up the second time in the legislature, we had already targeted anti-marriage-equality legislators, successfully working to knock them out of their offices, and we’d replaced them with pro-marriage-equality people. And we fought hard to get our friends in the legislature re-elected (not one pro-marriage-equality incumbent was defeated).

So, you see, if you organize around a candidate who is *already* going to vote for you, and if you work like a dog to get her elected, then you don’t have to do as much yelling and marching in the streets. Or politicking the week of the bill. We did 70% of the work of defeating the anti-marriage-equality forces when, two years earlier, we saw Deval Patrick strongly supporting marriage equality, and we worked like dogs to get him elected. Then, when we needed support from our governor, our guy was already in place wanting to help us and owing us a debt for helping to get him elected.

To replicate this strategy, you need to locate supportive candidates approximately 18 months before the election. Longer, if it’s a presidential election (Obama started campaigning two years in advance). Contrary to popular opinion, you position yourself to win the race six months to a year before the primaries. If you’re getting involved at the point of the primaries, you’re too late.

How about “go work with children–gay and straight and in between–as an openly gay person”? That’ll do an exponentially greater amount of good than marching, IMO. (I’m not anti-march. I’m anti-over-blowing-the-effects-of-a-march.)