Should We or Shouldn't We? We Should.

David Mixner wrote a great post yesterday on his blog regarding the apparent encouragement by the entrenched GLBT organizations to slow down in our push for equality. Specifically, a group of these organizations is trying to push Californians to keep a repeal of Prop 8 off the ballots until at least 2012, hoping that by then we will have won the hearts and minds of enough Californians to be assured of victory. These are some of the same people who pushed back against the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the organization formed to bring a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of Prop 8.

I'm amazed that these organizations want us to wait until people like us! I'm also amazed that they are misreading the tenor of this movement so terribly right now - the movement has finally been framed by the grassroots, and accepted by the civil mainstream, as a civil rights movement, nothing less. Being denied our rights just because some people don't like us goes against everything this country is supposed to be about. The fact that our activist organizations are still trying to make us wait until people like us, instead of fighting along side those who are making the push we need toward equal rights, makes me think that these organizations have served their purpose and should move on.

We deserve the rights NOW, not in ten years, And the only way we are going to get these rights is to fight for them NOW, to march and organize and to stand up to those who don't like us. It has been 40 years since Stonewall and much longer since gay activists started this movement in the 50s, and we have NO MORE rights now than we did then. We can still be fired in most states for being gay. The federal government does not recognize us in ANY way, nor our families. We are barred specifically in federal law and most state laws from enjoying the simple freedoms that everyone else enjoys - it IS, as David Mixner coined it, gay apartheid.

How long should we wait for people to like us? How much longer should we be denied our basic freedoms in the United States? How long do we let the hypocrites and haters ruin our lives?

The gay activist organization have done well at laying groundwork, but they need to get with the program now and get to work. The money we send them is no longer to be spent trying to make people like us, its to get us our rights NOW.