You just don’t speak for all of us.
So, I would appreciate it if you would stop declaring war on homophobia and insensitivity in my name.
Cause this queer thinks that it's about fuckin' time that the Democrats started getting the evangelicals back where they belong: in our party.
Where they used to be before Nixon and Atwater and Raygun and the Bushes.
There is work to be done, but I'm not in favor of us being mirror-image assholes to them, shunning the people who agree with us on more issues than they disagree with us on when it so clearly costs us dearly in election after election.
Bring religionists back into the tent and then we'll work on them about reproductive freedom and sexual equality and separation of church and state and the other things on which we disagree.
Even FDR had to work with the racist assholes in his own party FOR THE GREATER GOOD and even with the racist, homophobic, sexist and anti-semitic shit he did, I still think he was one of the best presidents we've ever had.
So, please don't think that you speak for me or all gay people when you try to impose some sort of GLBT community loyalty oath on our elected officials WHEN IT COMES TO THINGS THAT ARE NEITHER LEGISLATIVE, JUDICIARY NOR EXECUTIVE, merely symbolic.
I want my president to be effective and I want his/her policies to reflect my values.
This is not a slap in my face. This is a slap in the face of those Replublicans who have been allowed to use our idealogical purity tests against the progressive movement for too long.
NOT THIS TIME.
and mark my words:
President Barack Obama will be the FIRST president in history to mention the words gay or lesbian in an inaugural address.
Then tell me what having Rick Warren as a guest at this party REALLY means.
To people who think that the pulpit of the Inaugural invocation
is bigger than the pulpit already afforded to the guy who wrote and sold more than 20 million copies of THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE?
I say "Um, really?"
Perspective, please.
As a gay activist who cares for the entire progressive MOVEMENT, i beg you to step back and take a moment to consider treating the people you hate the way you want them to treat you.
Even knowing that GWBush is an asshole of the highest order, it would have stunned and thrilled me had he invited Rev Troy Perry of MCC (Metropolitan Community Church, the GAY congregation) to give the invocation at his inauguration.
Would it have meant that he was any more progressive? Not especially. But it would have made me stop hating him long enough to give him the benefit of the doubt in his first weeks.
(As I hope Warren's congregants will treat Obama's fledgling presidency)
And if GWB had been the kind of man who could invite a man who would be seen as unclean by most of his base to be a part of his inauguration, he would surely have not been such a useless piece of doubt-impaired and conscience-free shit.
Obama isn't attacking us.
He is inviting these religionists back into the tent. And they know that we were here first.
And to the person who said that the major anger of the gay community is being ridiculed in the reclisted snark diaries about the FUROR that has consumed the site today, I say I’m gay and my major anger isn't being ridiculed.
Am I not part of the community?
(I was excommunicated in absentia?)
And in response to the contention that nobody cares that P-E Obama has reversed campaign pledges or that he’s throwing gays under the bus, I say:
WHAT CAMPAIGN PLEDGES HAS OBAMA REVERSED?
(cause that sounds like some right-wing trolling dressed up like gay outrage right there, yessireebob)
seriously...I've been out of the loop. Name one pledge he has reversed. One.
(and also, which gays did he throw under what bus? Was it the single-issue, upper middle-class, caucasian gays?)
UPDATE
Thanks to the "bigger picture" people (there are a lot of you!) for making me feel like a new kind of politics is possible.
It's so nice to know you're out there.