Cross-posted at Creative Trouble!

Two of the biggest unions in Connecticut, The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) & the Connecticut Education Association, endorsed Ned Lamont yesterday! This is an incredible moment for Lamont. In sweeping language, AFT makes the connections between Iraq and other issues that too few in the media and in the Party have been willing to make:

"This endorsement came down to the issues of education and healthcare and the draining of resources from our state in order to fund the war in Iraq," said Sharon Palmer, president of AFT Connecticut. "Ned Lamont understands these issues and agrees with our positions."

"Our educational system has been pushed to the limit by the requirements under No Child Left Behind which has been underfunded by forty-five billion dollars," said Palmer. "Ned Lamont will support students and teachers by fighting to fully fund this federal mandate."

"With more than one in ten people in Connecticut uninsured and many more underinsured, our state is facing a health care crisis of epic proportions," said Palmer. "Ned Lamont supports universal health care that will provide high quality health care for all."

"More than two hundred and fifty million dollars a day is being diverted into the war in Iraq," said Palmer. "Money that could have been used to improve public services in Connecticut. Ned Lamont understands this and will stand up to the Bush Administration. That's why AFT Connecticut is proud to endorse Ned Lamont for U.S. Senate. Ned Lamont will fight to improve education, healthcare and public services for Connecticut's working families."

I couldn't have said it better myself. They'll be having a joint press conference tomorrow to announce their endorsements more publicly. From the sound of it, AFT & CEA will really mobilize for Lamont, moving out a lot of union members and organizers to hit the streets in the final weeks leading up to the primary. Lamont's field team better make certain that's what happens, and should use this endorsement as leverage with SEIU and other major unions in the state that haven't yet endorsed in the race. The challenge will be to respectfully approach and convince a few key unions with the power to really do field organizing that it is worth it to put the time and money into Lamont, as most of them will be focusing on the gubernatorial primary.

That Lamont's people have broken through with AFT & CEA is definitely a sign, however, that this is possible. If a few unions get out and do real groundwork for Lamont, it could be enough to put him over the edge. Lamont could really win this thing!

Cross-posted at Creative Trouble!

Cross-posted from my blog, Creative Trouble!

The Marriage Protection Amendment is dead on arrival in the Senate. The debate is a superficial one, more about pandering to conservatives than protecting America. It's pure politics, and what's great is that nearly everyone, left right and center, understands it as such. We may even find that a majority of the Senate ends up voting against - or very close to it. There seems little use in me echoing what has already been said on tons of blogs and media outlets already. Instead, all of us need to think critically about what we've seen, what the prevailing cultural narrative of what's happened offers, and most importantly, about what is to be done when the dust from this week settles.

We need to be sharply critical of the narrative I've recapped above, that "Bush and the GOP are just pandering." That statement is true, but those on the left who promote that narrative need to be careful. What lies beneath that statement is this idea that Bush and the GOP are actually a lot more fair-minded than they seem, but need to pander to the far right of the party in an election year. There's something insidiously exculpatory about this, making Bush and Frist look helpless in the face of an onslaught by rabid fag-bashers. It's a way of rationalizing their actions, such that the gay right can still claim hope for the GOP, rather than recognizing that the vast majority of that party stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the far right of the party on these issues. Bush and Frist have taken sides against our community, whereas Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (and nearly all the Democrats in the Senate, save Ben Nelson) stand firmly with us. Just as we can't acquit Reagan for his silence on AIDS, we cannot acquit Bush and the GOP for lending their muscle to the same people who sought to kill us all with AIDS and still would like nothing better than for terrorists to blow up every gay bar in America.

Now, perhaps more than ever, we cannot afford to remain on the political fence. We have to take sides. It's true that the Democratic Party is not where it should be on LGBT issues, but abandoning the Democrats is not the solution, as plenty of people have called for in the wake of Howard Dean's recent fuck ups in LGBT community relations.  Such incidents make clear that we can't just always side with the Democratic establishment whenever possible, as the Human Rights Campaign did when it endorsed Joe Lieberman over pro-equal marriage Ned Lamont. But we do have to cast our lots with the Democrats and progressives in general. We have to reject the rhetoric that all the politicians, regardless of their party, take us for granted. We can't afford to be neutral in a culture war that has already had and will continue to have real casualties.

