Get Used to It: Ep. 110, "Election 2004"

[Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila cuell your host or hostess or i can never decide what to call myself well here we are it's a few days after the national election 2004 in case you're running this reading this seeing this on reruns um but it's not a rerun for us we've been here well maybe it is a rerun we've been here before so i have three really smart people joining me today to talk about this election and its impact if any on the gay lesbian transgender bisexual and questioning community and maybe in a broader sense its impact on every community and anything else they want to talk about my guests today in order that i'm going to talk to them phil wilson who's an aids activist a head of a number of organizations and now a columnist in over 300 black newspapers in the united states welcome phil i'm glad to be here it's really good to see you again i'm glad you could join us and kurt shepard who is the governmental relations director at the la gay and lesbian center i think also uh community uh relations and lots of things that go into the title happy to have you on the show thanks sheila and uh our long-standing friend i can't say old friend because you'll never be as old as i am tori osborne who has been an activist um even back before the uh the other anti-war movement just assuming there's going to be another one and activists for women's issues for gay and lesbian issues and really all the progressive issues we've ever heard of tori welcome glad to be here so phil i'm going to start with you okay we had an election uh it didn't go the way okay what if they threw an election and everybody came well now we know the answer don't we um everybody's looking for a message in this election or you know the positive message the negative message uh and since this show is really about really to some extent the gay and lesbian community tell me what you think the impact on the community the impact of our community on the election anything you want to talk about well you know i'm of two minds you know i i kind of go with you know the the tales of two cities though it was the best of times and the worst of times now on the upside i mean we should start there maybe we should start with the downside in and upside i don't know but on the other side you know i spent the a few days in pennsylvania doing get out the vote and canvassing and telephoning and it was really one of the most remarkable experiences of my life you know to see people engage in our democracy to see young people who are fired up and committed to this democratic process and it was extremely rewarding and extremely inspiring i'm hopeful that americans know will grab a hold of our democracy and fight for it i have been fearful over the last four years that to really stand up for our democratic process to criticize our government to kind of talk about debate and political debate now there's been this turn now where to to actually provide any sort of critical thinking was perceived to be anti-american or anti-patriotic and quite frankly i think you know to critique our government is the most patriotic activity that we can engage in and i feel that many of those young people and many of the folks who are involved in getting out the vote and work on this election feel the same and so that was the good news on the outs on the downside you know i'm not happy with the outcome of the election i think that we all need to kind of review and analyze and look at what happened now i'm concerned that a majority of americans who voted uh feel that it is okay to discriminate against folks now i think that this is certainly a loss for gay and lesbian bisexual transgender folks but quite frankly i think it was a loss for americans i think that it was a loss for poor people i think it was a loss for seniors and i think we're going to see that in the upcoming maybe in the coming weeks quite frankly i think it was a loss for people with disabilities there's certainly a loss for people with ace and actually and this is going to shock people i think it was a loss for people of faith because the separation of church and state protects both the church and the state now and when those lines get blurred we are all in peril now and i think that we should be concerned that there are public policies decisions being being made based on religion religious doctrine now and i think that that is troubling and particularly when those religious doctrines or at least the way they articulated say that it is okay that there are americans that are more deserving of equal rights and there are americans who are not so deserving of equal rights well it's interesting when you say that about people of faith because that's a very large group that can really encompass anyone who has any sort of spiritual belief or religion whether they practice it or not but the people who seem to be claiming that title people who seem to be showing up at the polls under that flag under that rubric were seem to be much more sort of the conservative uh we would say right wing christians who were brought to the polls apparently partly energized by wanting to keep our community from making any gains well i think that it's important for those of us of faith who are in that bigger tent now and the tent is bigger than just you know the religious right uh need to claim our faith you know we need to take ownership of our of our faith and we need to say you know to to to to to desire to marginalize others is not the only voice of the faithful now that there are those of us of faith who want to embrace each other that wants want a society that is inclusive that was a society that really celebrates our diversity and our humanity and our ability for each american citizens to contribute i think that that is really an important message for gay and lesbian bisexual transgendered folks folks of the left and progressive folks to say that i don't abandon my faith because i believe in equality i don't abandon my faith because i believe that a woman should have the right to choose i don't abandon my faith because i think we need to care for our seniors i don't abandon my faith because i believe that our health care safety net should be maintained i don't abandon my faith because i think that we should have comprehensive sex education we should have comprehensive education about hiv and aids in fact all of those things are about my faith you know and as a black gay man of faith you know what