Barney Frank can fuck off and die; also Mr. Obama at the HRC

[solarbird]

J0, Barney Frank: Go fuck yourself. No, seriously. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Take your "protesting is worthless and you should all go home" and add it to your "sit down shut up and give the DNC your money so they can tell you to go fuck off again," your "let's not try to overturn DOMA" political ass-covering for Mr. Obama, your alliance-splitting sell-out scumbaggery on ENDA, and fuck. off. and. die. I've had it with you. Yeah, run out of town and hide from the march. Run, coward.

Of course, you're the perfect liaison for and representative of those worthless bastards at HRC, who, I must yet again stress, should never receive another dime from any GBLT person with any vague hint of self-respect, and are nothing more than a sockpuppet for the Democratic Party powers that be, with about as much self-loathing for themselves as the DNC has for them. They're a perfect fit for the Tuesday afternoon "veal pen," where beltway groups get their marching orders from Rahm Emanuel.

Mr. Obama basically repeated his campaign speeches at the HRC dinner tonight. He gives good speech, that's certain. Huffington Post commenters love it, ganging up on anybody who says 'j0, what about actions'? The HRC crowd, similarly caring about words and not about action, went wild at almost every word. As before the election, he declined to say anything against anti-gay initiatives currently up in various locations (then, most notably California; now, Washington State, Maine, DC), which I think is the most telling thing.

In addition him to doing nothing, his party is also continuing to do nothing except stop excluding queers from hate-crimes law. I'm rather iffy on the whole hate-crimes law thing to start, so that doesn't carry a lot of weight with me, but I'll grant it's of memetic importance if not much else. But Mr. Obama promised here - again - that he'll work towards stopping government oppression against GBLT people later, when it's safe, when the economy is booming and health care is universal and education is reformed and all wars are over (timeline Afghanistan: after he leaves office) and, and, and. Basically, it'll be our turn after he's done all the things he really cares about - be patient, and they'll get to us, someday. He lists the key things to get done first, tho' he doesn't quite use those words - here's the relevant bit:

I think it is important to remember that there is not a single issue that my administration deals with on a daily basis that does not touch on the lives of the LGBT community. We all have a stake in reviving this economy. We all have a stake in putting people back to work. We all have a stake in improving our schools and achieving quality, affordable health care. We all have a stake in meeting the difficult challenges we face in Iraq and Afghanistan... So I know you want me working on jobs and the economy and all the other issues that we're dealing with. But my commitment to you is unwavering even as we wrestle with these enormous problems.

The problem, of course, is that there are always enormous problems that face straight people (and queers too), and by this metric, simply not oppressing queers anymore gets scheduled for approximately... hmmm.... never.

(It's kinda neat later in the speech, where Mr. Obama takes credit for ending the HIV-travel ban that was actually ended by the previous Congress and Mr. Bush. Particularly since the implementation of regulations to end this ban were delayed - substantially - by his administration's actions. 10 months so far and counting! Of course, the HRC goes nuts cheering him. Sycophants.)

If you care, Sullivan liveblogs the speech here, and ends with describing the speech as "much worse than expected." Meanwhile, Dan Savage comments here, and Towleroad is not impressed here. Neither is Firedoglake.

Fundamentally you need to understand two things about Mr. Obama and this speech tonight. You need to understand that Mr. Obama never supported actual legal equality and never said he does. It's one of the places he's been somewhat honest. This came up again tonight, when he started talking about a national domestic partnership system, and not legal marriage, and where he did not say anything about Maine or Washington State. And secondly you need to understand is that this speech says in reasonably clear language that he will not spend one. halfpenny. of political capital on queers. He'll throw out some speeches and no-impact breadcrumbs to keep the money train going, sure, but that's an investment with an expected return. The only thing that has gotten any movement out of anybody in that administration is the threat of shutting down that money train.

That's all that matters, and that's all that will matter. Understand that, and you'll understand this.

