One Issue Politics

I was reading through some of the more recent posts on this blog and realized that I have drifted away from my initial intention - to promote rational, acid-free, debate on a wide variety of issues. I try my best to follow a number of different issues that I know enough about to express an opinion and avoid ones that I know nothing about. My last posts have focused on same-sex marriage. It is an important litmus test on civil rights, at least as I see it and, if you read newspapers, the issue commands a lot of column space. But I don't want to focus on that issue to the exclusion of others.

I remember political meetings in the early 90s and being shouted down when I suggested that "the movement" had plenty of room to demonstrate that we were not one-dimensional, angry warriors. If we wanted a place at the table, we had to understand that there are other constituent groups who had perfectly legitimate interests and that we ought to study them, take positions on them and join with as many people as possible to make a much longer list of political and social priorities. Lots of lesbian and gay people agreed with me and went off to careers in all sorts of different fields, helping to make policy decisions that affected everyone. Many of them, like me, refused to be the "gay perspective expert" at staff meetings because I didn't think I was qualified to speak for all gay men, even to one corporation. That's a heavy responsibility and, as we know, impossible.

I recently read a piece that I think hits the nail right on the head. The premise was that the LGBT movement has no Martin Luther King. There are certainly a few people who have a much bigger platform to get the message out (Evan Wolfson, Joe Solomnese, Barney Frank, etc.) but no one person has emerged as the kind of transformative leader who can snap his or her fingers and count on an army of true believers to march on Washington at the drop of a hat. (That, by the way, is one way of how I judge the power of a union president.)

The Internet has both enhanced the ability to organize but also hobbles those efforts because too many people of every political stripe seem to believe that bloviating on the Internet is a substitute for putting your feet on the ground or sending a well-written, personal letter to your state and local representatives that wasn't already written for you by a website.

Look at what's happening in Iran. Many young people in Iran seem to have access to technology that helps to chronicle the tragic reaction of the current Iranian regime. But they also put their boots on the ground and took great personal risk in doing so. That kind of bravery gets rarer every day. Without those pictures, few of us would appreciate just how much dissension there is, nor would we know that the 'democracy' Iran says it created in 1979 is far from any Western notion of democracy means. It's hardly easy for the United States to divorce itself from the issue, particularly given our history in that country - including installing a peacock throne for the Shah following a democratic election in the early 1950s that included SAVAK, the Iranian version of the KGB. Iran has lots of oil in the ground but no refinery to use it. Iran imports refined petroleum from its neighbors. The political use of religion in Iran is no surprise. It worked before and took away modern rights that we take for granted.

That's just one issue.

I intend to try harder to be a whole person - not just a gay man - and try to start conversations about issues that are not central to my daily life but are to others. I was on the right track last year. I'll try to get back there in future posts.