Get Used to It: Ep. 75, "Coping with Dub-ya"

uh [Music] hi i'm sheila cuell welcome to get used to it today we are going to talk about a topic that i think maybe some other people are also talking about but maybe not quite in this way and that is the new administration yes no surprise but since we talk on get used to it about issues of interest to the gay and lesbian community or about the gay and lesbian community that's going to be part of what we talk about today though not solely and so all i did was invite three of the smartest people i know and we're going to spend an hour talking about the new administration my first guest tori osborne long time activist in the gay and lesbian community women's community civil rights community is now the executive director of the liberty hill foundation here in los angeles county welcome tori glad to be here uh john heilman who is the mayor pro tem of the city of west hollywood and a law professor welcome john thanks for having us you bet and tom soto who is the president of p.s enterprises long-time gay and lesbian activist long-time environmental activist and an advisor to the gore campaign welcome tom thank you for having me tori let's start with you um it's a big difference from the clinton administration to the bush administration a big turnover a big ideological change how do you see those changes manifesting themselves primarily about our community but anything you want to talk about i mean you were in the oval office put together i think the first group of gay and lesbian community activists had ever met with a president who was in office at the time what do you think well i think it's um i think it's going to be a big big change and i think there's lots of specifics i mean for all of the fits and starts and ups and downs of the gays community's relationship with president clinton i mean you know he sold us out on a few things but the bottom line is that history will always link gay and lesbian rights moving to a new level of visibility and i think power because he sent a green light when he spoke you know at that los angeles uh meeting in may of 1992 and he said you know i have a vision of america and you are part of it and said it to the gay and lesbian community it was words we had been waiting for decades to hear from a national politician and he followed through for all of the ways that we have criticized the president it wasn't just in appointments it wasn't just in an executive order it wasn't just in showing up at the right you know hr human rights campaign events it wasn't just the access to to the oval office that that some of us had it really was sending out a different message and to me the most significant change will not be the appointments that aren't made the executive orders that don't happen it will be the lack of our issues being on the public agenda i heard this morning on the radio i actually heard a fellow um the leader i didn't catch his name but the leader or a leader from the christian coalition talking and he said and i quote he said what excites us about george bush isn't just the changes in social policy he said it's the music that we be that will be playing underneath and behind the political stage for the next four years now in that music we heard gay lyrics and gay and lesbian ideas and and values and just visibility in the last eight years as we never had before so to me it's about the narrowing of political space not just for our community for so many communities but the narrowing of the space for justice for expanding you know the very meaning of democracy i mean that's my thing these days is that i think you know over the long arc of this country's history um and i agree with martin luther king that the arc of justice goes forward we have you know steps backward and steps forward but overall it's about invigorating and expanding what the democracy and justice mean and under the last eight years with some with some problems absolutely for the most part the gay and lesbian issue values and community has been put forward with the oval office's help not despite not just the movement you know our own social movement for equality but with help from with the moral authority and with the voice and visibility of the president that will stop dead we will be put on the defensive the space will be narrowed i hope chronic discouragement doesn't set in i'm as interested in the ordinary folks who are you know poor and uh struggling who aren't necessarily just the leaders who won't be going to those christmas parties in the white house as i and you and others were lucky enough to do it's not just that it's really about about social policy but the music behind it the values the vision and the sense of how far you know how how open we can be i'm telling you you can measure social progress of the gay and lesbian community by how out of the closet how many more people are coming out of the closet and more spheres of their lives and the last eight years has been an extraordinary coming out and i call it coming home to america of this community and its voices its multiple voices that is going to just be the door is going to be shut well not just that but we stand to lose things too i mean there's sort of a in my mind there's like two major areas that i'm looking at it's like what and this is not just us this is civil rights this is the environment this is anything that we called gains over the past eight years what do we have at the moment that we stand to lose and some of those are specifics you talked about the executive order that bars discrimination in any of these federal appointments you know on the basis of sexual orientation i'm sure that gets unraveled in a heartbeat and the other half is sort of what you've also been talking about is the the loss of momentum what do we stand not to gain that we might have gained you know in the next four or eight years well i mean i think it's going to be a time of of setbacks and creativity now the other the on the positive side um you know i believe in social movements i believe that the long term social change doesn't happen just you know from an individual president in fact the reason that clinton was so far so much on our side was that we were the major civil rights movement of the 1980s and the 1990s and that the force of our voice and the force of our movement and how many people were active and activists in workplaces and in community centers and you know all over the country put the issue forward so that bill clinton had to listen and you know i'm i believe in building movements i believe that that that what it's really about that long-term social