SM, I’m not suggesting that you be angry with Obama, but I am suggesting that those who are use that anger to get them moving forward. You are suggesting many of the same things as I am, so we are not so far apart as you might believe. Where we differ is that I want the community to be outraged and angry, and if that is towards Obama, then so be it; if it towards the gay community, then so be it, but for cryin’ out loud, get angry and get moving.

I do wish, however, that you would please think a bit more about your approach, at least on here, towards the gay community. While I certainly appreciate all your efforts and genuinely find them nobel and kind, as a gay man, I don’t even feel the right to make assumptions about folks, nor would I toss off a judgemental remark about one’s preference to direct energy to pride rather than civil rights. Most of those people, are probably not on this blog, contributing to threads for one. Secondly, what I tried to explain to you earlier is that we have an experience that is impossible for you to entirely empathize with. You, as a heterosexual individual, could no more really understand what it has been like to walk through my life’s journey, than it would be for me–a blond and blue eyed fellow–to know what it has been like for a black man to navigate through the twists and turns in his life.

There is just so much that we experience that is so unique, like being a minority in our own homes. We are the only minority group that I know of that has been just about completely eliminated from the history books; there is no literature about us, how we contributed, about our writers, artists, presidents, heros and those who stood behind them. The only history that has been documented and left for people to read are the tragedies, those who were jailed, killed or were killed, who died alone and penniless. Our own suffering during the Holocaust of WWII is rarely referenced, and most people don’t know that while every other prisoner was released from the death and work camps, homosexuals were transferred to prison. The oppression that our people have faced in history is staggering, and yet we have been deminished and portrayed as flittering deviants and reprobates. DaVinci, Shakespear, very likely Lincoln, Williams, great men through history from Michealangelo to Mark Bingham, the footballer who helped to foil the plans of the last set of hi-jackers during the 911 attacks were all gay, but that is washed away.

So, gays are left with sad depictions of their forefathers, are told that they are inferior, less than human. What other group would take that, turn it on its head, and through a parade?!! Now, I’m not a huge parade guy, and I’m dubious about walking down a street and simulating sexual acts, but you know…if my people are able to endure 364 days of oppression at the workplace, at their churches, within their own families, and then can still muster up the courage to throw a parade, then I am one thousand percent behind it.

Furthermore, having a parade, no matter what you think of them, and working for civil rights are not mutually exclusive activities. One can do both, and there is a great chance that the gays who you might criticize today for their involvement in a parade will be the very same gays who will put themselves on the front lines tomorrow. I saw that happen in the AIDS fight, and I would not be surprised to see it repeat history.

Again, I, for one, am terribly greatful, and I’m not calling you out. I’m just encouraging you to understand that there is a complex history that each gay individual has, and one should not judge or condemn when one cannot fully grasp such histories. Please continue to fight for us, but more importantly, really try to get to know us and understand us better than you even believe that you do now.

Thank you, SM!

Who the fuck do you egoists think were marching and protesting in the hot sweltering summer sun and handing out flyers and leaflets in the freezing cold in the winter to get you the right you now enjoy?

Talk about ingrates!

Early gay rights leaders like Frank Kameny, Dick Leitsch, Barbara Gittings, Harvey Milk and Craig Rodwell would spit in your faces if they could hear the dismissive, cavalier manner in which you address your brothers and sisters.

Who the fuck do y’all think you are, anyway? Shame on you people. You’ll get no respect from me. That’s for sure!

Thanks for joining me in screaming on this forum.

If I could iterate one point. Our president presumably believes, and has stated many times, that marriage is between a man and a woman. Until he says otherwise, we are on our own. He has shown today that he is not prepared to expend ANY political capital on the GLBT caucus. He essentially attributed todays concession to Clinton. He no longer needs to court our vote and can do without our dollars.

Hence, that is I why I stated we need to move our focus away from Washington and toward those fights we can win. In my case it is the repeal of Prop H8 in California. The best we can hope from Obama is that he shuts the fuck up about his belief that a marriage is between a man and a woman and letting the states decide if they agree with him, which unfortunately California did. In essence, he doesn’t have a problem with not allowing gays to get married, he just doesn’t want his bigotry enshrined in a constitutional document.

Did I get any of this wrong? Am I missing something?

I am putting my money where my mouth is and cancelling my HRC membership and directing it to a group I think capable of repealing prop H8. What are you gonna do “Random Gay Guy”?

Obama is a nasty bitch.

