Right now, a few friends of mine are very discouraged. Many of them worked their asses off to get Obama elected and they feel betrayed over the situation.
There is a lot of people with credible concerns over the DOMA brief and other things.
Then there are the ones I wish would just go away.
You know them - the ones who are always talking about some psuedo intellectual bullshit about revolution and taking to the streets.
Or the ones who are always quick to cite what black folks did during the civil rights movement even though their knowledge of such things obviously from television movies and pieces of simple lessons they learned in elementary school.
Never mind the intricate details or Machiavellian plans that went behind every march, the fights, and the disagreements between major African-American civil rights groups that exist even until this day. All they know is Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat, Martin Luther King Jr. said his "I Have A Dream" speech, black people marched en masse, and presto, they got their rights.
Then there are the ones who will talk about the glorious past history of the outsider street politics of Stonewall, Queer Nation, and Act-Up while forgetting the fact that those situations took place when the lgbt community had no political power to speak of.
I know what you are thinking. Obama's actions proves that we don't have any political power now. Well that's not true.
One thing that always irks me when people like to cite the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is the fact that they tend to skirt over details, like the fact that even though African-Americans helped Kennedy to be elected, he had to be pushed to support civil rights.
Just like Obama has to be pushed to do the right thing. Of course in this case, it looks like Obama has to be pulled, yanked, or tied down and carried.
But the fact of the matter is that I'm a cynical, pragmatic person so I never viewed Obama's election as a huge breakthrough for lgbts.
Don't get me wrong. I like President Obama, but I have never viewed his election as nothing more than a chess move that would get lgbts closer to where we need to be.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be angry at President Obama. What I am saying is that we need to sit back, take a view of where we are as opposed to where we would be if McCain had been elected, and then use our anger in an intelligent manner that will get us closer to equality.
You see that's the good thing about the anger that many of us are feeling now. We are in the driver's seat, a place where we wouldn't have been had it been a Republican Administration.
We do have political power right now. And that power has the potential to yield positive results. That is if we don't allow our anger to lead us rather than us leading it.
Editor's note - Another reason why I hate this melee is that it is distracting me from the mission of this blog (exposing religious right lies) as well as taking the shine off of SC Black Pride week. But I will soldier on and hope to have pictures of events in the coming days.
