Aug 28, 2009  |  By: Peter Rosenstein  | COMMENTS     

I AM GLAD that the sage of Turkey Hollow is home and healthy. I respect the work that David Mixner has done in the past, but his writings now sound more like the place he writes from: hollow.

He apparently has amnesia regarding the situation facing the LGBT community in 1993. I remember the Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush race in 1992. David got some promises from then-Gov. Clinton after holding the first million-dollar LGBT fundraiser for him with his wealthy friends. It
allowed the LGBT community to become a player in the election.

But I also remember the election itself. Clinton was pummeled for not serving in the military and for getting a deferment from the draft. It was a three-way race and Clinton was elected without winning a majority of the votes. Not much of a mandate. For Mixner to suggest as he did in a recent blog post from Turkey Hollow, N.Y., where he lives, that all President Clinton had to do was call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Colin Powell, and threaten to fire them all if they didn’t allow gays to serve in the military is ludicrous.

When Clinton was interrupted recently by Lane Hudson at the Netroots conference (and as much as Lane knows I admire him, that was rude and really served no purpose), the former president spoke a partial truth about that fight in the early ‘90s. Of course, Clinton couldn’t resist revising history a little, but the reality is (both then and now) that we didn’t have the votes on the Hill to get what we wanted after Mixner forced the president to move on gays in the military before he had any real credibility on the Hill.

In 1993, when the homophobic Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said in essence that gays would serve in the military over his dead body, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was born as a way to keep Nunn from potentially passing a law banning gays from the military entirely.


AS FOR THE Defense of Marriage Act, which Clinton also addressed at Netroots, it passed overwhelmingly (and in bipartisan fashion) in Congress, and we were later able to use it to stop the movement to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Clinton also used it to get re-elected in 1996, but let’s be honest, would we rather have had Bob Dole?

The LGBT movement has come a long way since 1993. We held “feel good marches” and though they never got us any legislation passed, they clearly energized people. But we have learned and are smarter today. We realize you don’t need mass marches to make progress. Small groups of advocates in D.C. — with the right connections and backed by large groups of supporters out in the states — can make a difference. An example is the new filing from the Justice Department on DOMA, as compared to its first one, which was offensive in its anti-gay language. The Justice Department even hired a liaison to the LGBT community to make sure that first fiasco doesn’t happen again.

OUR COMMUNITY NOW understands we can make the greatest impact at the state level. That is where the fight is and where we have to elect people that support us — even after they take office. In the end, we need to elect our own. The Human Rights Campaign, with Joe Solmonese at the helm, finally understands that, and each of the state equality groups realizes we need to re-focus our resources at home. We are fighting a marriage initiative in Maine, legislative battles in New Jersey, New York and D.C., and are gearing up for the 2012 rematch in California. That is where our man/woman power and financial resources are needed. One hundred constituents sitting in each representative’s district office will generate more press and response in every small town across the nation than a few people trudging to D.C. In the future, let’s march on state capitals when we march and do it with a strategic purpose in mind.

Bashing Bill Clinton and writing revisionist history from the Hollow won’t move us forward. We need to keep the heat on the Obama administration and on members of Congress. We need to get off of our individual ego trips. More than ever, all of our national and state organizations, along with the leaders of the great new online organizations, need to sit together and jointly plan the next steps both nationally and locally.

We are organized, but we need to use those organizations strategically and spend our resources wisely. We have shown that our voices can be heard, but we will be even stronger if we begin to sing from the same hymnal.