Gay Community Should Pick Fights that Matter

With the continued hoopla over the selection of the Rev. Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation you’d think that he’d been selected as attorney general instead of just giving a several minute prayer to a God that all best evidence says doesn’t exist at all anyway. Yet, the faux outrage from my very own LGBT community continues.

Melissa Etheridge courageously asked us gays to cool it over Warren’s selection. She reached out to him and they had a pleasant conversation.

Warren, for his part, has removed anti-gay language from his church’s website and is even gallivanting around West Hollywood.

Yet, the old guard of the LGBT movement is outraged. One of those old (really old) guard, the president of a small political club here in New York City, took it upon himself to call a few of my political clients asking for me to be replaced. He said that because I wasn’t protesting Warren I was “reflecting poorly on their campaigns.”

The very idea that reaching out to people who disagree with you would reflect poorly on a candidate is very disheartening. Don’t we want to elect leaders who put their heads before their hearts in making
decisions? Leaders who can reach across the aisle to address climate change and healthcare?

The gay political bureaucracy is tired and bitter. They don’t understand that politics doesn’t have to be a reactionary game, but an actual way to improve people’s lives. I look forward to a gay rights 2.0 movement that picks fights that matter and stops acting so much like the right-wing fundamentalists. We’re supposed to be better than that.