And, LOL, guess I should’ve rephrased my standing ovation comment.

The thing about you is…you make so much damn sense. : )

Amy,

First, how cool is that the American flag had a prominent place on that stage? About the salute, from the stage Lt. Choi was facing both the crowd and the Washington Monument, which is surrounded by flags — even though it was some 20-ish blocks away he would have had a clear view of it.

As for the crowd reaction to Lt. Choi, we were rooting for him with all our hearts but we were all a bit flummoxed when he quoted Khalil Gibran in Arabic because the translation in English had the word “slave” in it. We had to process what he meant by that and I think we were not all on board with devotion and love being characterized as slavery. And we had to figure out whether he was talking about sado-masochism, which views relationships as master-slave. We had to ponder, in our community of sexual minorities, a little longer than the average person to understand what he meant. (BTW, I have a public history from the 1980′s/early 90′s of denouncing sado-masochism in gay papers and even had one of my pieces in the Lambda Rising Book Report censored by masochistic editor Robert Dirmeyer to remove true and very sickening information about S/M. So when I had booths at Gay Pride Day for the various groups that I founded and led back then, random sado-masochists in menacing attire would come scream at me.)

Anyway, yes, we were totally clear on Lt. Choi’s service and sacrifice. I expect many in the crowd, including me, have been following his fight through e-mails from the Courage Campaign, gay bloggers and gay media. And, personally, I had deja vu from the April 1993 March on Washington because Sgt. Jose Zuniga was then in exactly the position that Lt. Choi is in now. Gays are only just starting to wake up to the realization that conservatives support the immediate repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and that it’s Obama and the Democrats that don’t care and don’t want to repeal it.

But back to the crowd response to Lt. Choi — we loved him, we admired him, we respected him, we were rooting for him, but we had a hard time figuring out what he meant and when he wanted us to cheer.

Oh, another thing — everyone was very respectful of the police officers and while the crowd didn’t quite have the attitude of the Tea Partiers about littering in front of the Capitol building — that it would be sacrilege — around 5:30 pm a volunteer came around with a handful of trash bags and distributed them in the crowd. I signalled her and she tossed me one so I could police my area. When they finally closed the event at 6:05 pm, the place was swarmed with volunteers wearing their official march volunteer t-shirts and they gathered up the small amount of litter, which was mostly discarded signs and a few empty water bottles, in a twinkling. So both the police and the Capitol building and Mall were treated with great respect. And our country was honored by the display of the American flag on the stage.

I’ll have to look and see if there’s a YouTube of the British woman who told us that “America the Beautiful” was written by a lesbian. She led us in singing it, and we put our hearts into it, but she departed so much from the traditional version that we couldn’t really build up a lot of steam, which is why I didn’t post it. My sense is that the people in the National Equality March love America, and the ideals of America, and would be even more devoted to America, BUT America does not reciprocate our love with equality — speaker after speaker spoke of the Constitution and America’s ideals with a mixture of love and hurt and incomprehension of how homosexuals do not have equality and equal protection under the Constitution. How can that be? the speakers asked, speaker after speaker. Really, we do not understand. If there is separation of church and state, why have religions been allowed to appropriate the apparatus of the state to impose their teachings about homosexuality? To say nothing of the fact that the teachings are motivated entirely by greed and lust for power, and therefore require all of their followers to produce as many babies as possible because numbers are power and wealth, so homosexuals must be punished with second-class citizenship for refusing the coercion to form relationships that produce children (even though 20 percent of homosexuals have biological children and more would be happy to adopt the children discarded, um, put up for adoption or foster care, by straight people).

Cynthia

P.S.

I just re-read your comment and realized I didn’t tell you why Lt. Choi didn’t get a standing ovation. It’s because we were already standing, packed like sardines. We raised our arms and waved signs to give emphasis to our cheers. And after an hour or so, I was hoarse and I expect others were, too, which made call and response cheers harder to do. ALTHOUGH — late in the day, when one or two socialists were extolling socialism, I was not too hoarse to shout, “Booooo!” and when one asked for the crowd response of what we want to accomplish after repealing DOMA, DADT and enacting ENDA, I called out with my trained soprano voice, which I know carried to the stage since I was so close to it, “Destroy socialism!” Well — she asked!

Just my up too late two cents.

Geez, at this point I will never get through this post.

As always, love your work.

Back to reading.

: )

I also agree with you about a third party, Attmay. Which is why I advocate working within the Republican party: get Libertarian leaning conservatives elected to office and don’t let them forget or take you for granted like the liberals do. At least those who object to your very existence on religious grounds do so up front. The Democrats use the Gay/Lesbian community like an abusive spouse and all too often they enable them to do so over and over again. Nice to see some folks starting to wake up.

