Human Rights Campaign betrays us again

[cos]

A couple of weeks ago, this June, Maine Senator Susan Collins finally came out in favor of gay marriage.

When the Maine legislature first legalized it in 2009, and then a counter-campaign put it on the ballot, and Maine voted to unlegalize it, Susan Collins didn't do favor it.

When Mainers United for Marriage organized in 2011 and 2012 to put it back on the ballot, Susan Collins didn't support them.

When their referendum passed, Maine legalized same sex marriage again at the end of 2012, and in the year and a half that it's been a reality in Maine, Susan Collins didn't support it.

Why now? Because earlier this June, Shenna Bellows became the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, running against Susan Collins. As executive director of the Maine ACLU, Shenna Bellows was one of the lead organizers of Mainers United for Marriage. She was one of the people who formed the organization, back when Maine had recently voted to ban same sex marriage and many people said it was too soon to try again. Her active leadership for marriage equality before it was won has been earning her campaign a lot of support, and contributions.

So what did the HRC do? They struck a deal with Susan Collins: She says she favors gay marriage, and they endorse her for Senate over Shenna Bellows.

I guess the message to other politicians is: You don't earn HRC's support by working hard for equality, which is supposedly their mission. You do it by sitting on the sidelines until the work is done, and then telling HRC that if they'll endorse you, you'll say that you favor the gains from the work that other people did, after they've already won those gains.

Edit: A post by digsby, via jered, that expands on this. While HRC points to Susan Collins' support of the current Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the Senate, she's part of the reason why the current ENDA is so relatively narrow in its protections; Shenna Bellows, on the other hand, led in getting Maine to pass the Maine Human Rights Act, with broad and comprehensive antidiscrimination protections.

Comments

[jered]

The HRC doesn't want equality, they want political power. These are different.

[sariel-t.livejournal.com]

Seconded, also ick.

[catamethyst.livejournal.com]

Gross.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Cos, Ilse here - Have you ever been a Maine voter? I ask because I was for a fair portion of the years during which Maine, as a state, was ambivalent about gay marriage and I think the issue is more complicated than you present here (not intended as an insult). Maine politics, from my experience, is unique and complicated and, as someone who has been a voter in several states, Maine is the one that I believe drew me into participating in governance (differentiated from politics) more than any other. (not that I claim to be all that good at being a participatory citizen in general.)

Yeah, that's a jerk move on HRCs part, to say the least. This kind of think is a good chunk of the reason that political organizations that exist to be political really, really irritate me.

One of the things that I love about the way that Maine eventually (after wayyyy too much time waffling about it) legalized equal marriage is that it felt like a conversation between citizens and amongst the citizenry. Yes, some of the citizens behaved badly. It went back and forth two times, at least. There were weird technicalities (from what I recall). Out of state organizations became involved, etc. etc. I still can't read anything about any "proposition 1" without my brain going, " No on 1! No on ! means yes on equality!" There were tears. Letters were written to editors. It was a dysfunctional conversation at times. And, in the end, the state took the big leap forward as a whole. Not that everyone's happy with that, but I think that the conversation was important to have, culturally. Not just the result, but the conversation. One of the things that I really like about Maine's state government is that there are *so* many ballot referenda to vote on every year, not just names with a (D) or (R) after them. And I guess I never paid attention to what either of Maine's senators (both of which were, at the time, female republicans! Super unusual!) thought about marriage equality, because it was a cultural issue that the state had to decide on, because it's about winning hearts and minds through democracy, and the senators were off doing things in DC that were different.

Also: Politics is icky. Democracy is messy. So, when you put them together, is that kind of like mixing petrochemical based materials with organic (i.e. consisting of mainly carbon and hydrogen, i.e. compostable) materials so that you're left with something that you need to dispose of but can neither compost nor recycle? (like a cotton-poly blend t-shirt)

[cos]

Hi, and sorry for taking a whole day to notice this comment and un-hide it.

