Homo-politico Barney Frank and trans activist Mara Keisling sat down with Logo yesterday to discuss the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
Keisling, who heads the National Center for Transgender Equality calls the sexual orientation compromise “not acceptable”. Frank, of course, maintains that it’s better to get some rights than no rights.
HRC president Joe Solmonese also makes an appearance, telling Logo’s Jason Bellini what he told us: his organization needs to maintain relationships with politicians. Those relationships, of course, are more important than trans rights.
adamblast
So you’re saying trans rights are more important than gay rights?
That certainly the message NGTLF, Lambda Legal, Tammy, etc. have left me with. If ENDA goes down to defeat due the the trans activists controlling the LGBT agenda, our time of common cause is over as far as I’m concerned.
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
There are many things that you can say about Barney Frank. Brilliant, Ivy League attorney and life partnered for more than a decade.
Then you can add that Frank is a member of the Democratic Leadership Council – a centrist pragmatic caucus who hijacked the liberal Democratic Party. Kerry is also a member of the DLC.
As previously stated, Barney and his life partner are NOT married in MA. This, despite the fact that a Jesse Helms staff hypocrite did so. So did DA and former state Senator Barrios, whose Ivy credentials mirror Frank.
Why? With a Kerry win in 2004, Barney would like to move up from the House to the Senate. He would have sought the seat in a special election had Kerry won.
Frank sees the Kennedy seat as eventually winnable when and if Teddy dies or retires. His centrist pragmatism gives him additional votes.
What tells me that Tammy Baldwin, were she the congressperson from MA and not MI, would be married, and have done so the minute it was possible.
She supports a full ENDA and Frank does NOT. Surprised. Not me. !!!!
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
Adamblast – listen to a Canadian will full rights that you may never realise in your whole lifetime.
And that, my neighbour and brother, is sad indeed !!!
The right wing wants you to be recriminalised as sodomists. They do not want any part of the LGBT community to have ANY rights approximating as well as the reality of full equality under law.
When they can make the centrists and accomodationists and pragmatic pols go for less- they are weakening the arguement for all rights.
For example, MA is alone with full and equal marriage. CT, VT, NH and NJ opted for separate and second-tier civil unions.. How long do you think it will take for marriage to replace that pragmatic compromise?
Do you think that the Christofascists and secular neocons want to give the LGB community rights and not the T? Grow up, young man, says this 61 year old activist.
adamblast
Oh, I don’t doubt that all this in-fighting is making the right gleeful. But again, from the perspective of someone desperate for gay rights, it is the pro-trans crowd that has sided with the conservatives–in seeking to block the first gay rights legislation that has ever had a good chance at passing in Congress.
Sure, it won’t become law now. But if it passes in the House now, it could become law soon. Especially if the next President is a Democrat. I honestly believe that this trans-or-bust strategy will kill our hopes at any meaningful national gay rights legislation during the next Presidency. There are somewhere between 10 and 25 million gay folks out there who deserve better than this. And a handful of transfolks. They deserve their equality as well, but not at the expense of others.
Leland Frances
The quickest way to smell the stink, read hollowness, of anyone’s argument with another is the speed with which the first resorts to character assassination. Frank and his partner haven’t chosen to marry? Shocking! Counter-revolutionary! He must be self-loathing! Of course, he is none of these, but how nice of you, Ms. Canada, to resist mentioning that Frank is also a Jew. By the way, you need to take a refresher course in the Party Line of the Gay Lunatic Fringe for, in lieu of throwing rice at Frank and his partner, you should be throwing roses: to the Luney Tunes [sic] “marriage†is “assimilationist.â€
Whether one accepts at two-faced value your descriptions of groups he allegedly belongs to doesn’t mean he’s wrong about ENDA. By the way, your tactic is known as McCarthyism.
But all the McCarthyism and name calling and histrionics with no sense of history won’t change the fact that, as AdamBlast courageously repeats, some protection for some now is better that no protection for anyone. Or are YOU, for example, prepared to tell the blue collar lesbian mom working an assembly line in Alabama or slinging hash at a greasy spoon owned by “Christofascists†that she has to celebrate giving up the opportunity for even minimum-wage job security and continuing to feed herself and her kids while you stuff your mouth with lies and your belly with self-righteousness?
praenomenal
“So you’re saying trans rights are more important than gay rights?
That certainly the message NGTLF, Lambda Legal, Tammy, etc. have left me with. If ENDA goes down to defeat due the the trans activists controlling the LGBT agenda, our time of common cause is over as far as I’m concerned.”
And that is why they will win. T rights are not more important, they are just AS important.