angry

Committee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

Wikipedia has a good definition – along the lines of the maxim that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. On the question of who is better than our three committee members- We needed a CEO and the talent pool in our community is huge nationally. No one is really accountable and Steve Smith is just a hired gun who will move on to other issues. Check out this piece re Smith:
http://www.ebar.com/news/artic.....ticle=3475

Get over yourself. Did you seriously just whine for an entire page about them not having a version of the webinar software for OS X? Because, of course, THAT’s the important issue?

For starters, the web version of Live Meeting works fine on OS X. Secondly, if you’d just loaded Parallels or Boot Camp you’d sound just a bit more professional and like you know what you’re doing.

Kors has not “passed” a single bill.

He’s collected a lot of money and sent out e-mail blasts asking for more.

He and his group (along with Jean and the other retarded “leaders”) bullied the hell out of real activists during the Prop 8 debate — those activists were making the same points that EVERYONE is now making ex-post-facto.

Kors, Jean, and their national equivalents at HRC and NGLTF are utterly useless, except as examples of what NOT to do.

If Kors was pursuing another cushy line of work and his organization didn’t exist, it’s rather likely California would have passed 100 gay rights bills in California in his absence. That’s how pathetically awful his performance, and the performance of his organization, have been.

And if the leaders themselves had only said that, I don’t think there’d be so much hatred and resenemt against them in this discussion. Yet they didn’t …

Think about that for a minute.

How the f*** do you all think a gay rights movement happens?

Do you know that with Geoff Kors as Executive Director EQCA has passed 50 bills since 2000 in the California legislature, giving LGBT citizens as close to full equality as anywhere in the world, not just the United States?

Despite (currently) not having access to marriage, the statutes that EQCA has been instrumental for passing mean that in California you can NOT be legally fired for being transgendered. In Massachusetts (which has gay marriage), you can be fired for being transgendered! In California Registered Domestic Partnerships have all the same rights and responsibilities afforded under state law to married couples except for NINE specific enumerated differences. Do you think that happened by accident?

I just think people need to take a chill pill and think about what they are saying before they say that Kors, Kendell and Jean need to be “fired.”

Yes, the current LGBT leaders made mistakes in running the NO ON PROP 8 campaign. Mistakes will always be made in a campaign. Please list me 4 people you would have rather have run the campaign. How do you know they would have done a better job? This destructive anger to the people who have been leading these LGBT organizations IS NOT HELPFUL.

If you feel they are so awful, go ahead–create your own organization and try and enact change that way. Good luck with that.

In the end we really have no way of knowing if Prop 8 would not have passed if we had different leadership. We can only notice what happened and decide whether and how each of us will support actions to further LGBT equality in the future.

I gambled a wad, too. And I didn’t think the odds were good. But I really really wanted this. Now I’m looking at my Visa bill. I paid how much to lose my rights?

Their paycheck is in your pocket. Spend your money wisely, grasshopper.<<

I don’t know about the others, but Lori Jean is not answerable to ANYONE.

The LA Gay and Lesbian Center is not a community center. It doesn’t rely on contributions. The Center is a health organization and is nearly entirely financed by medical insureance and state health department reimbursements along with government grants.

Lori Jean didn’t think of the “West Hollywood Halloween thing” because she’s no longer a part of the gay community. She’s the CEO of a medical corporation with a 40+ million dollar budget and has about as much interest in Prop 8 as the CEO of Kaiser HMO.

This is the same “inspirational speaker” who went to the LA downtown protest march (the one that led to the desert) and told listeners that those who pushed through Prop 8 “are the same people who oppose illegal immigration and affirmative action.”

Huh? Did she read the exit polls? Did she glance at the blogs which tracked the contributions?

She’s so caught up in her insular world of “left v. right” and coalitions of failure and hobnobbing with the money-gays and bleating platitudes of decision by committee that it’s no wonder we lost. If the others are like Jean, then I’m surprised we got 47% of the vote.

Sorry if I sound bitter, but – unlike the attitude of our “leaders” – this actually matters to me. Personally.

THEY FUCKING SOLD OUR EMAILS!!??!!!

Can I be your gay husband? I think I love you.

Love, The Ghost of Harvey Milk

Those are fantastic ideas. I think 2, 3, and 5 are quite innovative and would help to keep the pressure on without us being perceived as attacking religion/marriage/children/whatever-they-accuse-us-of-this-week.

Thanks for mentioning this! What I found striking is that the people on this call seem to have elected themselves the leaders through 2010 by default. It troubles me that as we come to realize how badly and disjointed this effort was at both a state and national level, we still keep coming back to the same leadership. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?

As for organization, what is difficult especially in the GLBT community is our emphasis on privacy due to still valid implications of being out in a straight world. Sometimes we cannot reach people because we respect privacy in our community and usually have to be careful with email and home addresses. We must brainstorm on how to handle this issue in a world of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and aggressive blogging.