my bible tells me is that there is value in truth and honesty and integrity and i celebrate my faith when i tell the truth about who i am and i stand up for who i am that is the message that i get from my god and i think that's the message that we need to spread in our communities well i think one of the shocking things about the way sort of the the notion of religion or faith has been hijacked is it reminds me very much of the early part of the 60s when remember people were talking about love as though it were a word that had been taken out of the english language and needed to be brought back in the love children and it was reoccurring to me this time because everything you've been talking about and indeed our community itself has always been about love what is it that makes a person gay it's because they of who they love and so that divide between what kind of a person am i that wants to care for other people that wants to worry about those that have less than i do that doesn't think that war is the answer why isn't that a community of faith that has come together to vote as a community of faith but they've been doing the organizing and they've been doing it around hatred or at least around negativity well you know and that quite frankly is the message of this election i mean we can paint in all sorts of ways but the truth of the matter is that electoral politics is a game with specific rules you know and and and the right now came to this particular game determined to win now and and they used the tools of the game to make it so they organized better than we organized you know they were clear about what they were fighting for in a way that we were not able to be as clear and i think that the left if we kind of use the paradigm of right of left right and left i think that the left was not as well organized and not as clear and not as focused the right perceived that they were fighting for something and sadly i think for uh many folks on the left we were fighting against something and i think that we we found ourselves in that place and we stayed there when in truth we have lots of things that we can fight for and there are lots of things to fight for that were on the state on the line in this particular election well but couldn't it also be said that the the right was fighting against something and that something was us i mean it was characterized that way and indeed i've even heard some prominent democrats starting to blame our community as though we invented those 11 state initiatives to ban our you know marriages when i mean it seemed like a very good organizing tool but why blame it on a community what we brought it up it's sort of like people said to me in the old days you know there wouldn't be all this uh discrimination if black people didn't talk about it so much foolishness exactly but i think it's very dangerous for people to start talking about blaming our community for this loss and frankly i think completely wrong i think i think i agree with you that it was it is completely wrong you know i i like i said i was in pennsylvania i wasn't in pennsylvania didn't have an initiative on the ballot but quite frankly i don't think that this is this is at the top of the agenda for the folks that were voting in pennsylvania and it certainly was not on top of the agenda for most of the folks that i've spoken to around the country uh and i think that we need to look at that and and certainly i think that if the democratic party is going to you know blame the the the the same sex marriage issue on this loss then the democratic party is bankrupt in that regard you know because that's just not true and and and even if it were true so what you know the the the i think that at certain points in our lives and and if we're lucky it can be more of our lives than less of our lives you have to have integrity about something now and we should stand for you know equality we should stand for fairness and this is an issue around equality or fairness whether or not you believe it should be at the top of the agenda or the bottom of the agenda or whatever and we've had that discussion too but at the core of this now fighting for equality fighting for the equal rights on the question of marriage or equal rights on any question now is standing up for our democracy now and regardless of whether or not you live in a red state or a blue state you know we should all be standing up for our democracy and for me that means that each and every american has equal rights now it's as simple as that there's no such thing as as more rights or less rights you know it just doesn't fly that way and quite frankly i think that senator kerry and the ticket you know uh was in trouble on two fronts now a you know once they took the stand that they did not support you know the same-sex marriages they were saying we don't support equal rights i think that that put them in a flawed position and secondly you know to then say you know that that they would have supported the war you know even if they knew then what they know now well the war is wrong you know that we have we have young people who are dying who are in harm's way in a war that was based on false information if not false promises now we're losing that war we lost more people in one year than we lost i think in five or six years in vietnam you know and there's no end in sight regardless of what the poll said no the the the the the the position of integrity is the war is wrong and i believe in equality for all americans flat and simple and you live and die on that and then you can build a movement on that i agree well kurt you're the the one among the four of us actually working at a gay and lesbian organization that's devoted to uh you know gaining equal rights as well as providing services at the center how do you see this question in terms of the impact of the election on our community but also this question about the impact our community may or may not have had on the election you know for better or for worse well i just want to thank you for having me follow the preacher it's really nice really nice of you to have always always a good spot well tori told me no absolutely not i'm not going after phil yeah so thanks a lot i'm the newbie here so you get to do it but that's all right you're smart enough i've been i've been really concerned i've been wallowing in my own depression and sharing the depression and frustration and anger with a lot of my colleagues my professional colleagues and my uh you