I'm puzzled about why you think I presented the process in Maine as having been simple? I gave a very brief overview of what happened because my main point wasn't to describe the process, just to refer to it having happened... but even that brief overview made it look complex. Hardly any state had a more windy path towards legalizing gay marriage than Maine did (Massachusetts is probably the only exception - it was longer and more complicated here by far). And certainly nothing I wrote in this post depends on assuming that process or issue was simple. So, I can't come up with any good guess as to what you mean by "the issue is more complicated than you present here". Explain?

I've never lived in Maine. I have volunteered on some political campaigns there, and worked with organizers and activists from there, and have had girlfriends in Maine who I visited many times, all of which is not the same thing as living there but gave me different kinds of familiarity with the politics.

[(Anonymous)]

It seems to me that the HRC is doing what is strategically the best move in order to help the fight for gay rights (as opposed to simply cheering the people we owe our progress to, which of course would be nice, but also a complete waste of time).

They got a(nother) GOP senator to endorse same sex marriage! Even if Bellows had a chance of winning (which she doesn't), converting a GOP senator to a mild supporter is _much_ more valuable than having a staunch democratic supporter.

It will do us no good to split the senate between 59 staunche gay-rights supporters and 41 staunch gay-rights detractors. That democratic senators support gay rights is already a given, what we need is to convince a handfull of republicans to go from "no way" to "I don't really care, but ok, fine, have your rights". Maybe that means we'll end up with 50 strong supporters, 10 weak supporters and 40 strong detractors. But let's face it, that is all we need.

If the HRC are thinking a bit more long-term, and take as their general strategy to support people who flip over people who were always true to the cause, one could imagine a handfull more GOP congressmen and women deciding to cash in on this, and we'd end up with lots of house/senate races between strong and weak gay rights supporters.

We are on the cups of winning, both popular opinion, in the courts and in congress. But if we want a complete and lasting victory, we cannot do that by wiping out our enemy (there will be republicans on the capitol for many years to come), we have to do it by convincing them to join our cause. That is what the HRC is doing, and we should all applaude their level-headedness!

[cos]

There's some thick irony in this line of argument, because during the debate over gay marriage in Maine, Shenna Bellows actually did organize Republicans to support it, with reasonable success, and that's part of how they won... but when she invited Susan Collins to lend her support to that aspect of it, Collins declined.

Also, I think your imagination is running away with ideas of what the HRC might be doing that could make this move make sense, but the fact is that they never do what you describe. They don't use any power or influence they accumulate to push or move policy forward, they use it to drag progress backward in the aim of gathering more allies for themselves. Perpetually. If they did what you describe, it *might* be a defensible strategy, though not in such an overwhelming case as this Senate race. But they don't do it. Making another lukewarm "friend" who won't really help *always* seems to take precedence over getting something done that will help LGBT people, so they never get around to that latter part.

Ridiculously, they call out Susan Collins' support of the ENDA as one of the reasons she's worth endorsing, at the very time that GLAAD, the ACLU, Lambda Legal, the Transgender Law Center, and the NGLTF, among others, have all dropped their support of the ENDA because it has been so watered down that its extremely broad religious exemption would do more harm to equal rights than its very narrow benefit would do good. And Susan Collins is a big part of the reason why the ENDA has been turned into such a useless (at best) proposal that may do more harm than good - it's to placate supposed allies like her. She likes the changes made to the ENDA that have caused almost all LGBT rights groups to stop supporting it. Except the HRC, because this idiocy is exactly what the HRC's supposed "level-headedness" is designed to get. Better to chalk up another Republican supposed-ally on the scorecard at the expense of good policy and helping people, yet again.

P.S. It's a strawman to pit this as being about "Democrats", though you used that strawman subtly. This isn't about "Democrats", this is about the HRC making an endorsement against someone who has for a decade fought and organized and led in expanding LGBT rights, and done so very effectively, leading to several real and significant wins in a politically centrist and mildly socially conservative state. Someone who has been one of the key people most responsible for advancing LGBT equality in recent years. Her political party is not the reason she strongly deserves the endorsement of every equal rights group, her long hard tireless *effective* work is. Whatever case you're trying to make, don't minimize her by implying that it's just about whether she'd vote the right way because she'd be one of 59 (or whatever number) Democrats.