Don’t try to pin prop8 on Obama. During the campaign season, he was vocal in opposition to it. Proposition 8 passed because of misleading campaign tactics and scare tactics. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that Obama as a candidate could have done to keep Prop 8 from passing besides coming out against it, which he did.
What is with people like you that expect things to be done in a day. The economy is currently in a horrible state and our health care system is failing. Unemployment is at an all time high. These are issues that every American is facing and deservedly, they are going to be the first thing Obama covers. Our time will come. It may not be in the next 30 days, it might not be in the next 12 months. As someone said earlier, we have to work for our equality. Kennedy was for civil rights, but that didn’t happen over night. Civil rights demonstrations didn’t stop just because he got into office. No, the organizers kept on working.
Instead, people like you sit on your asses and scream on forums. Learn something about politics. Learn something about grassroots campaigns. Hell, learn something about civil disobedience.
Expecting someone to hand equality to us runs the risk of it being marketed as a benefit. Equality is our right and we have to make it known. If you want someone to be pissed at, get pissed at the GOP. Get pissed at small town America. Get mad at the people that are going to use action on our rights as political leverage to rally their cause and take back the “benefits” that we have already received. Until we make this a mainstream human rights issue through civil disobedience, it will never be put on the same plate with the current issues on today. Until we reach that level, we are going to be forced to wait until those issues are dealt with.

I’m not angry with Obama. Why should I be? He has done more for gay rights in 5 months than the last 2 administrations combined.

What makes me angry are people who expect him to bring this GREAT SOCIAL CHANGE to this country in a few months while they do NOTHING. Rome was not built in a day.

How fast would Obama move on this issue if WE THE PEOPLE were constantly writing to the White House about it, writing our congress people, talking to businesses.

Don’t expect him to take gay civil rights as a pressing matter when the gay community spends more time volunteering for PRIDE than their civil rights issues.

We are trying to get it together and focus our anger into action, but we can’t focus anger that is mollified and explained away.

Be angry with Obama, be angry with NOM, be angry with your family members who didn’t vote for your best interests, be angry at your buddy who went to a party instead of a protest, be angry at yourself for not doing more than you did, and cull it all together and then channel towards doing something constructive. There will be as many opinions about what is constructive as there people who have opinions, so you’ll have to filter all the information and do what you feel is best, whether that is joining the Courage Campaign, and equality group, or just talking to co-workers, friends, family members and neighbors until you are blue in the face. Write your representatives and call their offices…this actually can do some good if enough people do it. But stay ticked off and use it to the greatest advantage that you can!

And this is a dick! How about you suck on it, closet queer?

GO WORK FOR YOUR EQUALITY and stop putting the whole thing on HIM.

He laid it on the line today that we, the GLBT caucus, need to do more grassroots organizing and push our agenda through the states and other avenues.

The Whitehouse is closed to us.

He is going to expend exactly ZERO political capital on us.

Lets face it, Prop 8 passed because President Obama does NOT believe homosexuals should be allowed to marry. He does NOT believe we have the same civil rights that he and Michelle have. He is at heart HOMOPHOBIC.

OK…lets move on. I am going to cancel my HRC donation. They can go have all the dinners they want with Obama…but not on my dime. My money is going back exclusively into California to repeal Prop 8. Its going to be hard because the current president of the United States basically has the same stance that Bush had…HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO MARRY !

Let me say that again…Obama thinks…no Obama publicly declared to all Americans:
I DO NOT THINK HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MARRY !
I DO NOT THINK HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MARRY !
I DO NOT THINK HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MARRY !
I DO NOT THINK HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MARRY !
I DO NOT THINK HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MARRY !
I DO NOT THINK HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MARRY !

There you have it…he made it plain today, we have to move on without him, or rather, in spite of him.

p.s. Please sign on and send me another $25 for my campaign, suckers.

That was a very beautiful and moving post.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings about the LGBT community with the rest of us. Where we’ve been. Where we are. And where we are going.

Well done.

I went to whitehouse.org and did several on site searches. I did not find anything on that site that quotes Mr. Obama as having said that DOMA is discriminatory.

Do you have a link to that page where he states that?

As a kid in the 80′s, well before I so much as held the hand of another guy or had a simple date, I volunteer for Meals on Wheels for AIDs sufferers. I volunteered for PAWs to help those dying of AIDs keep the pets who comforted them, when their families abandoned them. AS a teenager I volunteered to fight Lou Sheldon’s group from repealing the “sexual orientation” from Irvine’s list of those who would be protected from discrimination.

A lot of us on this site have been fighting a very long time. Now in my 40′s, I continue to fight. Compared to others, I’m a neophyte still. But, moreover, we are all fighters in ways that, maybe you’ve heard of, but not in a way that you’ve fully been able to identify with.

There are those here who have fought big battles, rioted at Stonewall. Many more fought anger, dispair and grief as they fought for government funding for AIDs research in the 80s when our President wouldn’t even do so much as utter the word of the epidemic that would kill hundreds of thousands of our fathers, lovers, brothers, and sons–and yes, our mothers, lovers, sisters and daughters. No one group since the mid-20th century in the United States has experienced the holocaust that the GLBT community did. I don’t mean to be disrepsectful by using that word, but that is what it was–the silence and indifference killed the precious souls we loved.