change is really about not about it doesn't happen first in the electoral arena it happens in the electoral arena because people outside the electoral arena are organized and mobilized to put their issues forward and that's what what i think we're gonna have to do it's gonna it actually means that the work that you know that i'm doing at liberty hill and that others of us do on the activist and kind of you know institutional reform and social policy and movement building levels is going to have to increase we're going to have to get more aggressive about the media advocacy we're going to have to get smarter to get our messages out we may have to go back into direct action or some sort of more visible forms of uh you know who knows what civil civil disobedience or whatever but i'm just saying we may we're going to have to be building our strength from the ground up building the movements outside again so that when al gore gets in in four years or the democrats get back in in eight years or whenever the heck it happens that we've rebuilt our issues and our our power our political power so we can move it forward again but there's no question we're going to be on the defensive and the loss of momentum i think can you know it's it's it's a it's a depressing time in that sense but i think it will force us to be more creative i i take a positive view of it that we'll we'll learn from it as we did under reagan under reagan we've been through it although i mean the difference is we organize and the door is shut and you know don't get no i want to just just a piece of history here in 1980 when ronald reagan came into power one half of the gay and lesbian center in los angeles is staff was laid off because they were paid for by grants under the ceta program which was a jimmy carter democratic jobs training program for community activists a wonderful program by the way but it was government money and the minute reagan came to office of course he cut all those those programs that supported good community services and half of the center staff lost their jobs that was the bad news the good news was it forced the gay and lesbian center to institute the very first major donor fundraising program building up its private fundraising that of course became then a model for many other gay and lesbian organizations and forced a much more diversified you know and much more organizational sophistication in how we built organizations so i believe people respond to you know crisis with creativity and that's what we're going to have to do but it is it is uh it is a challenge so john you've spent a lot of your life and working for civil rights teaching about civil rights and in elective office which is always an interesting combination as we both know not just in terms of w becoming our president or having become our president if you're watching a rerun um but also the cabinet uh how do you see any impact not only in our community but sort of in the broader issues you know choice and civil rights etc i think it's very troubling and i want to just uh reiterate something what tori was saying that the discussion under bill clinton even when we were losing battles our issues were being talked about and i think clinton was probably one of the first and only presidents who really understood the gay and lesbian community viewed us as a significant partner in his efforts to move the country forward we're not going to have that under w or under a bush administration it's just not going to happen i think it's it's clear already that the people that he is choosing as his cabinet and as his leadership group they're people who have either been hostile to gay and lesbian concerns or certainly have been silent on it i i really view the next couple of years under a bush administration one where our issues are going to be there's going to be deafening silence out of the administration and it's clear that he is uncomfortable even meeting with people from the gay and lesbian community um his father never mentioned gay and lesbian issues throughout his tenure um and reagan of course they weren't able to even say aids during the crisis the epidemic that we were going through so i think that what we're really looking for or looking at is four years of really no progress at all a lot of backtracking in places where we thought we had had gains clinton for all of his problems and all of the the controversy over gays in the military and you look at the record that he had on gay and lesbian issues his advocacy for hate crimes legislation his advocacy for enda and non-discrimination on behalf of gays and lesbians his executive orders his appointments i mean fighting the battle for roberta achtenberg fighting for james hormel as a an ambassador i mean you're not going to see that from george bush by the opposite quite the opposite in fact i think to some degree it's a litmus test that he has if you're at all pro-gay or supportive of gay and lesbian issues you're not going to be part of his administration and the the appointments that he's made just some of them are very troubling for gay and lesbian issues ashcroft has had a history of antagonism towards any kind of civil rights legislation particularly anything involving gays and lesbians norton his interior nominee she too has been antagonistic towards gay and lesbians concerns and i i think that you're really looking at george bush who portrayed himself as a moderate during the election now having to reward the conservative right wing with appointments that will satisfy their concerns he has and i'll give him credit for this he's created a veneer of diversity he at least has a diverse group of faces up there and i think that's progress for the country even a conservative like george bush recognizes that you're not going to go forward with an administration with all white male faces up there so that is progress but their viewpoints very conservative across the board and i i think it's telling that ashcroft has a hundred percent rating from pat robertson's uh christian coalition we know through history that the people who are anti-choice who are aligned with groups like that have always been antagonistic towards gay and lesbian this is the guy that time magazine said that his record on civil rights issues was quote horrendous close quote i don't think i've ever seen time magazine use any words like that i mean generally they're more pablumesque you know in their language and this was that's very telling to me too and norton i think it's interesting in colorado every attorney general has to defend the law of the state when it's being challenged but they don't have to look