ACT On Principles

Many of you watched the arrest of Lt. Dan Choi on the White House gates on March 18, 2009.  Also arrested was the heroic Captain James Peitrangelo.  Rachel Maddow covers Captain James Peitrangelo in her conversation about President Obama being a “fierce advocate” in a clip from her show last year.

There is a growing concern with the lack of progress on the federal level in regards to LGBT equal rights.  Yes, we got hate crimes legislation, but the reality is that passed in the last Congress and we just needed a President to sign it (Thanks President Obama).  However, passing such a law that provides additional resources to investigate a violent or biased crime against someone based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, is a very low bar when it comes to being treated equal by our government.  There is so much more pain in our lives caused by unjust laws.

The recent arrests of Lt. Dan Choi and Captain James Pietrangelo at the White House gates reminds us of that.

When you walked into the courtroom after your night in jail, you were in uniform, handcuffed with a chain around your waist. You are a West Point graduate and Army lieutenant, how did you reach this point?
Being in chains, for me, matched what was in my heart the whole time I was serving and was closeted. Harriet Tubman once said she had freed 1,000 slaves but could have freed so many more if they only knew that they were slaves. People don’t always know that they are in fetters. Even my feet were shackled so I could only take small steps forward. To me that symbolizes what it is to live under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the only law that enforces shame. Those chains symbolized how my country is trying to restrict my movement, how we are only allowed incremental, tiny steps.

The LGBT community needs employment protections, the right to serve in our military, the right to bring our loved ones to immigrate from another country, and the right to marry the one we love and have it recognized by the Federal government.

At the begining of the Obama Adminstration, the  early critical LGBT voices were targeted, yet sweeping by calling for all of these laws to get enacted.  Such voices included The Dallas Principles (the inspiration for Act on Principles) and even the Human Rights Campaign with their No Excuses campaign echoing the “No Delays. No Excuses.” tagline for The Dallas Principles.  AmericaBlog’s John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay started the “Don’t Ask. Don’t Give” campaign to pressure the Democratic National Committee and the White House to fulfill their promises, and other powerful LGBT voices from the blogosphere joined inlcuding Andy Towle (from Towleroad), Pam Spaulding (from Pam’s House Blend), Bil Browning (from Bilerico), and Michaelangelo Signorile (from SiriusOutQ).  Robin McGehee, Kip Williams, David Mixner, and Cleve Jones called for the National Equality March in October with the demand “Full Equality Now”, while many of the larger national organizations lacked the vision and inspiration and sat on the sidelines as the movement passed them by.   Obama was criticized in the press relentlesly as his “Fierce Advocate” and “urgency of now”, fizzled into a  “fierce urgency of whenever”. Many from established organizations including those embedded with the Obama Administration defended the inaction by claiming that the growing voices that were asking for our equality were just being impatient, politically naive, and unsophisticated.  The defenders of the Administration’s inaction were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

The infamous Don Lemmon CNN interview with Lt. Dan Choi, Dan Savage, Michelangelo Signorile, and Hilary Rosen showed the movement, and showed the spit that was only going to get larger.

Nate Silver from fivethrityeight.com now reports that the 2010 election doesn’t look so good for Democrats in the Senate. (hat tip: David Mixner)

Democrats now project to hold an average of 54.0 seats when the Senate convenes in January, 2011, according to our latest forecast, and Republicans 46.0. This reflects a roughly one-seat improvement for Republicans since our previous forecast on March 10th.

Republicans now have about a 10 percent chance of taking an outright majority of Senate seats, according to the model, up slightly from before — and about an 18 percent chance of getting to at least a tie. Democrats still have about an 8 percent chance, on the other hand, of recovering a 60-seat majority — although obviously this would require a substantial shift in the national political environment. None of our analysis directly reflects any potential impact from the Democrats’ passage of their health care bill.

So we are going to be dealing with an even tougher enviroment after the midterm elections.  Now we must demand full equality and get those items that were promised to us during the election including the Repeal of DADT, and the Repeal of DOMA.  ENDA and UAFA in addition need to be passed by Congress and Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid.   We also must remember the lesson learned, “Those who told us to wait will not be listened to again.”