IN EARLY FEBRUARY the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest lesbigay political group, and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the nation's largest lesbigay religious organization, announced they would sponsor the country's fourth national March on Washington to promote the lesbian and gay (and bisexual and transgender) cause. The so-called Millennium March on Washington for Equal Rights, to take place in the spring of 2000, would be the successor to Washington marches held in 1979, 1987, and 1993.
Well, if HRC and MCC thought that they were going to do an end-run around the usual gaggle of "grassroots" activists, they soon discovered otherwise. The uproar from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and other, more left-leaning organizations was so powerful that HRC quickly backtracked and announced that plans for the Millennium March were on hold. "We decided a much larger group of gay people will come together to talk about a national march and a 50-state march," said HRC head Elizabeth Birch. "We agreed to just pause and have more people at the table."
What this means, alas, is that everybody and her aunt will now demand the right to "organize" the event. Expect multitudinous ethnic-identity variants to clamor for quotas on the national steering committee, but don't be surprised when they hang out the "only leftists need apply" sign. Some kinds of diversity are not to be tolerated.
That, of course, is what happened last time around, with predictable results. The 1993 March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian, and Bi Rights was characterized by abysmal planning. As Jacob Weisberg noted in the liberal New Republic magazine, the event "was appallingly organized, failed to coordinate even a single time for a photo-op on the Mall, and had as its most memorable quote a lesbian comedian's remark that Hillary Clinton was 'at last a first lady I could fuck.'" Moreover, few participants lobbied their Congressmembers while in town - one of the main reasons political protests are held in Washington in the first place.
That's not to say that many, maybe even most who descended on Washington weren't energized by being in the nation's capital with hundreds of thousands of compatriots. But it's hard to argue with Weisberg's account. For starters, the idea of a literal "march" around the National Mall followed by an afternoon rally in front of the Capitol was a logistics nightmare. Worse, most of the participants spent the entire day waiting (and waiting, and waiting) to march, so that even as the rally was ending around 5pm many were still in line to take their turn around the empty Mall, deflating the numbers at the media-covered rally.
The religious right Promise Keepers, by the way, understood this and dispensed with the "march" concept altogether. Their recent gathering was one all-day rally, with everyone together all the time. No danger that their numbers would be diluted by sprawling participants all over the place.
Of course, the '93 March on Washington's poor execution should have been no surprise since from the get-go priority was given not to organizational efficiency, but to an arch form of political correctness. Consider this: in their quest for "diversity," march organizers mandated gender parity and 50 percent people of color quotas on all state organizing committees - even in states that were more than 90 percent white. The same gender and race "diversity" dominated speaker selection, with the number of "pale males" (i.e., white men) addressing the crowd kept small enough to be counted on one hand. However, as noted, the call for diversity did not extend to ideological matters; virtually every speaker echoed the organizers' call for a broad left-wing alliance to overthrow capitalism, establish socialism, and (oh, yeah) have gay equality.
Do I exaggerate? Speakers took the podium to demand everything from mandated bilingual education and welfare as a "right" (known as "equitable income redistribution" in order to "end poverty") to government-provided free-of-charge sex-change operations for transsexual prisoners. These, in fact, were among the mind-boggling 55 planks of the official platform adopted by the national steering committee.
Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself. Here's my recommendation: make the Millennium March an all-day rally focused on what should have been our movement's primary goal all along, ending all discrimination by the government that makes us second-class citizens - "sodomy" laws in almost half our states, the military gay ban, and the federal marriage exclusion codified by the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act signed by HRC's favorite president, Bill Clinton. OK, throw in workplace anti-discrimination laws. But that's it. Period.
But I won't hold my breath, as we go marching on.