know my friends and neighbors and uh i you know i'm just trying to put one foot in front of the other one and try to try to move on from this and try to figure out how to do this i mean there are a couple things that um that occur to me um that i think are salient issues and i think what phil was saying is i i disagree that we the gays were not the issue that caused carrie the election and uh you know i mean carrie as you came out against gay and lesbian you know gay and lesbian marriage and the numbers just don't support that i don't have the numbers in front of me but the numbers really don't support that that there's that that was really what happened and i think to um frame the whole values discussion which is what some people are doing and pinning that on the gay and lesbian marriage issue is completely erroneous and and not and not valid um and the the other thing that i've been thinking a lot about is this whole notion of values and how we have ceded uh the whole values discussion to the other side and that uh i think it's important to assert and figure out a way to assert that we are people of value we are people that have faith and commitments and have commitments and care about uh society and that and i think that we can and need to and these are some of the discussions that i've been having with people we need to figure out how to do that and reclaim that and own that without necessarily moving to the right again putting it in the right left paradigm and i think that i i have to believe there's a way to do that and that we don't have to become republicans uh again putting it in that paradigm in order to reclaim those values and and and and own those um another thing that i've been thinking about in terms of all this is the whole i guess i call it narrow casting and i think that um i had an experience uh during the campaign of doing some programming at the gameless at the la ga and lesbian center um based on the films of the documentaries of robert greenwald the unfilms and outfox and um because it was important to me and important to the center to have the center become a place where politic political discussions writ large happen and to demonstrate to the community our community in the broader community that um that lgbt people care about the bigger issues such as the war um such as the economy uh and other things not just sort of the our narrow sort of parochial issues and it was amazing the response we got in four evenings of programming hundreds of people coming to the center to see these films and then have discussions afterwards not one person asked the the gay corollary to the old but what but is it good for the jews nobody asked that kind of question they were all deeply concerned about these broader issues that those films raised so i thought that was so that's been something i've been thinking about and how to sort of um participate as a community in these broader issues such as the war in iraq and such as you know other social issues um and then finally i don't know if i'm answering your question or not but among the things that i who knows and among the things that i've been thinking about is the fact that this and one of the things that breaks my heart is that um all of the anti-gay rhetoric of this campaign and that has been going that has been occurring in the media and reinforced by the media the results of all of that mean that people land on our doorstep seeking services and so that for instance when senator kerry went to missouri and said he supported the missouri decision to be you know constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that has a direct result in that the kids who are who live in missouri and who hear those kinds of views being sanctioned and supported by their by our political leaders those are the kids who end up on our doorstep seeking services and um so those are the things that i've been thinking about i guess and this discussion you've some in my no but listen you've summed up a lot of things i mean i have seen so many people in the last several days you know in tears they don't want to be in tears they would rather be angry i've been very lucky i've been very angry and not in tears yet um but you're you've raised a lot of good points i was thinking when you were talking about your point about values how many times the democratic party has not articulated its own values but sent said and frankly our community too well we us too you know this kind of whiny little tone like well we've got families too okay of course we've got families too and and we need to talk about it and we have talked about it and we've had you know photo shoot campaigns about it but the party itself has not been clear right that that what you know that these are our values that these are values they've stolen corrupted and misrepresented in terms of what it is yes some of the things that i've been writing narrow cast yeah exactly some of the things that i'm sorry to interrupt you know the things that i've been reading have to do with how well the the left sort of articulates issues but has not been very good about these values issues and somebody i think nicholas kristoff in the new york times the other day um said the four g's i've heard of the three g's but it's the four g's you know guns gays grizzlies and god and those are the things that clearly matter to a vast majority and i don't want to frame it in terms of blue red because that cuts a bunch of different ways but those are the things that resonate with the people that defeated senator kerry well and the the i guess the other thing about um uh in in terms of uh of values and kind of incorporating uh this notion that phil was talking about about equality and being much more straightforward about it i guess when howard dean you know was characterized as screaming and everybody said well it's over because you know he just went over beyond the pale i have always believed that you take your chances by saying what you really believe and seeing it strongly now it works okay for me in my district because i've got a wonderful district that you know elects me over anybody two to one but i can see where a national figure would worry i mean i would even worry running statewide what have i got to say to you know my more conservative counties but gay people themselves i don't know if they all voted for john kerry they didn't and what i mean 20 20 some percent of gay people voted for um voted for uh voted for bush also i was surprised to hear a statistic