Comments

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Protest marches and rallies ARE useless. Shay's Army got nothing. Suffragette marches did exactly nothing until pro-Sufferage candidates were elected. WWI Peace Marches achieved even less. The March on the Pentagon was a joke. Martin Luther King's March on Washington achieved jack squat; the Vietnam War lasted until well after the protest marches stopped. (In fact, there's some reason to think that the protest marches prolonged the war.) All the marchers in the world didn't stop the US from ratifying NAFTA or the WTO, and how much, exactly, have the Tea Partiers gotten of what they wanted? Electing the candidate that's more likely to switch to your side if the public's clearly stated will changes matters. Persuading the public matters. Organizing itself matters, if you think you can get roughly the same percentage of the population on your side that, say, Huey Long had; that'd be up around ten million people actively donating to your cause, I'd estimate. The rest is elaborate masturbation. It feels good for the protest marchers, which is why they do it; it changes society not even in the least.

You will get the things you want when you persuade an unambiguous majority of the voting public to also want them. Anything you do that furthers that objective is productive for your cause. Anything you do that detracts from that objective is counter-productive for your cause. That is how the country works. Period.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Bastages. So the HRC is right up there with the National Rifle Waffle Association in actually *doing something*, eh? Jive turkeys.

Ok. How do we turn off Rahm Emanuel? We know that that's where all *sorts* of bullshit is coming from, from this to FISA. We know who's behind that, too, only it's a bit more difficult to reach all the way to Constantinople as private citizens... but if we can somehow marginalize this jive turkey and make it plain into the bargain that no more such bullshit will be tolerated...

If this be treason, then let us make the most of it. I want my gorram country back.

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

This morning I was listening to NPR and they had coverage of the HRC dinner. The sycophantic gays and lesbians were wildly applauding Obama as if he'd actually done something for us.

Had I been there I might have caused another "Joe Wilson" moment.

It's amazing how intelligent and educated gays and lesbians can delude themselves into believing that Obama won't "throw us under the bus" again, (which he will.)

It's fucking pathetic. (Pardon my language.)

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

Beautiful rant. Thanks for sharing it. :)

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

So you place persuading a majority at the crux of legitimate change? Why do you envision that as a necessity?

I don't necessarily disagree; I'm just curious as to why you think it's central to meaningful progress.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I'll bite: Because people afraid of (for example) homosexuality will stop at nothing to fight it. Look what happened across the country in 2004 when Mass.'s court found gay marriage prohibitions unconstitutional. The twitchy-eyed haters thus mobilized (and maybe more than a hint of election process skullduggery) undid Kerry's election.

Until those people are a small minority and can be relegated into a fringe wacko grouping (as they should be anyway), they are powerful in the effort they will expend to fight any perceived advancement of rights to their hated target group.

Essentially, the hate comes first. All rational mental processes follow to support one's hatreds. Challenging that with mere rationality invites pitchfork and torch brigades to come a' knocking.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

How little you know me. I've been pro-gay-rights since before Stonewall. And if you think it's because I hate gays, how were you going to explain the fact that none of my other examples of useless protest marches involved gay rights?

It is a plain and simple fact that we live in a democracy. If you want to split hairs and call it a democratic republic, I won't contradict you, because for these purposes, the difference doesn't matter. Our legislators and our executives are elected, and up for re-election regularly. And while they're not supposed to do so, studies have pretty unambiguously shown that our judges take their interpretations of the law from the will of the public, too, albeit more slowly. All three branches of government have significant leeway to follow their feelings (or their campaign donations) when the voters don't care about an issue, but when a clear and unambiguous majority want there to be no change, there will be no change; when an easily recognizable slightly larger majority want a change, there will be a change. That is just plain how our government works. There have been a few attempts by people in power to short-circuit this process, but it almost never works, and on the rare occasions it "works," it never works for very long and the backlash is overwhelming.