Cross-posted at Creative Trouble!

As the world focuses attention this week on the 25th anniversary of the first AIDS diagnoses, there will undoubtedly be a lot made of the fact that, as Nicholas Kristof writes in today's New York Times, "In the early years of AIDS, the virus didn't get attention because the victims were marginalized people: gays, Haitians and hemophiliacs. Then when AIDS did threaten mainstream America, it finally evoked empathy and research dollars."

This typical account of the early years of AIDS is true only to a point. Kristof makes it sound as though the "early populations" (leaving out IV drug users) affected by AIDS were not only distinct from "mainstream America" but that they were tragically overlooked because of their status as "marginalized people." This common reading denies the fact that it was well known early on among scientists and experts that AIDS was already in Africa and was clearly being spread by heterosexual contact in addition to homosexual. Furthermore, it denies the unique way in which AIDS was socially constructed as a gay disease, not just because of a general misunderstanding but because of deliberate efforts by right-wingers to use the disease in a fashion that Simon Watney compared to that of the public spectacle in his essay "The Spectacle of AIDS" to revive Victorian-era conceptions of homosexuals as sick by their very nature.

When we talk about the culture wars in America, the common image is angry people screaming at each other about their beliefs. We rarely think of those wars as having serious casualties. Yet the efforts of leading right-wing culture war figures like Pat Buchanan, William Bennett, Fred Phelps and Jesse Helms to frame AIDS as "nature's revenge against homosexuality" - a perverse illness to match a perverse lifestyle - led to the deaths of many thousands of Americans of AIDS. These people had no reservations about what the government should do to people with AIDS - for since they were all gay to them, their response was basically, "Let the fuckers suffer, die, and burn in hell."

Their actions - helped along by an almost totally silent President Reagan and by other supposedly reasonable and remarkable right-wing luminaries - such as William F. Buckley, who in a 1986 op-ed in the New York Times called for HIV+ gay men to be forcibly branded on the buttocks and talked of a possible need for concentration camps -  exposed the right wing's culture war for exactly what it is: an effort to render dead or silent all those whose actions, identities, values and politics do not conform to traditional hierarchies of power.

Cross-posted at Creative Trouble!

To me, this photo of Alan Chambers, President of leading ex-gay group Exodus International, and his wife, which accompanied yesterday's Los Angeles Times story on the new push for "equal time" for ex-gay viewpoints in schools, says it all:

This is the desire for normalcy at its worst. And this is the face of a movement that truly threatens to turn back gains made in schools over the years. This bullshit needs to be taken on in every school board across America. These programs are so psychologically unsound and so unsafe that they cannot possibly be considered healthy.

It's high time a new push was made to get queer issues addressed in middle and high schools across the nation. Where they're not addressed, we need to work hard to get them included in health/safe-sex curricula as well as highlight, as California may soon do, the contributions of gays and lesbians in history (expect this to be the subject of another post). Where queer issues are addressed, we need to pre-emptively defend them against ex-gay challenges. The 3,000 Gay-Straight Alliances around the country seem perfectly positioned to lead this fight. We have to recognize that it's not enough just to have a support group in a school, and that it's not enough to have a day of SILENCE once a year. The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) should organize students in GSAs to start organizing parents and each other, and become true forces for change in their communities.

We should not be timid or afraid of appearing to push too strongly a "gay agenda" - for unless we do, the ex-gay agenda will destroy much of the already incredible progress we've made in schools, which would be a disaster for the LGBT movement.

Cross-posted at Creative Trouble!

Cross-posted at Creative Trouble!

I'd like to respond to this comment left on my last post and this post over at The Malcontent and Robbie.

