See for yourself. This was printed on the first page of the New York Times on Sunday March 21:
“On Jan. 21, Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and a powerful committee chairman, headed to the White House for a banking industry announcement. He had been openly skeptical about the prospects for the health measure. Mr. Obama pulled him aside. “He said, ‘I have to talk to you,’ ” the congressman recalled. “He was very passionate about it, and he convinced me that we could put some fixes in.”

Why didn’t Frank right there say Mr. President, I’ll support you but I need you to put these LGBT Tax Equality fixes in too, that were passed in the House version of the bill but not in the Senate’s.

The jokes on us.
[img]http://crabbygolightly.com/images/Congressionaleaders.jpg[/img]

I never knew it would be this easy. We should have been doing this 20 years ago. Did we have email 20 years ago? Oh, they could have made calls and just kept hitting “redial.”

No wonder our movement hasn’t worked. We should be using technology.

I’ll add that question to the email I am sending!

Does anyone know if that’s enough?

If it needs to be 1 trillion emails we’ll have to send more every day.

I put all my politicians in one address book and I only have to press “send” once a day. I think we will have our equality in one year if everyone does this.

Landon, you missed the one that pisses me off the most: BARNEY FRANK WAS AGAINST SUPPORTING MARRIAGE-EQUALITY IN MASSACHUSETTS!!!!!

When the Mass Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of marriage-equality, Frank moaned that “now” (or “then” in the moment) was not the right time; we hadn’t earned it yet. When it looked as though the wingnuts were near success in gaining enough votes in the Legislature to place a Constitutional Amendment to ban marriage-equality, Frank refused to use his influence among his fence-sitting fellow Democrats in the Legislature to squash the effort. Thankfully, his support and influence were unnecessary; but much harm was created as middle-of-the-roaders were left dumbfounded that the well known gay Congressman wasn’t a marriage-equity advocate.

Frank is a fraud.

Here in New York, it’s always the same bunch of people, year after year, who break their backs to do the political heavy lifting. They are understaffed and overworked. And gay people seem unable to put aside their differences and move forward as one unit dedicated to one cause, unlike conservative Christians, who unite and campaign alongside people they would never want to have dinner with.

Yes, there are more bigots out there than gay people. But gays have the better argument, they’re smarter, they’re more articulate – and they much lower in numbers, simply because they don’t work at it. Andrew Sullivan, Wayne Besen, Christine Quinn, Larry Kramer and all the rest can’t do everything for us.

Is there a gay lobbying firm with the power of the NRA? Nope. But there could be if every gay in America got behind it. I also blame closeted small town Americans, who are not out to their families and co-workers. They’re too afraid. I feel their pain, but it’s time to grow up.

It’s the extended family who will get the attention. When cousin Elroy and his wife Lolita from no-name town in a flyover state make calls, when Pastor Carlos and his congregation send NON-identical stamped letters and when the CFO of a Fortune 1000 company takes the time to fax his/her Rep —THAT’s when we get noticed. When people in who appear to have no vested interest in “gay rights” start hollering, the pols start to figure out that WE aren’t the only ones who give a damn about equality.

p.s. @Brian NYC: Wow, all I can say to you is YES.

For example, when I lobby my representatives I get nowhere because one is Dean Heller (Bushite) and John Ensign (old line republican) and Harry Reid (outright useless and chickenshit). And for most people in Red States lobbying won’t do a damn bit of difference either way.

So I don’t know why Barney thinks we can get anything with his grand lobbying schemes in Congress. You see what’s happened to DADT, the Prop 8 case will go down in the Supreme Court and ENDA won’t be passed for another ten-twenty years at this rate.

Thanks to the Congressional “all or nothing” strategy most of us will never be equal citizens for another twenty years or so. Better to do the hard work in the states, that’s where you find victory as we’ve seen with gay marriage and anti-discrimination laws. Lobbying on the federal level, for the most part, is a waste of resources and money.

Everyone knows politicians add up the number of calls, letters and emails before voting. It’s that simple. Maybe we should just take the $50 million HRC receives each year and hire some Kelly Temps to call, write and email politicians. I figured if we spent half the HRC money on that we could make 75 million calls, send 50 million letters and 1.2 billion emails. WE WOULD WIN.

That’s the secret – hire temps.

The problem comes in when lobbying doesn’t follow the dollars. The politicians have to be reminded why they got the money for us and what will happen if they don’t support us. Then we need to start threatening some incumbents with some truly supportive candidates (er, appreciative of our $$).

I like Obama but he only mentioned DADT in the state of the union to try and secure us as a voting block. What if the community suddenly started targeting this hubris towards another candidate for 2012?

This is a guy who discourages gay people from protesting. This is the guy who taught Washington that gay people could not be trusted not to live with prostitutes. This is a Congressman as embroiled in anyone else in the deregulation of the financial industry and the destruction of the American economy. This is the guy whose immediate reaction to Scott Brown’s election was to try to kill health care reform by announcing it dead. This is an openly gay Congressman who had to be beaten up publicly before he was willing to insist that transgendered people be included in ENDA. This is, frankly, someone who has done nothing to advance equality for gay people and a great deal to hold it back.

The number of bigots greatly exceeds the number of gays, and the are at least as well organized as the gays. The bigots who call themselves “Christian” have a meeting once a week. They call it “Church”. The club has been meeting every week for a very long time, and has grown very large indeed. When the leader asks them to sign letters to their congressmen, in the lobby on the way out, they do. And then they take some home for their neighbors to sign.

Gays just started trying to organize their own church a little over 40 years ago. Their church is very small, in comparison to the other churches. When their leader asks them to sign letters to their congressmen, the leader receives a letter the next week threatening to revoke the tax exemption, or a visit from the fire-inspector or the code-enforcement inspector, or some other kind of official harassment. Other gay organizations also have membership totals that are a small fraction of their straight counterparts.

Because of the numbers, gays are politically powerless in every traditional sense. And, because of the numbers, that isn’t going to change any time soon. The only power we might have is to swing a percent or two of the money and votes away from the party that thinks we are part of its “base”.

Roy Cohen:

“A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anit-discrimination bill through the city council.”

> The NRA doesn’t wait for the president to go out and lobby.

No: they fork over the cold, hard cash their right-wing members give them and they BUY themselves some goddamned politicians. That’s the way it works. I don’t think one single politician truly cares what their constituents think. America is waaay beyond that. Bush II espoused the view of most politicians when half a million New Yorkers took part in a protest march, saying (paraphrasing) “I’m not going to let a few extremists sway me from what my heart says is right.”

!

Many of the more militant unions already sponsor a Labor Party but the AFL-CIO misleadership keeps it muzzled. But as the Obama administration confirms its status as a lapdog of Wall Street and busts unions and as Democrats vote down pro-labor legislation that will change. There is increasing sentiment for political independence in minority communities.

The second reason we might want to form our own Party in some areas is to injure the Democrat Party by winning offices given the fact that the Democrat Party is our proven enemy.

As American society continues to splinter and polarize under the impact of economic and environmental collapse, endless wars and attempts to create a racist, misogynist antiLGBT theocracy the two main political parties will also polarize and splinter with both Democrats and Republicans careening towards the right and the far right, as we’ve seen.

Now is the time to begin to build a mass alternative to them with a leftist program of fundamental change. Abstaining from the effort to destroy the power of the Democrats and Republicans will insure our defeat.