Ashley Love of TFM has a post up about Arianna Huffington’s talk about the “demonizing and scapegoating” of the president. She was inspired to comment:
When Arianna started talking about the “demonizing and scapegoating” of the president by “irrational” people, it really struck a chord with me. Like many LGBTTQI Americans, I have become very upset with many queer activists making all these personal attacks on the president, as if he is a dictator that can wave a magic wand and grant us all our wishes at once. Reality check: President Obama has to work with the courts, Congress and the people to create change (and those anti-LGBT equality Republicans are holding up equality, not the president!). To put all the blame on him when things are not moving fast enough is infantile, and suspect. It’s bad enough the racist Tea Party is slandering him, but for LGBT direct action groups to act just as crazy is dangerous. If the Democratic vote gets split, do we really want another 8 years of Bush and Ken Melhman types ruining this country again? The scary thing is there are lot of classist gay folks who only care about marriage equality, they don’t care about ENDA or many other issues that affect the less privileged part of the LGBT community, and they most certainly don’t care about rights for trans and intersex Americans. Many of them would not mind if a classist Republicans got into office, because many gay people believe in a hierarchy in the LGBT community, with rich white gay men at the top, and transsexual, transgender and intersex people at the bottom. These Animal Farm types don’t care about the epidemic of homeless LGBT youth, or hate crimes that happen to trans women of color every week, or trans health care rights, or many queer communities of color, or LGBT people who have low income, etc. We need President Obama to stay in office, or things will get worse for the majority of the LGBT community.
I can’t agree more.
Her reasons are exactly why we all need to be out & voting for Democrats for other public office, too: to say, out loud & clear that we do NOT want these wingnuts who barely consider us human.
And yes, I understand the “I’m tired of voting for people who only like me marginally better” and I agree. I’m tired of it too. We need to keep the pressure on, but that means keeping the pressure on the whole political system, not just on President Obama.