this morning about how many gay people people in the exit polling identified as gay lesbian or bisexual um who also define themselves as evangelical christians i was surprised we were in phil and irony meeting this morning or we both heard that and i was surprised about that um it also is true that and it was true in the 90s people talked about this all the time in the 90s that the largest organized gay you know organization of gay people is the mcc church that it vastly um outstrips in numbers all of our other gay political organizations put together and i don't know if that's still true but i would guess that it probably is well tori you and i have had a conversation about this notion about whether you can have a fundamentalist country because that's what it takes to fight a fundamentalist country in a war or fundamentalist organization what what do you think though you don't have to talk about the religion thing but what do you think about the impact of this election on our community and our community's impact on the election well i i'm in a place where i'm looking for what's unusual where the contradictions are where the openings might be i i i mean i've been saying this for a while but i think the world changed on 9 11. and i think none not very many of our kind of traditional political or advocacy organizations or political communities have caught up with that reality yet and so i for example am buoyed by the fact that 60 percent of the people of ohio believe in civil unions and domestic partnership i choose to be positive about that statistic rather than that 60 percent of them voted for that awful ban on gay marriage that is where the country is now now i remind people that eight years ago and ten years ago when i did the research on my book only 43 percent of americans supported domestic partnerships civil unions wasn't even in the discourse it does not mean that i'm not proud that i'm not that that i don't think that senator feinstein is just plain wrong fearful turning to the right and wrong when she blames gavin newsom and the gay community for too much too fast too soon in the gay marriage lydia and i went up to to be part of history and get married i am thrilled we did it you married us yourself um it was it was a beautiful and transformative experience for anybody whose lives were touched by those ripples of joy that went out from the television set not for our marriage but that moment in history moved the debate forward however you know i do think that at some point we have to move beyond our on what kurt was saying we have to move beyond our own issues and for me you know with all due respect to my own marriage and that that mayor certificate that is up on my wall in a place of honor and will always be even if it was a nulled five months and four days later you know marriage equality is not as important to me as ending the war right now and you know i i've had these times in my life before i came out when i was 22 but i didn't start doing lesbian feminist work until the war in vietnam ended for you know we we are at different places in different times in our life and this is actually what i really hope for me the discussion is about a world that is dramatically transforming globalization 10 000 species globalization destroying indigenous economies civil wars all over the world corporate hegemony of corporate capitalism with no alternative economic system to even have a debate about to even have a cold war about terrorism which is a tactic guys it's not a country it's not an economic system it's a tactic and and i will tell you you know right here on television there is no difference between islamic fundamentalism and christian fundamentalism in terms of its relationship to democracy to justice to to a different world that we all know is possible and so for me what changed on 9 11 and what i hope begins to change in this country is a conversation and i mean including in the left and in the glbt community where we crack it open where we be deeply and humanely about the things we say we're about where we are really about democracy where we tolerate not just you know diversity in some i don't know some sort of token way but we really let our friends who are christians who are evangelicals you know come out in the closet about that how many if i hear it once i've heard it like 10 times in the last few years my friends are saying well i'm a person of faith but i feel like i can't say that in liberal or left circles um okay so i think we're in a in a rapidly changing deeply insecure terrifying world where there are where there's nuclear you know where there's war and there's you know nuclear capacity capability and terrorism are terrorists are a real threat to this country and to other countries where they've been more of a threat for much longer but the answer is not fundamentalism it's a law of physics you do not fight fire with fire if we are osama is saying bring him on bring bush on right every single day that that we talk saber rattle about iran and north korea and send more people into iraq we're creating more terrorists not less i think somewhere some part of american people know that but john kerry never said that by him being a republican light on the war issue as well okay and then the other thing is what kurt said you cannot fight a moral vision with great plans i don't care how many of them you have many plans do not add up to an alternative moral vision in a world like this one with so much demographic shift with so much economic dislocation environmental destruction you know who can even keep up with your own email let alone the rapid rate of change around the world and the losses and the insecurities i mean you know i we are in a time in history we've never seen before i mean there's been dislocations before there's been radical times of change but we're in one where we have the potential for the first time in human history actually for economic justice where post scarcity would only take four percent of the of the net worth of the 225 richest people in the world for everybody to have food clothing shelter reproductive health care education basic needs to be met okay this has never happened before this is new in the last 50 years so you have you have a whole new world that's possible and at the same time you have this terrifying that are really worse than communism this kind of fundamentalism but theirs is no worse than ours and what i really hope happens i mean i'm in my like angry you know i