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.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2014-07-09 14:00 (UTC)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.