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I genuinely dislike the meta arguments that tend to overwhelm the board at times, so I try not to engage in them if it can be helped. That said, in the wake of the DOMA brief, I saw expressed a lot of sentiment about ponies, impatience, that LGBT complaints are part and parcel of right-wing attacks (that specific thought is expressed in this very thread).
It's a dismissive, antipathetic posture towards LGBT concerns.
There has certainly been a lot of discussion about when it might be time for the LGBT community to hit the proverbial panic button. Personally, I was on the other side of the debate during McClurkin and Rick Warren. I disagreed with the reactions on DU. Full disclosure: I was an Obama supporter from very, very early in the primaries and defended him no minor amount. I'm now re-evaluating my own judgement and posts from that period. For me the DOMA brief and - more critically - the administration's tone deaf response to it was the moment where "let's see where this administration goes" changed to "Ok, this administration either doesn't know or doesn't care what it's doing in regards to LGBT rights, and this is not the direction it should be moving in." If this administration is to move how we would like it to move, it must be informed as early as possible that we will not accept a repeat of the Clinton model towards our community. This is precisely what we are now in the midst of doing.
I do think there is a schism, a predictable, inevitable one. Put somewhat clumsily, there are two kinds of people in any political party; those who worship power and those who are ever suspicious of it. The former will usually find expression in being just ducky with just about anything the President does. "Our guy is in there, and we must support him lest we give the other team an opening."
The LGBT community must be the latter if we're going to achieve our goals. We can't say, "Well, he's our man, let's wait and see," when that administration begins making tangible decisions and policies that are contrary to postive movement forward.
In the past, I've often flinched from the anger and outrage expressed by my LGBT brothers and sisters towards the administration. Call it dispositional. However, that anger and outrage, once it found a target and channel, is effecting change. The administration has noticed. Congress is noticing. The gay leadership establishment is heeding us instead of instructing us to go along to get along. We're now finally, finally getting some movement, some acknowledgement.
In history, no revolution or movement for greater freedom ever succeeded by relinquishing their greatest weapon - the refusal of deference. Some people want us to do that, to defer to this President, to trust him in the face of acts and policies that do us no good turn. That's an impossible request, and one no earnest supporter of equality would make. We can disagree about tactics, and I often do. However, what do we do when any tactic and criticism we take up, any banner we raise in the march forward, is dismissed and never found acceptable by too many of the president's most ardent supporters?
The President once said he would take his lead from us on how to pursue our rights. What are we to make of those who shoot us down at every turn, who criticize every tactic, when all we're trying to do is exactly what the President said he wanted us to do?
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