like they're so passionately defending it and she did i mean she was incredibly strong about it when roy romer the governor of colorado was the the chair of the anti-amendment two campaign uh even though he was the one being sued you know and that she was defending so i think we have a lot to worry about there when she actually uh solicited briefs from other attorneys generals from across the country to try to get them on her side so it'd be one thing if you went in there and defended as you have to do as attorney general but she seemed very eager to defend that ordinance and her amendment to in colorado and i certainly don't view her as a friend of the gay and lesbian community but more importantly for the position she's tapped for her viewpoints on environmental issues i mean i don't think gay and lesbian people or any other people in the country want to see our national parks and national monuments opened up to oil drilling and uh mining and these are sacred uh places for all of us not just he said the polluters will police themselves right what do we have to worry about i mean really horrendous yeah and i when you look at his appointments and he he comes into office with no legitimacy he campaigned as a compassionate conservative that he was going to try to be a uniter not a divider but the people he has chosen are all people who are for the most part very extreme in their viewpoints the probably the only true moderate is christine whitman in the the selection group and they've kept her as far away from any kind of social issues as possible putting her in the epa where her her record isn't that strong um so i i'm very troubled from not only gay and lesbian concerns but from general civil rights why would you put somebody in charge of civil rights who has consistently opposed civil rights legislation well there's a good reason i mean we're we're hiring the foxes to staff the hen houses and it seems like very obvious choices uh to do that that is an agenda and the agenda comes out of the message and the message from the appointments is we're putting people here who will make certain that those i would call it gains made in terms of civil rights or protection of the environment will not only stop it will be rolled back that's the agenda and therefore the cabinet is absolutely appropriate as appointments for that agenda i mean you you fi you hire a guy that lost his election in missouri even his own state you know wouldn't uh want him to run the state and this the only thing that you can be saying is look he was wonderful on anti-choice issues i want him there to make certain that those are rolled back but the thing that disturbs me when tory was talking about the the loss of not just momentum but the fact that you start to get depressed you know it this it seems to me like the community is already almost making excuses for some of these appointments like oh well not as bad you know you won't be as bad as you think well i think there is that sentiment among some people in the community but i also see a lot of people who are tremendously energized but what happened in the election results and the machinations to get him the presidency and when he signaled that um his favorite justices were justice thomas and scalia the two justices that are most hostile to civil rights and certainly to anything involving gays and lesbians i mean i think that energized a lot of people and i think a lot of people are looking to become more active and to be more involved yeah it's easy to sit back and be depressed but i think as torrey said we've got to be working at the local level we've got to be working at the state level to re-energize our communities because the progress that we've made over the years bill clinton was tremendous but he was tremendous because we enabled him to be tremendous because we've been out in the workplace we've been working in organizations people know us now it's not as easy it's not acceptable to be as bigoted as it once was and i think no matter what bush does it is still the the history is on our side we're going to continue to move forward we're not going to have to fall back we're not going to get much progress out of out of george bush if al gore was elected i think we could see real progress with enda being enacted and signed into law it's not going to happen under a bush administration he's not going to push for it and his selection for vice president should have clued us in cheney is extraordinarily conservative um his positions on on environmental issues his positions on civil rights issues he has been he has demonstrated throughout his tenure an extraordinary conservative bent on everything particularly on gay and lesbian issues so we should have known prior to the election that that's what it was going to be like well we probably did know but many of us didn't think that he was going to win and you know now we are dealing with it well everybody's mentioned environmental issues tom and that of course has been your forte for so many years [Music] and it seems to me i could be wrong that so much of environmental protection really does stem directly out of law out of the enactments of law out of agency regulations etc how do you see this new administration shaping up executive orders through things like the federal antiquities act i think it's we're going to have a profound um and and unprecedented coalition that gets built as a result of the bush administration coming in and it's going to be in response to a lot of the record that is uh so it's it's not even light it's so obvious and entrenched we know where these people are coming from you're looking at an administration that looks as though it's a fortune 10 oil company you have george w bush w for wildcatter from texas you have dick cheney former executive for halliburton who who cashed out at 30 40 million dollars to run as his party's nominee and then you have condoleezza rice it's on the board of chevron and the list goes on and on and on so there is absolutely no question that there are going to be solid and true and passionate attempts to derail a lot of the progress that we made in the environmental community which is not just you know the concern of environmentalists as we all know i think you know many of us here met in the 1980s on on on other movements others than just gay and lesbian rights and you know some of our key appointees in the white house um you know helped to serve in the department of interior and epa i myself was appointed by the president to sit on the border environment commission which regulates the the multi-billion dollar north american development bank and and