When the voters didn't want Social Security, we weren't going to get Social Security no matter how many people marched in the streets and no matter what politicians got elected; when the public switched sides on the issue halfway through the Great Depression, we got Social Security. Civil rights campaigners could march all the wanted and protest all they wanted, but as long as the majority of Americans didn't want a Civil Rights Act, we weren't going to get a Civil Rights Act. Then people saw Bull Connor's cops using dogs and firehoses against kids and elderly women on TV, saw the murders of white civil rights workers exposed on their TV, and we got a Civil Rights Act. For every time we've changed our laws and our customs, you will find the same thing: even when our political class have all wanted to change things, they couldn't do so until the public demanded it in no uncertain terms.

On gay marriage, the polls (http://pollingreport.com/civil.htm) are moving back in your direction, slightly, but they're still against you by about 5 to 4. (That's up from 3 to 2 over the past couple of years, and 2 to 1 or more in recent times.) Get that number to 3 to 2 in favor, or even 5 to 4 in favor for a long time, and you'll suddenly find politicians who were previously on the fence changing their votes, because that's how democracy works. Looking at the last year or two's polls, if you could sustain the current numbers for another year, you could probably have national civil unions by this time next year (currently polling about 5 to 4 in favor). (continued ...)

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

(continued...)

So, now, let's talk about the protest march that Barney Frank, who has been campaigning for gay rights for (I'm guessing here) longer than you've been alive, says is going to be useless, and I'm agreeing with him. Who will it persuade? Anybody? Has anybody ever changed their opinion on an issue because a few tens of thousands of people held a protest march, ever, anywhere in this country? I would argue, based on my reading of history, that the answer is no, with one exception: really ugly protest marches, like the Seattle anti-WTO riots or the anti-war riots of the mid to late 1960s, persuade people to oppose the protesters. In terms of voter persuasion, in terms of the one thing that matters most in a democracy, a protest march is a gamble risking losing much in order to gain nothing.

But it feels good to march. Protesters get re-affirmed by each other, they feel less alone, they feel reassured that no, it's not just them, there are thousands of other people working for the same thing they want. This empowers them to go back home and persuade some more. That's the only payoff from a protest march; one that doesn't turn into a disaster can reduce burnout among the people actually doing the work of persuading the people to change their opinion.

Barney Frank thinks that, this close to victory, the risk of losing campaigners to burnout is a lesser risk than the risk that large numbers of voters who are currently close to changing their minds in your favor will perceive the marchers as trying to be a militant minority trying to bully politicians into voting against the explicitly stated wishes of their constituents. What evidence can you cite to prove him wrong?

[avram]

And if you think it's because I hate gays

Where are you getting that from? Neither ankh_f_n_khonsu nor peristaltor accused you of hating gays.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah, I never accused you of being anti-gay. Far from it. In fact, your summation of the situation mirrors (with greater presented evidence) my position.

Were you perhaps addressing solarbird?

[cow.livejournal.com]

That would be a mistaken address. If you're trying to find the anti-gay queers, you have to call the HRC. }:D

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Mmm. I read what you said as an attempt to answer ankh's question about why I was saying what I was saying, and misattributing the motives that you mentioned, fear and hatred of homosexuality, to me. I read it as you accusing me of being insincere, of throwing up the false barrier of needing majority support for your position because I wanted you to lose?

In light of what you just said, I suppose it would be possible to read what you wrote as an answer to a question other than the one ankh asked, namely why does it matter to persuade the majority; in that reading, your answer would say that if you persuade the politicians (via the march) but not the public, the public will find a way to strike back? That, I could almost go along with, with the caveat that the march isn't going to intimidate the politicians into voting against their constituents, anyway, so the point is moot.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

OBAMA MAKES SPEECH, DOES NOTHING

This is no longer a headline worthy of "news". Call me when this dude actually does anything.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Yup. Your second paragraph sums it up nicely.