What strategy should we support going forward? This is what I beleive should be done beyond pursuing court cases on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption:

1. We focus on passing ENDA with or without the transgender provision. Obama and our allies in Congress can get this done for us in leiu of tackling the Don’t Ask Don’T Tell legislation they want to hold back on until 2010. We deserve outreach in 2009 for our Obama support and this will protect the most people. It’s also an economic security issue.

2. We create a GLBT Chamber of Commerce and select one of our most prominent businessmen to be the face of it. The organization would be supported by glbt organization donations and then later membership dues. We must push the economic security issue when talking about marriage equality. We also need a lobbying arm solely focused on pushing our interests in debates over small businesses in the health care discussions occurring at the national level.

3. We must begin our own media campaign about our glbt families. Churches do it. Corporations do it. Political Candidates do it. This isn’t a recruiting commerical of course (tongue in cheek). This is a familiarization campaign. We must approach it from a view angles: 1) We have families. 2) We are your neighbors. 3) We share your values. 4) We are Americans. I see commercials profiling families like the Match.com or EHarmony ads where a lesbian or gay couple talk about their life, how they met, and their day to day grind. We could even have ads with single people talking about what they do… this would be maybe where a gay celebrity puts their two cents in. At the end they look at the camera and say “We’re gay. We’re your neighbor. And we’re Americans too.”

4. We must individually start demanding more from our organizations. If we must replace leadership or remove funding we must. I beleive we should all refuse to pay next months dues and call for a dossier from each organization we belong to as to where they are going in a 3 year plan. We all must take indiviual responsibility for who is guiding our way, this is one way to do it.

5. We organize a protest a month. We follow the example of JoinTheImpact.com’s calendar and keep the pressure on. Our protests should not be directed at our opposition. We will not change their mind and exposing their hypocracy is not our job. Our job is to sell our brand. We have to go to the people who vote and say “This is why you should support us.” We should avoid being the angry gay man at the temple and become the neighbor who shares the same concerns as his or her other neighbors but has to climb a hill to do it. But most important, it is a gay or lesbian face they see not a straight one.

See “Milk” and compare to these twits. Discuss.

We do need to do this from a grassroots level and we need to take an ALL or NOTHING attitude.

As for EQCA/No On 8, I gambled a wad and lost. Well, I won’t be playing that machine again.

First, after one of the most devastating defeats in the history of the gay rights movement, they wrap up their town hall meeting in 2 hours? That pretty much says it all. If there were a genuine interest in working through what went wrong and how to make it right, this would have been a 4-5 hour marathon, and only the first of many. What arrogance.

Second, I find it incredible that no one asked how two of the leaders could go on long vacations during the campaign. These must have been screened out.

Third, Qweerty says of Lori Jean “She also is impressed by the grassroots energy that’s popped up after Prop 8 passed.” Wow! Awesome grassroots energy! Lori Jean should lose more often. Think of all the energy she’ll create. Maybe she can manage the campaign to defeat the next initiative, which will be to repeal domestic partnership rights. She can go on vacation for a month, blow the campaign, and then marvel at all the beautiful demonstrations in the street.

Undoing this defeat necessitates the removal of leaders like this.

Did anyone resign, at least?

Also, as an aside, why has no one in the legal challenges against Prop 8 brought up the absurd consequences of upholding the proposition, namely that it leads to the potential for extreme uncertainty in the law, this issue has potential to flip-flop every two years until we finally get protection from the Supreme Court of the United States.

It’s hard to think when one’s head is shoved up one’s ass.

I’m a Mac user and I am as pissed for being excluded for that, as I am being excluded as a grassroots person.

ECca liked my check, however. I should be receiving an email very shortly, asking for another one.

For what, I don’t know. But, I’m sure they’ll think of some way to throw it away.

Btw, since donating to ECCA, I’ve wound up on over a dozen other organizations email lists…all of whom are asking for money.

Fucking whores. Not a dime more. To any of them.
They can kiss my queer ass, including HRC which I have already canceled my membership with.

Their paycheck is in your pocket. Spend your money wisely, grasshopper.

(Yeah, my ass is burning from the whole call, too. And not in a good way.)

This is so horrible, remove them from their positions…now!

http://washingtonblade.com/the.....g_id=22644

“A member of Barack Obama’s transition team is denying media reports that the president-elect has decided to delay efforts to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” until 2010.”

Also:

“Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), the lead sponsor of legislation that would repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” told CNN earlier this month that the administration would approve of such a bill next year.”

And:

“Retired Army Col. Stewart Bornhoft, who is gay and a former commander in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said changing the law would require both “passion and preparation.”

“Clearly, the passion for change is there,” he said. “But it requires proper preparation for the [Defense Department] to declare that they can implement open service successfully.”

However, Bornhoft said repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” should be attainable in the next Congress.

“Whether that’s the first or second half of that period should be determined by the progress within the Pentagon’s thinking rather than an arbitrary calendar date,” he said.”