uh yet what we're going to see is a lot of that attempted to be unraveled the the other effect that i think is going to say you talk to this a little bit sheila is that is there's there's a collective grieving going on in our community and i think a lot of it is going to affect the level of spiritualism that we've been able to generate and build momentum within our community but also in most communities that are impacted by what by by the by the benefits and the decisions that have been made by the clinton gore administration and those are the low-income communities the communities of color gays and lesbians of course but what we're going to find now is is is a coalition that will involve all of those groups i remember back in 1985 during the height of the reagan bush era when we were all organized against several things nuclear arms we had pro-peace a great nuclear disarmament remember that peace march and so forth and then we had the contra wars going on not only in nicaragua and el salvador but also in the halls of congress and we were blockading uh you know some of the most busiest streets in front of the federal building these were issues that affected the community uh in los angeles and throughout the country uh because we saw from a spiritual point of view that these were not things that we could connect to from a values-based point of view as a country how can we support pointing missiles uh at one another that could destroy the earth 14 times over how can we support an administration that was allowing uh the death and the murder of of of of marinol nuns in el salvador and so forth i wouldn't be surprised if we see a repeat of much of that type of antagonism as john had pointed out and we're going to have to respond with an unprecedented coalition and torrey's right back in the 1980s our movement was very different than it is now we now have a very solid and a much more sophisticated political and organizing and funding base and i don't think that that we will take too many months into this administration to wait for many of those policies to be implemented much less discussed and i think that the nomination process and the uh and the confirmation process is going to be a little bit more time consuming than than w uh in terms of strictly environmental issues i i don't even want a hazard to guess but you know you know how much time do we have and where do you start because you could talk about wetlands you could talk about the arctic national wildlife reserve and the northern slopes we could talk about forestry there's already discussion in the beltway about what w is going to do to try to referendum or undo a lot of the federal antiquities acts access really that really irritated some folks like orrin hatch with the grand escalante staircase monument the sequoias and so forth we're also going to have to look and turn to our local leaders that are our sadly solidly entrenched they have their own mandates at the state level in in the california legislature or uh governor davis right those those folks that actually came in because people actually voted to recounted them and now they're there representing our interests this is not that administration and we're going to have to uh put a a very diverse and effective coalition which you know i'm looking forward to seeing that part because that really adds to you know this the spiritual connection to the cause that we have and it also opens up the eyes of of uh what we sometimes find to be a very segregated activist community i'm concerned about gay and lesbian rights i'm concerned about well guess what we are going to have to be concerned about everyone's issue because we're all in the same family we're all going to get you know thrown on the outside of this of this uh uh whole whole administration and our interests will not be protected um the other thing that we could look at are things within the marine environments across the california the east coast in the gulf you know there has been a number of attempts to open up our shorelines to offshore oil drilling and you know it's it's it's uh uh interesting to see how uh the direction is going to take it with respect to that type of national policy and international policy uh uh because there have been discussions about that possibility in the future we remember during the early 80s when they started to build oil platforms they made sure that they built them in the santa barbara channel and we also made sure that you couldn't see them from ronald reagan's ranch are we going to do the same thing again here so there's a number of issues out there now we have our nominees you know they all sit on these boards these corporate boards their oil interests they get it they understand how manipulate prices and so forth and now we're going to have to have these folks provide some degree of leadership not legitimate in my opinion to lead the country toward toward a stable economy hopefully a prosperous one but you know who's to say and also one that will that will affect the environment the least as possible i and i don't think that they're even going to be enthusiastic about that well you know it's interesting our community is often characterized by the other side as you know as rich or privileged or special rights uh and yet many of us have been working in areas i mean like you know just as you do tori and you both have as well uh in terms of concern about other communities picking up from your point tom and i you know not just communities of color but all impoverished communities which was one of the reasons why i was so concerned about tommy thompson's um nomination for hud i mean this is this was the engineer of the welfare deform you know in his state and a brand new report has just indicated that oh yeah there's fewer people on welfare but they're not making any more money and oftentimes less and they're in worse shape than they were when they were getting any kind of government benefits so he advertised himself as doing this sort of humane thing get those women to work what they really want to do is you know go to work and many of us in other states have tried to kind of buttress this plan that got captured everybody's administration imagination with at least some child care at least some training money at least it counts that you're going to school try to humanize it but it looks to me like he's also uh you know a disastrous choice not to mention the education chief from houston well i don't think you could you could take the type of standards that we have been living up to through the clinton administration and begin to apply i mean if we do that obviously we're