To put it bluntly: we are fools if we really think we can win the fight for equality all by ourselves. No major movement in the past century that has achieved real, measurable progress has ever done that, and let's face it - our numbers and our political/economic leverage are not so great that we can be the sole champions for our cause. If we are dumb enough to think that we can do the nearly impossible - create a major shift in American culture that not only wins us equal rights and privileges but also makes us true cultural equals viewed as people with dignity who like all people deserve to be free of degradation and violence - all by ourselves, then we will reap no less than we have sown.

But this isn't just about having enough numbers to win. It's about challenging a system and a culture that makes difference - be it racial, ethnic, religious, class, sexual, or gender difference - a cause for fear, hate and violence; a system that devalues not just queer lives, but the lives of all who are othered. It's not enough for us to try to gain power for queers - rather, we must work to challenge the very idea that any group or groups in our society or world should have power over the others. It's that idea that ultimatley binds our cause to other movements for social justice.

It is not enough to merely demand civil rights and a "place at the table," but rather, as black gay activist Keith Boykin put it at the Millenium March, we must "demand a whole new table arrangement that welcomes all those who have been excluded." We must fight, in Boykin's words, "not to gain privilege but to challenge the whole concept of privilege itself." That fight is not won that will be won easily, and certainly not alone.

Cross-posted at Creative Trouble!

Two things happened this week that could potentially be very important long-term in getting the queer community more engaged on issues of economic justice and the labor and immigrant rights communities more engaged on queer issues.

On Wednesday Matt Foreman, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, issued this incredible statement on the need for the queer community to support the immigrant rights movement - both because it is the right thing to do and because it will tremendously strengthen the political power of both movements in the long term. The whole statement is worth reading, but this part in particular struck a chord with me:

We need to recognize that the leaders of the forces of political and religious intolerance are not driven primarily by anti-gay animus, even though it often feels that way. Instead, under their frame, anti-choice, anti-environment, anti-welfare, anti-sex, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT philosophies not only fit together but are all intertwined...Those of us on the other side, however, lack this overarching and elastic frame. We're all desperately fighting defensive battles to protect our own very narrow slices of an ever-diminishing pie. By ignoring Ben Franklin's advice to all hang together, we are most assuredly in imminent danger of hanging separately, each in our own silos.

This is a stark reality for our own community. At between 4-6 percent of the population, we are simply too small to win equality by ourselves. That means we must build alliances and relationships of trust with other communities and causes. Building these kinds of alliances requires more than words, it requires reciprocal work.

Cross-posted from Creative Trouble!

AP reports that the National Organization for Women's PAC has backed Ned Lamont in his challenge to Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary for Senate. Citing Lamont's strong support of "the full range of feminist issues" including full access to emergency contraception for rape victims, equal marriage, and a swift end to the war (rightly including that as a feminist issue!) as opposed to Lieberman's bizarre support for Catholic hospitals that fail to administer EC on "moral grounds", as well as his failure to join the filibuster against Alito and his membership in the "Gang of 14" who oppose filibustering judges except in "extraordinary circumstances," NOW writes, in words that truly inspire:

The stacking of the courts has emboldened those who wish to turn back all progress in the area of civil rights, privacy rights, and of course reproductive rights. The attack on Roe in South Dakota was predictable and a direct consequence of the confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The strategy to pack the courts with right-wing judges who are committed to overturning Roe is no secret. Yet, Senator Lieberman is one of seven Democrats who have promised not to filibuster any of President Bush's judicial nominees, except under "extraordinary circumstances." Well if packing the Supreme Court with abortion opponents like John Roberts and Samuel Alito is not an extraordinary circumstance, then we don't know what is.

These are precarious times for women. We cannot be satisfied with a senator who votes for women much of the time, or even most of the time. We need courageous leaders who will protect and advance all of our rights all of the time. The winner of this election will have profound influence on national policy which directly affects women and girls in Connecticut, in the nation and throughout the world. We are confident that we have found principled leadership in Ned Lamont and are proud to endorse his candidacy for U.S. Senate.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Campaign's PAC has predictably endorsed Joe Lieberman.