Q&A with HRC’s Solmonese

The Washington Blade sat down with Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, on the first anniversary of his taking over the leadership of the Washington, D.C.-based gay and lesbian advocacy group.

Q: In your first week in office last April, you announced plans to travel to the American heartland to highlight your intent to increase HRC's educational and outreach work in the states. Your newly released video on state activities touches on this. Could you describe what HRC is doing on the state and local level that it was not doing one year ago?

Solmonese:  Well, I think the video speaks to a lot of the political and grassroots fieldwork that we're doing in the states. What I was really talking about a year ago, … in addition to my view that our political efforts needed to move out to the state and local level, both to make the states better places for our community to live, but also to begin a process of changing mindsets in states, whether it's changing a local piece of legislation or changing a legislative seat, in ways that it would begin to reverberate in Washington.

So that the congressman we're talking to in Washington looks back to his district, always votes with his constituency as he tells us and begins to think that, "Perhaps my constituency, because of the passage of that law back in the state or because of the election of fair-minded legislators, perhaps my constituency would be OK with my voting for this hate-crimes bill or this workplace nondiscrimination bill." So that was the catalyst and the motivation for the political side of the work. And that's what I hope was portrayed in the video.

But the other equation of HRC, the other side of the work was also why I had in mind to go out across the country. And it is this idea that I think we're most successful when we go to where people congregate, whether that is in the workplace or in communities of faith or in hospitals or in college and university settings. Work with our own community, whether it's to get a better set of benefits at a corporation or to help establish a GLBT student group in a college. But change, hopefully, the view of everybody in that setting.

So to me, it was important to get out of Washington and to travel around the country and to move that work out. And so the first day of work for me, April 11, I was in Kansas and I met with a group of same-sex parents and their children and had a conversation about what it’s like to be a same-sex couple and raise your children in Topeka, Kan., as opposed to Washington, D.C. or Los Angeles.

I heard things like the challenges they have when they take their children to the emergency room, or the decisions they make when they walk into an emergency room and look across the admitting desk and think, "That’s probably the person who is going to be most welcoming to us." And that is by no means the experience that those parents should have when they walk into the emergency room.

But what I wanted to get a clear sense of is where should we be going with our work? Now, in that instance, I think it is one of the things that prompted us to start this hospital rating project that we’re doing with the Gay & Lesbian Medical Association and the Moutner Project. It’s kind of along the lines of our corporate work: rate hospitals, work with hospitals, try to get our community a better sense of the jobs that hospitals are doing and in the process prompt hospitals to do a better job by our community.

Q: HRC started as a PAC and a Washington lobbying operation dealing with gay issues and all the specialized work that's required to be the gay community's voice in the nation's capital. Now we're seeing more of a shift to the states. Yet state and local gay groups were always understood to be the ones in charge of changing the hearts and minds of lawmakers so that they would vote the right way in Congress. Are you implying that state and local gay groups have failed at this?

Solmonese: Oh no, no, no. Two things. One, the Congress is gridlocked. So people say to me, isn't it your job to go up to the Hill and get more people to be with us on X? Well, absolutely, and we've always done that and we'll always do that. But the Congress is gridlocked and on any issue, if you said go get more members of Congress to switch their opinion on the environment or choice or you name the issue.

The way the Congress is constructed is that 98 percent, 95-plus percent of incumbents in Congress got re-elected last year. There is no sense by anyone on the Hill that they’re going to lose their seat. And so when it's gridlocked like that, and as you know well, that is the byproduct of redistricting, there's nowhere to go. And so if you want to impact Congress, if you want to shake things up, you have got to come at it from an additional direction, which is from the states.

So whether it's – the seats in Florida are what they are with the 22 congressional seats in Florida, there are maybe two that are ever in play. Those members, who are either in a very progressive district in Miami or a very conservative district in the northern part of the state are with us or not. And there’s very little movement.

So if you want to shake things up in Congress, if you say to me, go get more hate crimes votes for me in the state of Florida, I've got to add an element of that, which is being in Florida. For instance, in Florida this cycle, on the ballot, the potential for a bipartisan redistricting commission. Or the election, in this case, of more Democrats to even up the legislature so there's a more balanced look at redistricting.

Maybe the lines get redrawn, maybe the legislators feel like, 'Gosh, I want to get a more progressive universe drawn into my district, I've got to think differently. Or there are lots of fair-minded legislators coming up the pipeline. The Senate president used to be anti-gay, now the president is pro-GLBT and well funded and nipping at my heels. So I have to think differently about my positions.'

So to me, it's coming at Congress from another direction to try to accomplish the core work that HRC has always done. And what I think about what's going on in the states, I think that the state groups have done a wonderful job for the most part. I just feel like more is better.

And so more money and more effort and more energy in the states to elect that new GLBT-friendly speaker of the House — that we're there and state groups are there. Of course, when you go into these states, you realize, gee, it's not just HRC and a state group who are working to elect this progressive and fair-minded person, it's 30 other entities as well. Those 30 other entities all seem to kind of make it work, and they have as long as I've worked in politics. So I see no reason why this can’t work.

Q: By the 30 other entities, do you mean 30 other organizations?

Solmonese: Sure. You go into the state of Oregon and there's probably three key races that could turn one way or the other. So you've got a Republican district and a Democratic district, and nobody is playing in those races.

So if you have three races — I sometimes think that when people talk about, well, how can HRC and Basic Rights Oregon work together on those three races? If you land in those states you realize the Oregon Teachers Associat