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   Act On Principles has created new tools to make sure you can find out where your Senators and Representatives stand on ALL of the LGBT legislation as designated by the Equality Caucus. We are currently in the process to ensure all 535 voting members of Congress receive a survey directly from Act On Principles. However, we need your help to ensure that the various offices in the House and Senate complete the survey, and provide the information that we need. Public Whip Count Tools:Instructions for Contacting Congress1. Contact the Congressional offices that you want to get information from. Call the District or Washington office using information from www.house.gov or www.senate.gov. Let them know that you are sending them a survey on LGBT legislation. 2. Provide the appropriate survey for the office that you are contacting. Use the US House of Representatives survey for Representatives. Use the US Senate Survey for Senators. 4. Ask the staffer or Member “Hi, I would like to know if you can fill out a survey on where you stand on all pieces of LGBT specific legislation as designated by the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus. I am asking that you provide the position based on the accepted whip count terminology.” 5. Collect survey(s) from the Congressional office(s) you have contacted. You might have to do follow-up calls and emails. 6. Share the information that you collected with Act On Principles in one of the following three ways: a.) Enter information into appropriate Public Whip Count for Act on Principles at www.actonprinciples.org. B.) Email or scan responses to whipcount@actonprinciples.com. c.) Fax to 305-723-0299. Your encouragement and persistence to get your Representatives to fill out the survey will be helpful in gathering information for our Public Whip Count. Act On Principles will be creating special webpage to list all of the members who have completed the survey as requested. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us. Get ready for this campaign to rock the world of anti-gay New York Senators. Cynthia Nixon joins the cause, giving my favorite quote in any LGBT advocacy video that I have ever seen before: “We’ve tried the carrot, now its time for the stick!” (No Ratings Yet) hat tip: www.gay.americablog.com Thanks to TruthWinsOut for the transcript.
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(No Ratings Yet) Please indulge me in this experiment. Music has been pivotal in prior civil rights movements. And I wonder if there is space for it in our current LGBT movement. I’d like to share with you every Friday night a great song from our LGBT movement and other civil rights movements to inspire and educate the current and prior struggles that we have a had as a human race. Let me know if other songs of struggle and social justice should be shared, and I’ll happily post in future “Friday Night Video” postings. The first song comes from an artist named Sean Chapin from California who I first discovered from around the Prop 8 challenge. Sean Chapin is a talent that is adding the music to our movement. You can visit his website at http://www.moreequalunion.com/. Not only is following catchy and motivational, it clearly articulates our LGBT struggle . Enjoy the cameo from heroes Dan Choi and Cleve Jones. And you might see some other faces that you recognize. Here are the lyrics of Equality Now by Sean Chapin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykglh7bapWk (No Ratings Yet)
From Dr. Jillian T. Weiss at Bilerico On Tuesday, March 16, there will be a lobby day specifically for ENDA in Washington, D.C.. LGBT people and allies from around the country who support ENDA will be there. I will be there. Will you? It is particularly important to ENDA that people attend from the eight states in which Senators are on the fence. If you live in one of these states, you hold the fate of ENDA in your hands. If you are from one of these eight states, and you are a currently-unemployed LGBT person who is unemployed because of job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, the Bilerico Project would like to help you get there. * Alaska This is too important to be limited to only middle or upper class people who can afford a ticket. Bilerico is excited to be partnering with PFLAG National to support PFLAG’s policy work in order to bring people with stories of discrimination to Capitol Hill. If you would like to donate to help this effort, we would welcome your assistance. More info after the jump. I cannot guarantee that we will be able to accommodate you, but I will make every effort to accommodate all those whose presence would make a difference. Please be as specific as possible in your email about how your presence would make a difference. Include your name, email address and telephone number. The subject line should read “DC LOBBY DAY ASSISTANCE REQUEST.” The deadline is tomorrow, March 5, 2010 at midnight Pacific. To make a donation to this effort please make your checks payable to PFLAG National with a memo line that reads for PFLAG’s policy work. Checks may be mailed to 1828 L St., NW, Suite 660, Washington, DC 20036. You can also donate online but be sure to mark it in honor of PFLAG’s policy work so we know where to apply the funds. There is no deadline for this, but we will need to have the funds in hand shortly in order to use it for the ENDA DC lobby day. Please also send me an email to let me know that you have done so at jillian@bilerico.com so that we can keep apprised of progress. One year ago, Gina Caprio, an American citizen living in Sacramento, CA was determined to do something to change the way unjust US immigration law was affecting her life. Caprio had fallen in love with someone in the UK a few years earlier. The relationship had taken the usual twists and turns associated with a long-distance romance, but when Caprio and her partner decided they wanted to live together in the US, a door slammed shut. Caprio’s UK partner is a woman – and together they are a same-sex binational couple – one of more than 36,000 according to a Human Rights Watch Report. Because the US does not recognize same-sex relationships in any form at the federal level, the US half of the couple cannot sponsor their foreign partner for legal residency here. While opposite-sex binational couples have long taken advantage of marriage as a means to stay together in the US – same-sex couples, whether married or not, remain harshly discriminated against. “When I heard the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) had just been re-introduced in Congress, I knew I had to do something that would make sure this legislation would pass,” said Caprio. She joined Out4Immigration, an all-volunteer group made up of