want to write a manifesto about this i mean and and i mean not just to queers you know not just to gay people i don't want gay people to be just as angry at the prospect of arctic drilling and just as angry at this war and you know what i want to say i think we are i think the turnout you know the the the turnout at kurt's film series by robert greenwald and everything that i'm hearing everything that i'm hearing is that it's like our our structures our discourse our organizations are from the old world but the new world is one where we really do come together and when what phil's experience had in philadelphia i was in new mexico lydia and i have a motley crew of gay and straight people that just came together because of a moment in history and being willing to go to new mexico and we walked with acorn in trailer parks and we walked with america coming together and we walked with a kerry campaign and we walked at four in the morning we walked at midnight and i could sit here for hours and tell you stories that give me hope and i also learned some lessons i learned that latino democrats voted for bush because of abortion now i can sit there and i can say oh my god you know or i can say okay and i want to figure out how we get those women to vote for not for bush next time around we we got to do it differently and we can't and and so in my view if carrie had lifted up a moral vision of the world that could compete took some risks was bold was creative was innovative you know why was he not talking about the environment why was he not talking about you know a erratically new vision of the world there are so many things that could have competed for the hearts and the minds and the guts because the in the army of the of the christian evangelicals is jesus spent a whole lot more time talking about poverty and talking about what was wrong with rich people then he did talk about gays and guns and abortion and and as soon as we create we've got to get over ourselves i mean there's a lot of things we need to let go still though the organizing tool and this is these gays i mean we all of us i i understand and i you know very articulate and 30 wonderful points that i would i i want us to talk about for the rest of the show and everything else we want to talk about one of the one of the questions though is supposing you do articulate a strong vision can it overcome that sort of the fear and hatred vision because it seems to me the only thing that overcomes fear is faith you have to believe it only thing that overcomes fear is faith and love they are the only things that overcome fear of it can't be a single election you know we have to believe what we believe and that quite frankly is one of the one of the distinctions that that i see and i agree with corey i mean we were at a meeting right i mean victoria his son's name is corey he gets us mixed up all the time actually he's uh i saw my brain because he he's actually in houston uh but uh uh i i agree with tori and we were we were at a number of us were in a meeting this morning talk about what should the gay lesbian community do and i put on the table and that is not as as strongly as i'm gonna going to say this afternoon is that i know what i'm going to do you know and what i'm going to do is i'm going to work in black communities as an openly gay man now and i've had the privilege of doing that for the last four years and for the record you know black folks voted no 90 percent for kerry as opposed to what gay folks did so go figure but uh at the same time when you know the religious right was going to use was trying to use this as an issue as a wedge issue for black voters but i think when we talk about moving forward you know as i do the work that i do on poverty issues on justice issues on on race relations issues on on health issues taking with me who i am and all of it you know that moves you know the issues around equality based on sexual orientation usually forward you know and and and i am concerned about the war you know i mean i was heartbroken because of the war you know and the those issues i was heartbroken because i know that social security is going to go in the toilet you know if we privatize it in the way that this president is talking about privatizing i know it i i'm upset because there are men and women who are getting infected with hiv every day because we have a public policy that is an alice in wonderland theory of public policy where we wish what is isn't and what is it is you know and when you when you when you talk about abstinence only as the only language that you can talk about by hiv prevention that young people to become hiv positive one of the things i want to make two points one is that i believe that things happen for a reason i don't i don't know why i wasn't as surprised at the outcome of this but i got my hopes up on election day but i really believe that the glbt community because of how we how our politics our activism and our experience has been molded by having to fight the right for the last 20 years we have been at their crosshairs and that we actually have the experience of knowing what that they are not conservatives their radicals and knowing that they are not american they are anti-american and knowing that they are not democratic we know this we can teach the re we can talk about this we can share our experience how did we expose them how did we move the country forward 20 30 40 points on gay rights in the most conservative era in american history we have a lot that we can bring from that experience you know the the emperor um is butt naked and and what it says somebody say buck naked and ugly and we know this and we have our own experience uh and our own ways that we can bring our own experience of having fought on hiv policy um on you know gay and lesbian rights to a broader movement that needs to people have not quite yet got it the 280 million dollars of prevention money that used to come to creative programs to prevent prevent hi hiv are now going to build the infrastructure of of wacko enviro evangelical christians who have abstinence-only programs so that little stupid little groups that have one staff person now have 25 30 step they're building the infrastructure of their right-wing movement well it's happening all across the national institutes for health it's happening all across in terms of research as well let me just say let me just say one other thing the this real story of this election if people after they mourn after they