It so happens that I recently concluded my first run for office, as the first lesbian in WA state Senate, 5th district. We have 6 wonderful gay boys but no womyn in our state legislature. And in my own race, I received not one penny from national LGBT lobbyist groups and received a $200 check from a local group on election day, far too late to have one iota of impact to getting me elected as the first lesbian in WA state. This was a sad analogue to the serious problem we have, that of the LGBT financial backers choosing to fund Obama’s race to the exclusion of local more effective LGBT friendly races…. I would ask LGBT and Gay allieds to write several pink checks for candidates up and down the ticket. Happily, I know one example of strong LGBT local legislator success. A Miss Karla Drenner, the first lesbian in Georgia, for whom I was once proudly campaign manager, was able to craft early LGBT friendly legislation simply by working her butt off in the Georgia legislature. She and WA state’s own Senator Ed Murray, sadly did not receive a penny from Victory fund in their initial run for office. Sadly, Victory Fund keeps making these same mistakes as they did in failing to support my race.
If I take these ballot initiatives personal, it’s because the sound of a vacuum cleaner sucking my precious Gay dollars out of my pocket, only to throw it after bad government is hurting our cause far more than the Catholic or Mormon churches spending millions. Don’t get me wrong, I would love the tax every church in a 2,000 mile radius of my house.. but that’s for alter… Right now, Obama’s administration, while not showing a clear understanding of the need to separate church and state, might learn from the LGBT framing of this issue as a fundamental requirement of our Federal laws to separate CIVIL marriage from Church Marriage. Church marriage, again as our founding fathers wisely outlined, has no place anywhere in our government legal or legislative codes. And if Obama cannot personally verbalize to the nation that he supports gay marriage, we will have 4 years of a lame duck president as far as LGBT rights go. Our power is to say NO next time Obama asks for millions from us. And I will personally ask Obama why he thinks his love for Michelle is more important than my love for Steph, if I ever get to meet him personally.
Ballot initiatives have become a cowardly instrument of special interest groups to tax the masses and strip the masses of their civil rights. Period end of story. I do support limited ballot initiatives as referendums on the ‘extras’ in a local community such as parks and transportation or fire infrastructure but only when backed legislatively and do not support the use of ballot initiatives as a substitute for what should be clear and unassailable federal and state laws supporting the LGBT community’s right to marry in a civil and government based way. We need even more powerful LGBT group framing on the difference between Church Marriage and Civil Marriage but that is yet another editorial.
How Holland Showed The World In 2001 That Gay Love is Very Ok & Very Legal
My friend, Paul Weijntjes who lives in Holland invited me to his wedding with his girlfriend Laetitia and I saw them get married in a Civil Marriage in a Drab Brown Government building by a government official who read funny and cute stories about their early dating experiences. It was the coolest wedding I’ve ever attended because of how evolved and participatory the government got in the ceremony while leaving the couple free to marry in a church later and keep that from having any impact on the legality of their marriage. In 2001 Holland was the first country to legally recognize a gay couple’s right to marry. click here Dutch gay boys and dutch lesbians, and dutch transgendered and pretty much any 2 people can marry and it’s been that way since 2001. Hooray for Holland.
Fast forward to America, 2008. California, easily considered our most liberal or at least ‘progressive leaning’ state, is actually that way because of ‘representative government’ and a complex system of electoral votes that reorganize ‘one person one vote’ majorities into larger more representative community majorities. For instance, those 55 CA electoral votes Obama won, a crucial number by all accounts to delivering his nationwide mandate were the result of representative electoral system not a one person one vote citizen mandate. Let’s be clear, as Obama likes to say, he won CA because of San Fran, LA and large parts of San Diego to the chagrin of the state’s more rural citizen masses. And if it worked for Obama, and we need that to work for us in the LGBT civil rights struggle. But what if we asked each individual in California to vote for Obama and remove the electoral college formulation of votes, then the largely rural California masses might have handily delivered the state to McCain.
For the same reason Obama won nationally with a ‘representative’ counting of the votes, we in the LGBT community must stress a departure from laws by citizens versus laws by wiser, more elder and educated representative statesmen. We must start by telling every current Gay legislator, WE WON”T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER on immediate repeal of all statewide bans.
Folks, we in the LGBT community must stop pouring good hard earned Gay dollars into ballot initiatives that continue and will continue to fail. Why? Because the ignorant masses are neither the moral compass of any society nor are they a great way to govern. And the new focus of our money should be judges, legislators and yes locally based ones, because our Federal congress has failed us. Donate locally, because all government is ultimately local and I suspect ONE judge will end up determining the fate of this grueling Prop 8 Anti-Gay judicial challenge.
Please note, our founding fathers understood that a 3 branch government never included a one person one vote provision, other than to secure representatives and even then, they went to great effort to craft a House of Representatives that acted as pools of geographic communities to counterbalance the Senate not a one person one vote citizen body of government. The serious problem is that we are pushing governing from the group who are elected and paid to do it (legislators) to citizens who are unqualified and sadly, too misinformed to make quality legislative decisions on behalf of the rest of their community.
The Ballot Initiative was never the intent of the founding fathers, and we must demand our legislators and our judges to secure civil rights for all which includes LGBT citizens and we must ask them to do their jobs now. Or else… or else we must fire every single politician that took a gay dollar and hold back our national fundraising dollars from any Presidential down to city council member politician who does not vow to reverse every nasty ‘citizen approved’ anti-gay ballot initiative ever passed.
When Edmund Burke famously said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” I am sure he was not aware that on Saturday Nov. 15, 2008, his statement would take form as hundreds of thousands LGBT citizens march in the streets to reverse the evil and resist doing nothing as some very misguided churches continue to preach and codify into law the very evil notion of anti Gay marriage bans.
I can only hope our national LGBT lobbyists will pour these limited gay dollars into legislative and judicial challenges, and more importantly reconsider failing to fund local gay legislative challengers such as myself, who could have been the first lesbian in WA state and a powerful ally in making WA state plan B for this failed Prop8 in CA. It’s time for the LGBT community to get brutal about lobbyist efforts, and stop failing to support local legislator who vow turn the tide of this horrendous and egregious violation of a civil right we should have been awarded back in 1967 when the interracial groups were given the same right.
I learned on my campaign to turn away all lobbyist and consulting advice and run my own campaign. I encourage those gathering in the streets to find their grassroots power and start demanding a campaign that locally forces Gay marriage equality, even if at local city councils as we may wait for years for our federal lobbyists and legislators to climb out of the Cowardly gay hole they’ve been hiding in, except of course around elections when they pander senselessly to the group of people who give liberally and early to their failed campaigns.
Please feel free to contact me at Phyllis@phyllisforsenate.com if you have questions or comments.
425.736.6644
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