going to be very very disappointed um and and even when you look at the administration that you had i mean we have you have issues with with tommy thompson i mean we have a president that while he was in office hate crimes went up 70 percent um how are we going to justify that when when when when we have someone like ashcroft uh being nominated as a the chief law enforcement officer for the country a man who's who is regularly quoted in white supremacist magazines who was uh seen as the single greatest obstacle to civil rights in some people's minds who no the voters of missouri wouldn't happen he lost against a dead man and and you know now he's going to be our ag so i think that you're absolutely right but but when we look at this administration it really is going to be cut in several areas it's going to be very very distinct and clear that this was the historical point where where where we we started to go back on things like environmental protection civil rights gay and lesbian rights and quite frankly again i'm i'm a big believer in our ability as a community not a faith based but of spiritually based that understanding the spiritual value of things like environmental protection and having protected resources or even urban parkland in open space for children in the inner city or gay lesbian rights or the right to choose these are things that are spiritually based values that are going to be completely and entirely absent from this administration hence gives us the ability to capture a lot of that energy and throw it into a very multicultural very diverse movement that quite frankly we'll just take to the streets again like we've done before and before and before we'll do it again and i think that we're going to have a voice that will uh quite frankly be effective in being able to stop a lot of the policies uh but but uh clearly you know my head is still spinning by seeing the backgrounds of some of these nominees it's scary well it's i was just going to say i mean the poll after poll shows that there's actually an enduring majority between 60 and 70 percent of americans who favor pro-choice non-discrimination for gays and lesbians and anybody else a strong public education system environmental protections and expansion there is actually a coalesced set of value-based social policies that most americans believe in i mean that's just what the polls say the problem has been that under 20 years or 12 years of reagan bush and then clinton fighting as best as he could on some uh issues and sort of having to to work against an incredible consolidation of power by the right wing in this country i mean from 1980 on the most powerful the agenda has been set by the radical right not the moderates the entire political discourse has moved so far to the right i mean liberal became a bad word uh practically overnight in this country and so and there's been a fragmentation i mean some of this i think is just kind of history in the way that things happen and i believe the gods kind of you know the things happen is to some extent as they're meant to be and i but i do think that what we're looking at now is as tom was saying there was this fragmentation of different movements i mean some of us have crossed over and worked on other issues for for many many years but a lot of people have come up and come out in the last 20 years where the gay movement has been coming into its own and haven't perhaps worked on environmental but they're no different than the majority of americans they may not have been enviro activists but they certainly halt share that set of beliefs in effect gay and lesbians in general are proved to be progressive across the board on almost every issue including some of the economic policy issues that people tend to categorize the gay community as rich and you know conservative on economic issues that isn't in fact the case uh in fact we're pretty much you know with kind of mainstream uh americans i think the real as tom put forward i think the real interesting question is going to be if if we can overcome some of that fragmentation if some of the people that have been working on choice and the people who have been working rebuild the coalition there have been little bits of coalition and aids activists and pro-choice activists you know those those act up people were out there in front of those clinics and those pro-choice women were out there and act up and there have been a few remarkable coalitions under the reagan bush years and and i think we've seen you know some of that uh over the last eight years but there's going to have to be and it's interesting and i mean i hope i'm right when i say that i think the the maturity of the gay and lesbian movement is such that it won't just be uh you know doing for ourselves but that we really will take our leadership in community building and our spirituality a lot of it forged but the extraordinary you know having been in the in sort of the cross hairs of the right for so long and by the loss of aids what aids has done to our community there has been a kind of a deepening on the values side you know what is life about what is this country about what is democracy about so i see us providing leadership in other movements is what i'm saying is that i agree as we step forward as i hope that this coalition but i think it's bigger than a coalition i think it's reclaiming democracy it's really claiming this it's funny that you've all kind of identified the potential to go sort of either way with this we talk about this feeling of discouragement and it's the same way with you know with an election all this talk about bipartisanship i am a bipartisan activist in sacramento but bipartisanship doesn't mean everything gets mushed together in the middle and there are no differences there are differences there are some incredible ideological differences and disagreeing on policy matters is not partisan what it is is sticking to what your constituents elected you to represent you tell them what you're for they vote for you you be for it whether you're or in hatch or barbara box or whoever you are that's what you're supposed to do and it isn't about party it's about values but the question is will our community and others be discouraged uh make excuses say oh there's nothing i can do look they took it over or is there you know the sort of the energy and the answer is well it could go either way what do we do however if we're energized the the the the the thing that has changed from from from the movements of the 80s and they were great movements is that we now have entirely new mediums for communication organizing and activism we could