Just saw this on the internets from the 2008 Election….
Are we under Obama’s bus or not?
Shame on the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for their botched coordination of the New Beginnings Initiative.
Prior to the the 2008 election the Task Force brought together about 20 national and local organizations to provide “low hanging fruit” policy recommendations for the Administration.
You can read about it here, here, and here.
However, Pam’s House Blend exposed that the list of suggestions to the Administration has now been removed and replaced with a list of the “princess crumbs” provided by the Obama Administration.
If you go to the Task Force’s site today, you’ll see a very different list (below). Only the items where the boxes are checked off. Therefore you don’t see the laundry list of action items this administration hasn’t accomplished. And, of course, that intro paragraph had to change to deflect criticism of inaction.
What happened to asking people to track the original list? Is there a political problem in transparency regarding what was asked of this administration and what has been accomplished?
These administrative changes do not go unnoticed. They are political maneuvers that only give you, the readers, voters and donors, additional reasons not to fully trust the motives of the organizations supposedly holding our fierce advocate’s feet to the fire. Any good steward of the original list, since it was so carefully crafted, would indeed want to check off those boxes and show people the work left to be done.
It’s called goal-setting, marking milestones and acknowledging where matters fall short, people. All the money spent to craft the list is wasted if there are no visible measures and goals to show this administration has work to do. What’s the point of the NBI if it is truncated to grade on a curve like this?
It’s ironic considering the majority of funding for the initiative is provided by the Open Society Institute.
Shame on the Task Force for wandering so far from its roots of activism and transparency, and accountability. It’s time to call the Task Force and demand that they place the list of New Beginnings’ suggestions back on its website, and get back on the path set forth by its founders.
