Sunday, December 12, 2010

Please let me petition you to petition...

by Chris Barnett


http://tinyurl.com/2cykwtr

OK folks, here's the next! The campaign is doing better these days, but nowhere near the amount of signatures I hope to see on this issue. I get that for many of us, we don't want to be activists, we just want to be with our loved ones. I don't know what the point needs to be to radicalize any one of us to start getting more proactive in asking people in your own day-to-day lives to get behind us on this. My transformation has happened in my increasing disappointment with the continued lack of leadership on issues that affect us, and the Obama DOJ defending DOMA in court. I am a fan of Frank Rich and in his column in the New York Times today, though addressing the "controversy" over a piece by artist David Wojnarowicz at the National Portrait Gallery, he grasps the overlap with our own issues when he writes:

It still seems the unwritten rule in establishment Washington is that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor...This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" are rarely called out for what they are--"bigotry disguised as prudence," in the apt phrase of Slate's military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan.

There is much more and the column is worth a read, of course, but I say: ENOUGH!

I don't just care about the UAFA and equality in immigration because I am affected. I look at all of the problems facing this country and how the red herring of homosexuality gets thrown out again and again, and disunity is sown again and again where we should be fostering understanding. The differences between people, after all, are likely much smaller than the things we all share in common. And America will never meet its ideals as long as any group is treated the way we are.

In the absence of leadership, we must lead. We must promote the narrative that this is our country, that we belong, and that no one should have the right to tell us to leave. We must promote the truth that love, wherever it takes root, is a good thing, and that it is the key to humanity successfully greeting the world of changes we face as humans on earth in 2010. And we need our wider communities to do this with us. So please: share the link on to others, however you can. Please try to get people not only to sign at Change.org, but to share it on too. We must get louder in saying "no" to the way that society allows itself to marginalize what we hold with our loved ones. Diminishing our experiences as loving human beings is the big lie we are working against, and we need the help of our wider communities to empower a challenge to the status quo, and to raise a loud enough voice to effect change.

http://tinyurl.com/2cykwtr

Happy Sunday--
Chris

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