raise money quicker now we could organize quicker we could get the word out we could cast a rapid response to the millions of people in the fraction of a second and and i think that that whole dynamic that the new economy of activism new activism is the the the ability for us to take that diverse coalition we're going to have uh your traditional liberals uh all of a sudden bond from a values-based point of view with the folks that were on the streets of seattle at the world trade organization you know we're gonna we're gonna see that where in many cases they were seen as the left of the left you know now they're gonna be seen as part of the left now they're going to be included and that new that generation of activists are going to be able to bring a whole new set of dynamics that will help to operate rapidly respond to some of the issues that will confront us from the bush administration the bush administration in my opinion are old economy these are folks that this good old boys and good old girls who come from you know these these staunchy old wall street type and houston-based types of companies that that are are are not clearly understanding of of the value that that mr greenspan perhaps saw and unleashing some of the new economy developments and we see what happened last week with their their pressure they twisted his arm and you know they're claiming and george bush is going out there saying heard some bad news from these executives well what executives he's talking to old economy executives for the most part and they're saying yeah there is a slowdown but he's also smart to say you know it's not my fault it's already started before i was there it's just going down the the tubes and then of course if it goes down the tubes because of things he did all he has to do is say you know see i told you you know i wanted to just raise this um point about this kind of possible be kind of in the best sense kind of anti-old paradigm anti-old corporate model and and just mention this article that's been whizzing around the the email sort of cyberspace by john kenneth gabriel that's coming out in the texas observer um about corporate democracy and what he basically says is that what happened when you had that basically the republicans lost the election and then they tried to obstruct the vote uh in order to to you know to the vote count in order to make sure that they got their guy in and he said you know this isn't a new form this is called corporate democracy i'm going to read this it is a system whereby a board of directors read the supreme court selects the chief executive officer and then he in turn appoints new members of that board you know the shareholders are owners in title only they're invited to cast their votes in periodic referenda but their franchise is only symbolic for management holds the majority of the proxies on no important issue do the ceo and the board ever permit themselves to lose and the media which is kind of used to this form of corporate democracy as galbraith calls it you know kind of rolled over and what he called for which was really great to hear this was for to as he put it to never forget do not forget over the next four years do not forget that this is this election is you know a fraud that uh in fact al gore won it's a stolen election and he calls for civil disrespect i love it it's not quite civil disobedience he's not calling for us to go out on the streets in some random way but for civil disrespect where we don't allow any substantial policies where the political space is not given to bush and the supreme court uh to enact permanent kinds of changes because it's not a legitimate government and i love the idea uh and in fact i'm surprised just in my own friends and family sort of the people you know we all have kind of our brother-in-law tester our tests are the people who are not political you know the ones that aren't the activists and don't read the paper every day who maybe we check with to see what the bell weather you know like what's really happening our fingers on the pulse and i have to tell you that underneath this media and republican and spin doctors call for sort of let everybody get in line and make peace now time for national healing there's a lot of outrage and there's a lot of people who know that this election was stolen who know that this is not a legitimate presidency he's a president select and not a president-elect and i i think that if we do our organizing and if we have good hearts and if we're values driven and if we realize we're representing a majority opinions here we're not at the margins this is a major this should be a majority uh voice over the next four years and we need to remember that not there's anything wrong with being at the margins i've been at the most of my life but we really are talking about a social uh vision in this country that's shared by an awful lot of people um fragmented as we may have been over the last years by having to you know fight for against the right wing or fight for our individual rights if we come together i mean i really think that there's a way that if we come from a place of this civil disrespect it's civil but it is disrespect in the sense that we're not going to let this guy promote his agenda without a battle against the majority of americans i think it's a brilliant phrase and as a matter of fact i've seen it now in three different emails where people don't seem to know where it arose and i think it's good for us to give credit to john kenneth galbraith this is a it's a brilliant article and i think this is one of those cut and paste and forward you know people say people are always forwarding me emails i think it's a sign of friendship when you forward an email this is something i thought of you i wanted you you know to have this i'm interested in how your students are responding to this john we you know we always talk about youth and sometimes we mean high school youth and or college or whatever but young people do you see any outrage or any uh platitudes or whatever is happening with them well it's funny because i teach in at both usc and at whittier and usc is at in la and whittier is down in orange county where you would think that the students would be more conservative i'm finding at both schools tremendous fascination with the whole process tremendous interest and invigoration in the whole political discussion whereas two or three years ago if you raised anything political there they would just gloss over their eyes there has been so much attention on this election and there's so much interest and so many people i had students who were from out of