I’m not so much pro Gay/Lesbian as pro “who the hell are YOU (or I, for that matter) to tell others how to live” (which is why I do not get along with the hardcore religious sect OR the socialist nanny statists).

I would LOVE to see even a solid 20% of the activists in the Gay/Lesbian community decide to use conservatism to further their goals. I honestly think it would be great for the country in the long run.

PS: I also think Sally Kern should have a gold star sticker pasted on her shirt by her keepers for managing to generate enough brain current to speak AND keep her heart and lungs working. Given how little she obviously is capable of producing, blathering that crap could have proven fatal

They don’t have principles. They just support whoever invokes Jesus the most.

Keep in mind that when I became a conservative (on some days I will refer to myself as a libertarian, but that’s usually when some idiot like Sally Kern calls us “worse than terrorists”), I tried to understand and respect their viewpoints to see where they were coming from, but they crossed the line with Prop H8. They’re not just people who disagree with me; they are actively standing in the way of my rights as an American. I won’t stand for them tarnishing my beliefs, my party, and my country by association.

Regrettably, the Pink Pistols don’t seem to be doing much of anything. Their blog’s last entry is from 2007, which is not a good sign.

A third party will do no good in the long run, except siphon off a few votes from Democrats. The time for gays to rebuild burnt bridges between them and the Right is right now.

You are correct about the influence of the Religious Wrong. It’s time for Michael Steele to wise up and see that they continue to cost the GOP votes and support, and all the talk about “Reagan’s Three Pillars of Conservatism” won’t change that fact. Times have changed, and the pillar of social conservatism needs to be replaced with a pillar of social libertarianism: one that trusts adults to act like adults and face the consequences for their actions, while acknowledging that you can’t freeze a free society in amber. Besides, northern Republicans tend to be more socially liberal than southern Democrats.

The other two pillars (fiscal conservatism and defense) can stay. Bush’s spending sprees no longer seem like such a betrayal of fiscal conservatism now that we have a trillion dollar and growing deficit. And we will face a conflict with Iran no matter how much we try to avoid it; it’s been coming for 30 years.

No matter how long it takes, the Religious Wrong will lose the war on gay equality, just like the White Supremacist Dixiecrats (who used the Bible to justify their bigotry) lost the war on black equality. And as for religious blacks who resent the comparisons between the struggles of blacks and gays: Julian Bond doesn’t think so. Coretta Scott King (who shared my birthday) didn’t think so. The arguments used to attack us were once used to attack you, and they don’t magically become valid when they are transferred to another group.

Actually becoming a left fringe we were just accused of being is a worse idea. If the GOP gets back into power without any attempt by gay activists to build a dialogue between them, then all of us will suffer. It’s a two party system. Attaching all our goals to one party is what made the Democrats into the do-nothings. LCR had the right idea by endorsing no one in 2004. They need to hold the GOP’s feet to the fire. Stonewall Democrats need to do the same to their party. They can’t just be cheerleaders for their own party.

In the meantime, keep up the protests. I’ve always believed the Pride Parades were too much like parties and should be marches for equality.

In short, it’s time for the gay activists to grow up.

Yes, I do. I’ll be reviewing United in Hate by Jamie Glazov soon — as I wrote a few weeks ago, Dr. Glazov updates the insights of Eric Hoffer to apply to the present day. He explains why the three constituencies who ought to be with conservatives — homosexuals, women and Jews — are instead fighting on behalf of the enemies of capitalism and liberty, who also have the destruction of homosexuals, women and Jews at the top of their “to do” list.

Obama is an enemy of capitalism and liberty — that animosity animates all the proposals that he’s really pushing, or gotten enacted. Once you realize that, and grasp that he is a sociopath who tells people whatever they want to hear so they will hand over their money and power to him although he has no intention of keeping his side of the bargarin, then everything Obama says and does makes sense.

Very few other bloggers have figured this out, so they go after Obama piecemeal instead of realizing there is indeed a core explanation for all his contradictions and betrayals, which is why I will keep harping on it until a critical mass of people have caught on.

Cynthia

Do you think that’s it? I think it’s more that he just really doesn’t care. When you get right down to it, he doesn’t give a damn. It’s easy to make a speech, he is used to getting positive feedback and likes that, but anything more requires some level of energy expenditure and it’s not worth it to him.

I base this on his throwaway comment about the Special Olympics, which I don’t think it would have been in him to make if he cared at all about the disabled or respected them as human beings.