Others fought smaller, but no less profound battles, being rejected and discarded by their families; disowned by friends and churches, dispairaged by neighbors, ministers and strangers who hate us, without ever bothering to know us. Most on this site, have fought these battles, by holding onto their esteems by a thread, being beaten down from time to time, and pulling themselves back up by their own boot straps. Having be brought up in a society that teaches us not much more than self loathing, we have fought to achieve in spite of the voices who have consistently told us that we are unworthy. Many have fought back from the brink of self destruction, depression, and against all odds lived another day to look for and gather knew hope.

I also find it unfair to suggest that we are single issue voters. Many of us have children, to whom we would like to leave a better and safer world–a greener world, a world free of poverty and suffering, a more peaceful world. Those of us who do not have children, still feel a responsibility to the generations who are coming behind us, and feel fiercely protective of them.

As others have pointed out to you, this is a website with a definite focus; it is, after all, a website catering to the GLBT community. It is a place we can come to vent, to share, to exchange thoughts, and to do these things in an environment wherein we feel safe–for there are precious few such environments. After the Clinton Administration’s handling of our issues, and then the dark bleak 8 years of the Bush Administration, we are a community who was touched and affected by the promise for hope and change, and we gleaned onto it. In the past two weeks we have been hit hard by a hatefully worded brief from the DOJ, we were then told that the promise that a repeal of DODT was already being addressed by the house was untrue, and that the house shuffled it back to the White House. Three recent dismals in our military of gay service people have been especially affecting, 20 year veteran nurse, a language translator, and an 18 year fighter pilot who was heavily decorated and described as a hero…all dismissed without fan fare, and under the protection of the Obama administration.

Many of us understand Obama’s need for captial, and we all understand that there is just so much that a new president can do in a few short months; however, this comforts little when the president’s Department of Justice compares our relationships to incestuous ones, or to a marriage in which one party is a child. Today, then, we get our first inching of good news, and we find out that it is not an executive order–as even Bush would have executed, had it been something he believed in–but was a Memo that expires when Obama’s presidency expires. We also found out that we do not get full benefits, nor do we get health insurance, and the few health benefits we do get will be taxed, unlike those enjoyed by opposite sex couples.

SM, I appreciate all your help and my guess is that you are a compassionate person. I hope to meet you on the line out here in Orange County one day, for I counnt on that open heart that you have to find its way around our own perspective on our last few weeks. I expect that someone like you will have the capacity to re-examine this, and be able to not entirely relate, but maybe understand why our passions are high, and our fighting spirits building.

And, SM, I think this is the perfect time for you to rededicate yourself to our fight for civil rights, along with your work for other causes that are important to you, because you will be at the front of a new, stronger movement, a movement which will see greater numbers of GLBT folks and their supporters than you’ve ever seen, all working together towards securing the liberties guarunteed to us in our constitution. What will unite us is exactly what you find, at the moment, distasteful–it will be our united anger and drive to express it in a way that will finally have our voices heard.

We have driven back by circumstance in the past, and lulled into a sleep, but we are wide awake now. Do not dispair in hearing our anger, do not condemn or discourage it for we need it to move forward with any real intent to secure change. And, SM, do us and yourself a favor: do not abandon us, just try to better understand us at this new juncture that we find ourselves, in a new juncture in our history.

Touché, Kevin.

Where there is a will, there is a way, as the old adage goes.

would you have been so “patient” if he had not moved on Gitmo? Somehow he signed that executive order and stem cell research, etc. and he hadn’t even warmed the toilet seat in the WH when he did that!

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com.....-many.html

There are some issues like DOMA repeal that would cost a lot of political capital. Maybe the Democrats are justified in waiting on those. But 69% of voters support DADT repeal, including a majority of Republicans. In all but two states, a majority of voters support job antidiscrimination laws for gay people, in most cases by a large majority (over 60%). In every state, a majority of voters support housing antidiscrimination laws for gay people, usually by a very large majority (over 70%). Why is it so hard for Congress to do things that a substantial majority of voters support?

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/gay rights

It looks as if we aren’t going to get any action on gay rights from the Democrats unless we hold their feet to the fire. I hope that LGBT donors continue to boycott the fundraiser later this month.

“It’s so laughable that you cannot even see how Obama is setting things up so that the courts HAVE to give you full rights.”

Yeah. And the next time you see Mr. O, ask him how much he wants for his bridge in Brooklyn?

We’d like to “buy” that too! LOL

Sorry, no. MLK said “wait” almost always means “never.” And I’m not waiting for your calm world to ask for equal rights for all Americans. i’m not.

No one expected him to drop a goddamn thing. He’s the one who said that he can walk and chew gum at the same time, remember. As a matter of fact, I’d rather he had done nothing instead of letting his department of justice run amok writing briefs with hate speech that are going to be used in fundraising letters for years to come by NOM and their ilk.

It’s so laughable that you cannot even see how Obama is setting things up so that the courts HAVE to give you full rights.

It’s laughable you all BASH Obama when you all FAIL at your own equality fights.