the state who made sure that they voted absentee that they actually express mailed their ballot back so that it would get there in time that kind of interest which typically first year law students who are so overwhelmed they're not taking that kind of time and you know one of the things that i've talked to them about is how do you change this how do you get involved and i think that our movement really needs to return in addition to fighting the battles at the national level return to the local level the state and local level is where change is really going to occur in the hearts and minds of people and we need to experiment at the local level when reagan came into office that was when west hollywood became a city and we enacted one of the first domestic partnership ordinances at the same time as this tremendous conservative retrenchment at the federal level we were able to enact domestic partnership and that grew other cities copied it it now has been enacted thank to your leadership at the state level and we've seen the growth of of that concept so now in vermont they have civil unions i think that is where we're going to make any real gains real progress is by getting down and dirty at the local level fighting for things that we v we feel are important for our community i think that's where the progress is well of course we thought the state's rights were going to be respected by the supreme court now we're going to have to re-examine that assumption or maybe it's only when there's just one issue at risk because the supreme court on their equal protection analysis has always been very interesting if you have a minority that is claiming they're not being treated equal then for some reason the majority of this court has found that equal protection doesn't apply to that if you have a white man who's being you know uh discriminated against and brings an equal protection claim ah that's when we're really saying you know equal protection has been violated i guess in that sense they were consistent but in terms of states abilities to go beyond which we have done in california on protecting people with disabilities at work beyond what the ada provides age discrimination beyond what the federal law provides if they leave that avenue open to us we can do it but there are always problems where federal law i shouldn't say problems i mean it's appropriate under the constitution where federal law maintains and they kind of occupy the field and we don't get a choice i mean we haven't talked about gun control issues which i think is also i mean when the uh you know when charlton heston is packing his bags to move into the white house i get a little concerned but it does sound that the the nra was having that same sort of uh hearing the music playing behind you know what yeah there's three i was thinking that there are three areas we haven't mentioned and one of them is you know there's been a resurgence of labor um and i mean you got it no matter what you think uh and it's you know i don't think its record is 100 good but no matter what you think of the labor movement it's an anti-poverty machine and with the new economy the downside of the new economy is the increase in the gap between rich and poor and you basically have sort of forty percent of the people in this country um working as low wage workers and you know we get and the top one percent has accrued most of the wealth of the last uh 20 years and so you know the labor movement and the kind of resurgence that has happened under john sweeney in the bill clinton administration and it particularly here in california the rise of new labor that's been so significant uh and that you know the janitor strike and so forth but there i mean dick che there's dick cheney on meet the press saying the very first thing that they're going to do is make it less possible for labor union members to do that political that check off where they i mean that is how to cut the knees out from under the labor movement that basically delivered al gore michigan and ohio and into some extent california so labor's one the other is is immigrant immigration policy which has not been particularly progressive over the last six or eight years but i i heard there was just recently this like emergency meeting of 200 immigrants rights groups here in southern california to try to strategize because it's just going to be you know horrendous in the future and then of course the gun control issues and now there's you know i think that is definitely an issue where you have had the nra lobby the gun lobby has absolutely blocked except for here in california you know a couple of other state levels john says i think what progress has been made in some of these tough issues where the right wing has had pretty much a lock on the national debate and on national policy and and and and because clinton's had to operate in a political environment where the right wing not just the republicans but the right wing of the republican party was in control of congress you know for for those critical years and anyway so i think there are other issues and i really see these of a piece uh i mean for for probably 20 years of my life i i really felt like the the voice i had to be you know shouting and singing the loudest was my lesbian and you know feminist voice and i really feel now as if i'm in the same boat with a lot of people who may not look like me and may not come from the same place although my people were immigrants from ireland of course at some point back there but you know and i just feel like it's not just a it's not just sort of a paper thing you know or a good idea let's build those coalitions that make everybody just come together i really feel like we're for it's a struggle for the soul of this country and it's so clear now i mean it's just so clear who's running it and it's an old group of guys with all values and it doesn't it but it doesn't bring out the best of what this country can be we're either going to be a multicultural pluralistic tolerant country and that's going to mean extending some economic democracy it it is going to mean we're going to have to re-look at the social contract and the the economic part of the social contract in light of the new economy because it's leaving a lot of people behind or we're going to go backwards and you know i think we've all said that you've said that and in one way or another we're kind of at a crossroads and this will bring out the finest in us over the next four years and beyond or we'll kind of fall into that depression we'll become take even more prozac and indiv and fall into our private lives and you know make