same-sex binational couples, their families and other supportive individuals and learned from them that UAFA needed more co-sponsors in both the House and the Senate. While this, the fifth re-introduction of the bill by Rep. Jerrold Nadler [D-NY-8] and Sen. Patrick Leahy [D-VT] came with 80 co-sponsors in the House and 14 in the Senate, it was nowhere near the number needed to gain a judiciary hearing, much less a floor vote. “We drafted a form letter that allowed space for people to tell how hard it was to be in a same-sex binational relationship in America and started contacting previous co-sponsors of the bill by email, fax and snail mail,” Caprio said. Out4Immigration has about 400 active members around the world. Using the Change.org website, Facebook and Twitter, these members spread the word about the campaign and each week’s targets. “We saw results of the weekly letter writing campaign almost immediately,” said Mickey Lim, Vice President of Out4Immigration. “Rep. Ed Pastor [D-AZ-4] and Sen. Kirsten Gillebrand [D-NY] were quick to read our stories and sign on. But the real indication that we were making an impact – that our voices were being heard – was when Congressional staffers called us and said ‘You’re jamming our fax lines and crashing our email systems!’ You have to send a lot of messages to do that.” The combination of the letter writing campaign, strategic efforts by other LGBT groups and advocates, and the 11th-hour private bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] that stopped the deportation of a Filipino woman named Shirley Tan, who was nearly forcibly separated from her same-sex American partner and their two children led to a Senate Judiciary hearing on UAFA last June. While the bill has since picked up more Senate co-sponsors, Feinstein, ironically, has not signed on. Tom Tierney, another Out4Immigration volunteer joined the letter writing campaign and added a weekly “Call Congress” action after the June hearing. A revised letter now asks five members of Congress each week to co-sponsor UAFA as well as support same-sex binational couples in comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). A bill introduced by Rep. Mike Honda [D-CA- 15] last September called the Reuniting Families Act (RFA), is inclusive. A Senate version of that bill, however, is not. When a bill by Rep. Luis Gutierrez [D-IL-4] called “CIR ASAP” omitted same-sex binational couples late last year, “our members and their families jammed his phone lines,” Lim says. And, when rumors circulated that Sen. Charles Schumer [D-NY] might be considering leaving same-sex binationals out of his Senate counterpart bill, “our members were quick to act and call his office, too.” “The people we target each week are selected based upon their past voting records on LGBT and immigration issues, as well as the committees on which they sit in their respective chambers of Congress,” explains Tierney, who continues to try to net some Republican support to go with the so-far all-Democrat numbers. Last week, UAFA picked up a key co-sponsor, Rep. Maxine Waters [D-CA-35], bringing the total number of House supporters to 120 – more co-sponsors than any other immigration bill. “In total, we’ve seen 5 Senators and over 20 members of the House sign on as UAFA co-sponsors after we’ve written to them. They’re getting the message,” says Tierney. Meanwhile, Gina Caprio and her partner have temporarily overcome their separation through a student visa. “But the emphasis here is on the word ‘temporary,’” says Caprio. Until same-sex binational couples are recognized at the federal level, either through passage of UAFA or its inclusion in larger CIR, the Out4Immigration letter writing campaign will continue. “No one should have to choose between their country and their family,” says Lim. “Our letters and phone calls address the very real issue that LGBT Americans with foreign partners have very few legal options to live together in this country.”
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As of this morning, for the first time in history, same-sex couples will line up outside the DC Superior Court to apply for marriage licenses. There are so many lessons to be learned from this battle, but I think it is important to note three that really stick out in my mind. First, unlike we have seen on a federal level, incremental change works if, and only if, you see true incremental steps towards equality year-after-year that build upon each other. It took a truly dedicated group of activists in DC to continuously add legal increments towards full marriage equality (and not just promises year after year) to create the opportunity to force full marriage equality. Second, if not for Republican-turned-Independent openly gay councilmember David Catania who was willing to be bold and stand up to an onslaught of criticism from other communities within DC and from our community and force the issue on principle we would not be where we are today. Third, if not for a group of young activists (who were called politically naïve and worse by the supposed “savvy” and “sophisticated” politicos) who created their own organization and refused to back down and bravely took on the entrenched powers in DC we would not be where we are today. I say all this because last year when Councilmember Catania and the the new activist organization DC For Marriage began to force the issue we heard a chorus of criticism that claimed that forcing the issue would alienate, Latinos, women, poor people, church-goers, the Catholic Church, middle-class workers, Congress, African-Americans, etc…..and that forcing the issue would set us back 20 or 30 years, but Catania and others refused to back down and took a principled stand. Sadly, people in our own community said that standing up for principle was a sure way to lose and that we needed to be realistic and pragmatic, others claimed that we needed marriage equality in at least half the states before forcing the issue or we would assuredly lose the battle here at home. We now have marriage equality in the District of Columbia—and last I checked, the sky has not fallen. Have some people been alienated? Sure. Are there discriminatory attitudes and beliefs more important than our families equality? Nope. Will there be a backlash? Sure. But, that is a by-product of exerting leadership and actually fighting for change and is bound to happen no matter what you do to minimize the impact. (And, it is important to note, that lots of work was done to build bridges but discriminatory beliefs and attitudes did not paralyze Catania and others.) Kudos to those in DC and around the country that are willing to show real leadership and are willing to fight and demand for our equality. The time has come. |
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