Jun 26, 2009  |  By: Peter Rosenstein  | COMMENTS     

HAVING PARTICIPATED IN a number of marches on Washington, I think the few people who are focusing their energy on this ought to find something more productive to do.

Before we ask our community to spend the time and money — and make no mistake a march on Washington is an expensive proposition — we should look at who we will influence with the march. Are we going to attack the Congress and the president we just helped to elect? What are the threats we will use to move them any faster than they are now moving or can move? Will we threaten to stay home during the next election cycle? Will we threaten to vote for conservative Republicans next time? Will we withhold our money in 2010 and who will that help?

We need to focus our energy on the work to be done state by state and not ask our community to waste their time and money to come to Washington for another potentially feel-good march that will produce no tangible results.

Our movement needs to keep electing more people that will speak up and vote for our issues. That doesn’t get done by marching on Washington. It gets done the way the people in Maine, Iowa and New Hampshire fought for marriage equality. The slow process of talking to legislators one-to-one and making sure they know we will vote our principles. It gets done by possibly threatening a liberal Democrat at home who hasn’t stood up for us with a challenge from another politician who will.

It means electing members of the LGBT community to school boards, city councils and state legislatures, and this year in Rhode Island to the governor’s mansion. It means taking the money you would spend on traveling to Washington and dedicating it to a campaign or lobbying effort in your own state.

THE D.C. CHAMBER of Commerce, or tourism bureau Destination D.C., may not like me writing this column as I serve on one of their committees. But this isn’t about filling D.C. hotels or bars. It is about working in the most productive way for our future and the future of the next generations of the LGBT community.

I was prompted to write this column because of the nightmare scenarios I see coming out of this potential march. We don’t need another fight between our national organizations to take a lead in an event that I understand they don’t even think is worthwhile. We don’t need the petty fights over who gets to be on stage and speak and when. We don’t need the politicians who haven’t passed any of our legislation speaking from the stage with us applauding them as they tell us to keep fighting the good fight and that they are with us. And we certainly don’t need another financial fiasco because some of the same people who did the last march will be involved in this one and they were the gang who couldn’t count straight.

I don’t mean to demean the good intentions of people like Robin Tyler or Cleve Jones. As a community, we owe them our thanks. But a march on Washington is the old way of doing things. How much legislation did the last few marches get us? Let’s move forward with new leaders and in new ways for the 21st century. Let’s organize statehouse by statehouse and city council by city council. Let’s build a cadre of future leaders who will eventually come to Washington as elected officials and stand up for us because they are us. Then maybe we won’t have to spend our money to come chastise them after we helped to elect them.

I AM AS unhappy with the pace, or lack of it, of this Congress and the deafening silence on our issues from the White House as anyone in our community. I am frustrated with a White House that can allow the DOJ to submit a brief on Smelt vs. USA that actually compares prohibition of our marriages to prohibition of incest. A brief that suggests DOMA could be good because it saves money when the federal government doesn’t have to pay benefits to our partners.

It is all absurd, but not something a march on Washington will have any impact on at all. This president and this Congress know they have us between a rock and a hard place. What are we going to do? Bring back the Bush administration or the Republican Congress?

So let’s each apply pressure to our own representatives back home and let our national organizations ratchet up the pressure on the White House, because that’s what we fund them to do.