January 5, 2009

What If Equality California Gave a Summit, And Nobody Came? (P.S. You’re Not Invited Anyway)

First, a quick, two-part refresher course on the No On 8 campaign’s extreme paranoia, and why it’s killing our movement:

Part 1: “De-Briefing: No On 8 Postmortem, a.k.a. Virtual Town Hall Meeting,” November 26, 2008:

Ocamb directs question from Queerty to Jean: Who composes this evaluation board (that will be analyzing the campaign); will No On 8 commit to making the evaluation public; and, why should we continue to support the same leaders? Another listener: Will the campaign allow input into the independent evaluation?

Jean: “We are currently looking for people who are experts in doing this… We don’t have them engaged yet.” Intends to get input from people “at all levels of involvement in the campaign.” In terms of making evaluationj public, “none of us [on this call] have the authority to make that call for No On 8,” but feels it would “not be wise” to make results public, “because it will include recommendations we don’t have our opponents to have.”

Ocamb: Who does have that authority, and can the strategy part of the report be redacted (making the rest of the report public)?

Jean: Authority would be “the broader executive committee campaign on the campaign.” It’s “hard to speculate on what would hurt us or not without seeing the evaluation” when it’s completed.

. . .

Kors: … In January, there will be a “summit trying to pull one or two representatives from every organization” so we “can start discussion on education and political work to secure full equality.”

Ocamb asks about reaching people who can’t be there: “Could you Webcast that?”

Kors: Will have to check about Webcasting. So far, the “summit” is “only reaching out to groups… We’ve been having [a] group deciding the agenda, deciding goals… [This] really has to be decided from the ground up,” bringing “new people, new organizations into the dialogue.”

. . .

Jean: … “My hope that with this summit planning in January [will] include virtually any organization, of any kind…”

Part 2: “If You Never Want to Suffer Another Devastating Defeat by the Anti-Gays, Read This. Or Else.,” December 29, 2008:

11. Secrecy = Death

. . .

Activists, please take this lesson to heart: a culture of movement secrecy will fail you every time. I recommend Gene Sharpe’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action for a discussion how a culture of secrecy can stifle a social change movement. I’ve had to fight this fight in various activist venues over the years, and it still often doesn’t get through. People can get paranoid — they may want to overcontrol the volunteers, overcontrol the flow information, control who shows up at events; people get paranoid about “outsiders” or “spies” or whatever, and all that fear is contagious. Fear strangles a movement. Fear turns off potential allies. It prevents a movement from taking the steps necessary to succeed. If you’re refusing to publish information about when your phone banks are happening because you’re “afraid that spies for the other side might show up”, fire yourself and get new leadership, because you’re killing your own justice movement. I fully support the concept of message discipline, and I strongly oppose the “do-your-own-thingism” which so often pervades progressive activism and demolishes progressive message coherence, but there’s a difference between enforcing messaging discipline, versus telling your volunteers not to share information about where the upcoming phone banks are located.

Now, get ready to get pissed off all over again; i.e., No On 8 is still not listening, and at this point, probably never will.

From Rex Wockner, via Towleroad:

Big Prop 8-Related Summit
Will Limit Media Access

A Jan. 24 summit in Los Angeles to strategize about “winning back marriage rights” in California will be only partially open to media — a decision that has led to the resignation of one member of the organizing committee and to complaints from California gay media figures.

The Equality Summit apparently will bring together some 150 activists to organize and strategize in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8, the Nov. 4 ballot measure with which voters amended the state constitution to re-ban same-sex marriage.

But according to summit coordinator Anne Marks of Equality California, “the planning committee decided that at some portions of the summit where sensitive strategy discussions were to take place, it could only be advantageous to our opposition if those discussions and plans were made public, so limiting press, or making these sessions off-the-record, would make sense.”

That decision isn’t sitting well with some folks, especially given that the failed No on 8 campaign, in which Equality California was the biggest force, has been widely criticized for its insularity.

“I resigned from the planning committee of the Equality Summit because I felt that the press should be allowed into the entire conference,” said longtime activist Robin Tyler … who was a plaintiff in the California same-sex marriage case and, with her partner, Diane Olson, half of the first same-sex couple to marry in Southern California after the state Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage took effect June 16.

“This issue was discussed on a telephone call last week, and by a majority vote, the organizing committee decided not to let the press into the entire conference,” Tyler said in a Dec. 30 e-mail to reporters. “After the call, I … felt very uncomfortable with this decision. I asked for it to be brought up again, as I think total media access is an extremely important issue. When I was told that the newly elected ‘Executive Committee’ had decided not to bring the issue up again, I resigned. … It felt like the same old ’secretive’ process that had happened during the No on 8 campaign.”

Brava, Robin.

In e-mails that circulated among the 53 members of the Equality Summit Planning Committee, which were forwarded to a reporter, a few other committee members also have expressed concerns about the media decision. …

Among the reporters hoping to attend the full summit is Karen Ocamb, news editor of the Los Angeles gay magazines Frontiers and IN Los Angeles.

“Responsible journalists have a long history of respecting legitimate requests to go off the record when discussions turn to strategy or issues of a politically sensitive nature,” Ocamb said. “LGBT journalists … represent the thousands of individuals who contributed to and volunteered for the No on Prop 8 campaign and if people are going to be asked to be engaged again, they have a right to know what happened, who will lead them, and (to have) at least a sense of what’s coming next. And at this stage, that can only happen through us.”

Plus, who in the gay press is going to leak potentially damaging information? The people who work in LGBT media have just as much to lose as the average Joe Gay; they’re not going to screw themselves over.

Nobody’s talking about inviting the enemy — I don’t see anyone bringing the Baptist Press, Lifesite, and Peter LaBarbera into the room — but to block the gay press…?! That’s sheer insanity. Or sheer paranoia. Or arrogant (Obama-like) “we know what’s best, so don’t you worry your pretty little heads” paternalism. Or pigheaded territorialism. Or all of the above.

After some discussion, this California-based reporter also informed summit organizers that he believed the gathering should be fully open to the press, given that the No on 8 campaign has been harshly criticized for its closed style and that people attending the summit will talk to reporters afterward anyway, possibly leading to news stories that might not be as accurate as ones that would be produced if reporters were present. …

More at the link — and worth it for the reader comments as well, summed up for me by one Wuzzy, who writes:

Great! This is being organized and coordinated by the very people, Equality California, who screwed up Props 22 and 8. I have zero confidence in this so-called “summit.” The future of our community cannot be trusted to EQCA.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

Permalink | |