rage start getting organized again is to recognize how much has happened in the last year how much of an infrastructure america coming together within the democratic party he's building sort of the left wing of the democratic party from the ground up the labor movement environmental and women's movements coming together they're not going away they're not folding a tent they're moving in the future gay people have to be in there where i was in new mexico the head of the field operation for the state of new mexico was sue burnside who's a long-time lesbian uh you know democratic party activist and she said to me proudly she said all of my deputies are gays and lesbians we know from field organizations all right so we lost you know top and the 501c3 organizing to get out the the voter registration the the you know national voice and america vote and all of these groups that were doing uh the the c3 organizing of youth of uh you know in different communities we got the new vote we got the the the youth vote this is the beginnings the on all the move on and the league of pissed off voters and you know all of these groups the thousands of groups this is the beginning of the next phase of activism and i feel like we all need to be like you know larry kramer the early part of the aids epidemic and be calling for a higher level of resistance resistance if we have to go on the streets it may be time to go in the stream do you think it's going to happen tory because all of these people that you're talking about in this war this wellspring of experience has sort of been sitting there do you think this is i mean is this going to catalyze them you think in some sustained way i think if people uh if people put out the call and if the moment is right and if people i mean i can just see i i don't know what it'll look like you know i'm i mean i don't think i'm going to be you know the leader of this movement but i do think it has to not just be you know gay people on gay marriage and enviros on arctic drilling it's time to say okay nrdc i think you're too white i don't think you're perfect but you know what if you put out the call i will put my body on the line on arctic drilling because i was in alaska this year and it breaks my heart the idea that those old growth forests would be killed for profit to make the one half of one percent of the rich even wealthier it is immoral you talk about immoral it's immoral and i want to say to my environmental friends are you going to be there with us and maybe it's not going to be gay marriage maybe it's going to be civil unions i don't know but but we need to start talking across movements and daring to dream of rebuilding the next great left and that means that one of the one of the messages i mean that i hear from you and i i think it's a question that has to be answered on this show there are people who are so depressed so feel like they were punched in the stomach that the lesson that they could be learning or that they may feel they're learning is what's the use what's the use you know we did all this work and it didn't work i mean i think they forget how many millions of people voted the way they wanted them to vote and they don't know how many more may have done if they were on those bank phone banks or if they were what went to those meet-ups but what if they're experienced what if their feeling is i don't think it's going to last i don't think it's going to last i think we put out a call um phil was part of putting up the call to and i i was heartened by that by how many people showed up for this sort of strategy session this morning how many people want to roll up their sleeves i mean i really i prefer to believe that it's real and that it wasn't just sort of um someplace to show up i really believe people are ready to roll up their sleeves there are no there's no other people on the planet who know better than we know that it's not always over you know and how to mourn and then move on and you know i was one of those people where where the doctors made the call they'll come down because he's not going to last another 24 hours no i've been at those death beds no i talked to people today who are alive who we didn't know were going to make it the next hour no so yeah maybe we got punched in the stomach but we've been beat up a lot worse and we've come back you know and so the thing that i would say to those folks who feel like what they use you know is we've been there before you know and we have we have proven that there is there's not only a reason to fight you know but there are benefits to fighting there are rewards of fighting there there there are positive outcomes that that come about you know because we have been able to fight even when we were at our weakest moment i am alive today and many of us are alive today because you know at many many times we decided given the choice between giving up and not giving up we chose not to we also know another thing we learned is the therapeutic power of activism and i i mean how many of our friends found i'm serious you know found that the antidote to depression and the antidote to fear is action and in fact activism and movement building and and working together and building a new movement that's what we did around aids and i really think the time has come to rebuild to have the next great american movement and no american movement well and also you remember in your i mean in your book and in a number of books people talking about the importance of coming out of being present of letting everybody in the world know you know i'm one of them deal with it but there isn't one right true way to do it and this is what i mean we must look at the fundamentalism within just if i choose to not work on behalf tomorrow for you know for one issue whether it's on the assimilationist side or or for you know whatever we have to respect the people that we there's so much work that needs to be done and the the vision is so broad that it if you want to work on transgender issues go for it if you want to work in implementing ab537 with gay straight alliance network and the schools in california that now 40 of which have gsa chapters go for it but if you want to work on the war go for it but let people know that's all i'm saying phil says he goes to the black community and and he's a gay man in the black community i mean it's amazing the turnaround in the black community there was enormous homophobia we we won a cable award for a show we did about that very issue