the best that we can or we're going to come together and rebuild uh you know and and work together well there's been an interesting cross-pollination of the issues anyway i was thinking we were talking about immigrants how many many years the battered women's movement worked in order to get immigration activists to understand that this ought to be a way in which uh where battered women are escaping violence even though it's private and not government inspired that this had to get into the lexicon of the immigration rights community because it's government sanctioned where there's no law against domestic violence and finally there was some opening there the same thing with our partners where we want to bring them in under immigration laws doesn't mean that the that the democratic administration has been perfect it's been a little bit of an opening there's been a little bit of light and of course there's a great fear not only that what the immigration rights community has as its core issues will be attacked but those of us who've been trying to connect with the immigration rights community on battered women or gay and lesbian issues where that's beginning to expand what happens in a right-wing environment like this is you retrench back to your core values and say i can't even get my stuff you don't stop bringing me stuff to make me educated that's what we have to avoid yeah and because it's going to be critical for our our overall movement whether it's gained lesbian environmental immigration to see the greater good of being able to share that small core value with another sector of the movement because that's what the right wing wants they want to basically divide our front and then split us up and eliminate us quite frankly that's how you eliminate we're all politicians i mean we know how to do that and we're going to have to do it to them as well but but when you look at things like gun control and immigration or i think the single greatest thing if you want to really take it boils down to what are going to be states rights and federal rights and so forth that's going to be a very big question because they've turned the game around on themselves and on us quite frankly and you know it's not just on civil rights issues you know where you know on a lot of environmental issues it was it was commerce and trade seeking protection under federal interstate commerce clause so that they could pollute in california even though they were stationed here and commerced here they were registered in nevada but they polluted here and so you know we at the coalition for clean air years ago got them for that but they continue to try federal preemption and that's not right and that that this court is going to uphold a lot of that now so we have to be concerned about these things on the immigration issue in addition to um that that great scenario that you outlined on on abused women is also the ability to finally get gay and lesbian rights written into its policy within the ins that if they are persecuted on sexual orientation then they deserve a fair hearing and and that was something that that recently came out and now we could begin to uh you know help to protect that i guess that will probably be one of the first things that gets uh looked at in this administration it's it's going to be a very um a very uh yeah we're going to be tearful but you know there's also going to be some joyful periods of this and that's because we're going to be able to get that spiritual connection between all the different sectors of our activist community involved and drive it toward a single objective and that is basically uh you know i think gabrielle is just too kind this was you know in in school we called the sakura taw you know that's what it was this is the overtaking of a government by an illegitimate means or by force and and that's what has happened here um it may have been a bloodless revolution uh but it was a revolt nonetheless and it was against the will of the people to this day al gore has more than 600 000 votes in the popular vote and if it wasn't for the supreme court being an obstacle to allowing the vote to continue in florida just like maria cantwell won in washington so too would have al gore in florida well that's what they want us to forget though and this issue about galbraith saying don't forget don't forget is that you know people i mean talk about the memes that got out in society another email that was one of my favorites that there are certain elements of knowledge or opinion or just thought that are put out we call it spin but it has to grab hold and one of the ones that grabbed hold they call them memes just like your genes imprint who you are these memes imprint what you think and one of the early memes in florida was put out by the right wing which was bush won why is gore such a crybaby right let's give up you know let's all just get on with our business well no i mean just say no that's really what i've time to just say no you can't say that that oh yeah i guess so that's legitimate well yes it is legitimate if a supreme court makes a decision that's brought to us but that doesn't make an election in which you didn't count all the votes legitimate and we're not going to stop saying that that's not being a sore loser that's simply being a truth teller that's legitimate but it's you know i think that people are not going to forget and i think unlike past elections where maybe uh people of color would feel excluded from the election now there's a much broader group of people who feel like their voices weren't properly heard and counted properly and i think there's going to be a much broader group of people who do not feel like this election was legitimate and do not feel like their voices were counted they're going to continue to press forward and i think in in florida we're going to see some changes at the state level and probably even at the governor's level new voting rights act yep well i'd love that castro offered to come and help with those elections i think that was totally appropriate what a nice guy i think she's a nice guy i mean some of my friends said why didn't we ask jimmy carter to go there you know we send him to all those other elections well of course it's amazing but the hours already sort of spun by i've had a wonderful time thank you tori thank you tom thank you thank you sheila um thank you for joining us uh we know that you have these same discussions around your dinner tables every day and night and i hope you will continue to do so and all i have to say to you is as to the george w bush administration don't get used to it [Applause] [Music] you