UNDER ATTACK?

To me, it is a very strange thing to feel like we're under attack.  And by "we" I mean gay men and women in the United States.   2008 was a political disaster for gay rights.

Arizona, Florida, and California all passed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage.  Arkansas voted, actually voted to prevent gay & women from legally adopting children.  

The President elected is allowing Rick Warren to give the blessing at what will be the most watch inauguration in American history.  The real sin of Prop. 8 in California is what people actually had legally taken away from them.  It is one thing for Arizona or Florida to ban what does not yet exist, but quite another to invalide someone's legal marriage.  

And now I read that Pope, during his Christmas message, comparing gay rights and marriage to the destruction of the human race.  While I understand that the Church comes down on the side of pro-creation and life, coming down on the side of hating someone who already exists and serves the Lord on God's Earth seems like going too far.

To me, it feels like it's open season on gay men and women's rights.

So here's what I would like to know for 2009:  Will President Obama allow gay men & women to openly serve in the United States military?  The desegregation of the military definitely helped in the civil rights movement.  And so should it for gay rights.  Will the California Supreme Court invalidate Prop. 8?  With Prop. 8, the seeds of newly re-energized internet based gay political activism is brewing.  And I would really like to my money into a new wave of political activism.  I want to support an ACT UP for the 21st century.

I feel strongly that the leaders and board of the Human Rights Campaign & the Gay & Lesbian Task Force should all have resigned after this election.  Such a humiliating defeat was unacceptable for me to continue to put my hard earned money into a losing strategy.  I want to put my money into a newly motivated generation who are looking outward to the status of gay rights in the second decade of the 21st century.  This decade is lost and we cannot afford to lose another 10 years.