several years ago and um it has been at least as demonstrated in this election a bit of a turnaround um and i think that you're absolutely right about the work and it's to the degree that it's happened or is happening and i think it happens across movement it happens because we don't see who we are you know my dad said and i i love him dearly he he he called me up one day and he was talking about you know the uh uh that meant the protection of marriage act that he says you know george bush seems to think that my marriage needs to be protected i didn't know that no and he said you know if you and mark got married tomorrow i don't think that i'm gonna divorce your mother your mother and marry my dispatcher i don't see how you're getting married has anything to do with with my marriage and he says and you know something if i get my marriage right i consider myself lucky i don't have time to worry about whether or not you get your yours right and and i actually think the reverse of that is also true and that is my humanity my equality is intrinsically connected you know to your humanity and your your equality if if they are able to marginalize me then they're able to marginalize you no matter who you are you know so part of our message has to be that you have to stand with me for your own protection you know because those who would marginalize us you know are not going to stop with just one group and quite frankly in all of this you know the the the person that frightens me the most are the types of things that dianne feinstein is saying because if you look at the history of fascism every place where fascism has happened it's happened in the context of fear and baiting and blaming you know and that those are the environments in which fascism you know it is likely to survive you know benjamin franklin said those who were sacrificed liberty for safety deserve neither liberty or safety and so the interest of our safety no we have to fight for our liberty corey i think i interrupted you as well or maybe we all interviewed well i was just going to say something there is something powerful if if one of one's aims is to strengthen the lgbt community and whatever that looks like there's something very powerful about not focusing on that but focusing on some other issue whether it's the environment whether it's you know something else and i think that's an incredibly powerful uh way to strengthen our community as well you know by not focusing on it necessarily in the sort of naval gazing narrow casting kind of way but being present and accounted for and vocal in these other movements and these other communities well it always feels to me like there's some sort of search program going on in the right wing for the next scapegoat you know is going to be the unions is it going to be gay people is it going to be abortion it really doesn't matter i don't think george bush cares about any of those issues i mean honestly personally it's just brilliantly exploited you know they brilliantly brilliantly exploited the bottom line of it is that we had these 11 uh ballot initiatives they all won um even in oregon where a good campaign was fought against it because that's where people are and uh you know they were able to exploit it but when you would at his press conference this week you didn't see george bush re resurrecting the idea of the federal marriage amendment because because what if they actually got a federal marriage amendment they couldn't exploit that issue to bring people out to the polls uh in in order to then actually move and a regressive and repressive economic agenda forward i mean the the irony of this whole thing is that you'd get all these people all whooped about up about gay rights and abortion at least for now abortion is still with us gay rights are happily moving along they're galloping along as best as i can tell we have more rights more visibility more power more human more you know we are a part of the american family now more than we ever have been but the people who have voted against us consistently have less economic security their kids can't afford to go to college it's all a big old red herring it's all a bunch of bs you worry about those glibits and their marriage and the fact is we're just going to take away all your economic security and all your rights and until people start i mean this is why this is why we have to be part of a broader movement that connects with the heartland of this country including the white heartland of this country although let us notice how people of color and gays and jews did not vote for this man the heart of his was 88 you know white not just religious but white people i mean the future is with a different vision i think uh but but i mean you know the bottom line of it is that we that that this is kind of a distraction for the real issue which is this consolidation of power by extremists um who who are in so many ways anti-american certainly against the best vision of this country when the first thing he talks about is social security privatization and then did you read the third sentence in that statement about social security said well of course there will be some loss in benefits for those that go into the private investments right well then why would anyone do it well we're going to make you do it after a few years and then there'll be a loss in benefits not you know not for people they want just for you they want to fatten the corporations coffers and well they already did pharma at the expense of middle and class and working class people and middle class people so far are buying it and it is about time that we start looking in the eye of the american people and not just saying you know give me my rights but saying you and i have something in common they are taking our country from us and it is time to take it back and quite frankly we have an opportunity because the way social the history of social movement in this country has happened whether we're talking about the issues of race or whether we're talking about the woman's right to to to vote no once the genie is out the bottle it's out the bottle you know so quite frankly you know gay marriage is going to happen right you know it's going to happen it may not happen this year it may not happen next year it may not happen for five or two years but it's going to happen you know and they know that you know and so they know that it's easy to kind of fight this fight because they know that isn't it it's a fight that will continue to generate money now because it's going to happen and while folks are focusing on us as as tory just said really while folks are focusing on this issue all these other issues that impact their lives they're not focusing on a lot of the folks who voted for george bush this time possibly on the issue of of of conservative moral values that includes us and a whole bunch of other things are folks that voted against their interests and it was important for them to make a case to folks to vote against your interest because if folks begin to look at the the economic situation that we're in the impact of the deficit that we're involved in you know if they look at what's happening to our healthcare delivery system and that when you start shutting down emergency rooms like we're doing in california because people don't want to pay an extra two cents on their telephone bill it doesn't just impact the poor people it doesn't just impact people of aids it means that when you're in a car accident doesn't matter if you're driving a mercedes or a lexus no or a pickup truck you know you won't be able to go to the emergency room so folks you know it's one of those switching baits bait and switch types of things now as long as they can keep people distracted they get people voting their way and it's our job to say okay we're actually in this together and so let's talk about the fact that i'm interested in the economy you know as a gay man or as a lesbian i'm interested in as in the deficit as a gay man or a lesbian kurt not to the exclusion i actually don't think all of us should do that so i don't think i think that that we we have great capacity so it doesn't even have to be that we need to focus on these the these larger issues instead of gay lesbian issues we can focus on these larger issues in addition to some of us focusing again the country has been so led to believe that everything is someone else's fault if you tell someone you know the emergency rooms are shutting down because of the government's policies about not funding them then they say to you no no it's shutting down because there's it's glutted with immigrants and what we really need to do is to pass a law so that immigrants can't go into emergency rooms i mean this is what was said to me more than once in california and so the issue of scapegoating and how to really sort of fight that and that's an issue for our community as well i think it's a very difficult question when people don't want to understand what's against their own interests they want to just blame it on other part of that is the way there was an interesting analysis i don't know if i referred to him earlier nicholas christoph my fellow oregonian who talked about how the left has tended to condescend to and speak in a way that's ineffective in building the alliances with people in the red states and there's this sort of like elitism condescension perceived and probably real that works against our so as part of it is how we talk how we how we talk to people we also have to start looking for commonalities i mean this is what i meant when i started and i said i'm okay that this country is 60 in favor of civil unions and domestic partnership because i remember it was a nanosecond ago that they didn't favor that so i'm okay with that that doesn't mean i stop fighting for gay marriage but it means i say okay you're 60 in favor of civil unions now where else can we agree where else can we agree and i want to start building building some common language some common vision that doesn't where everybody's most you know kind of perfect position isn't the the prerequisite for agreement it some broad principles are fine with me we do not have to agree on every single one of them and i mean i think we are and i really feel as if people it's going to be a challenge because you know the women's movement may have to have to recognize that there are people who identify as feminists who don't have the same definition for where they support abortion people are going to have to just take a deep breath and just say in order for us to win and we have to start talking about winning because the planet will be destroyed democracy will be destroyed and one brand or another of fundamentalism will triumph unless we put forward a vision that's radically different that's radically whole but that that is you know i don't know maybe it's simple maybe it's just economic justice human rights and environmental sanity two minutes left unfortunately i don't know where the time goes so a minute each for last thoughts anything you want to message to the viewers well i want to talk about this sort of false dichotomy the false dichotomies between the red and the blue if you looked at one of the maps that was in the la times the most interesting map to me was population dispersion and if you looked at where the population is dispersed there's big chunks of blue right down the middle of the country which is characterized as being completely red and there's big swatches of rural america and and rural people who are actually considered to be blue people and i found that to be sort of reassuring but also pointed up the uh folly of this sort of false dichotomy that we live with so often i would say that our democracy is alive and well and as long as our democracy is alive and well we can win and so we just have to get busy i don't think that the you would think the american people were more frightened of gay marriage than of terrorism the way that this whole thing has been spun kind of and i don't think that and i and and furthermore i think that there is a new movement being born and those of us who were on the phone banks with all these first these young people who had never been engaged it's a new democracy movement or something it kind of came out around voting and electoral engagement who knew go figure but it's we're at the beginning of something and people need to just grab on with it take take the ride be generous and loving to your neighbors because they may not have the same politics as you would like them to and just go for it and we'll take back the country well there you have it of course you're going to have your own opinion about all of this and we're really glad that you were with us thank you kurt thank you phil thank you tori i always love and appreciate having you on the show and this is going to be an interesting next couple of years but we're going to have a lot of discussion and debate about it so we might as well get used to it [Music] you