George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Karl Rove.
To hear our activists tell it, these conservative Republicans ought to be the focus of the gay rights movement.
John Kerry, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Howard Dean.
In fact, "liberal" Democrats and moderate Republicans like these ought to be the main focus of the movement right now.
No amount of Chicken Little rhetoric and frenetic fund-raising will convince the stalwarts of the right to moderate their views, and the next opportunity to unseat them is almost two years away. Even then, how much will we really gain with their successors?
Our so-called allies, who we cheerfully toast at black-tie dinners and lavish with our donations, could be reached and influenced right now with enough pressure applied at the right places.
Instead, for years now, our activists have given a free pass to anyone who will parrot the right words of support for gay rights, and offered them political cover when they compromise away our future for their present.
The recent brouhaha over the president's judicial nominations is a classic example of how we facilitate the abuse of our rights at our own expense. It wasn't a mammoth showdown like the votes last year to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage. It wasn't a test of political will like last year's presidential campaign, when Democrat John Kerry withered when pressed on the issue of gay marriage. But the fight over whether Democrats could use the filibuster to block some of President Bush's judicial appointments was the first big test of 2005 for the gay rights movement and its allies. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone failed.
Senate Democrats once again sacrificed gay rights for the greater good of their own political expedience, and our lobbying organizations nodded meekly in understanding, not managing a peep of criticism.
These same Democrats, and their like-minded predecessors, have talked the talk but never walked the walked for years, failing even to pass employment non-discrimination when their party controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.
The nuts and bolts of the filibuster battle were arcane enough to excite only the most ardent political junkie: Senate Democrats had used the filibuster to block 10 of the 45 judges nominated by President Bush to serve on the nation's federal appeals courts, just one step below the U.S. Supreme Court.
Frustrated that the minority party was thwarting the president and his fellow Republicans in the Senate majority, GOP leaders planned to invoke a "nuclear option," cutting off the filibuster with 51 votes, rather than the 60 required by Senate rules.
Of the 10 judges blocked by the Democrats, the one judge with the clearest anti-gay record is William Pryor, the former Alabama attorney general. While in that position, he urged the Supreme Court not to strike down sodomy laws in Lawrence vs. Texas. Pryor argued that constitutional protection for consensual sex between gay people would inevitably lead to similar protections for incest, necrophilia, pedophilia and prostitution.
President Bush managed an end-run around the Democrats' filibuster of Pryor and last year used a "recess appointment" to put Pryor temporarily on the 11th Circuit Appeals Court in Atlanta. The judge from Alabama quickly returned the favor, casting the critical deciding vote upholding Florida's ban on adoption by gays.
But Pryor's "recess appointment" will expire soon if he does not receive official blessing from the U.S. Senate, so when the president re-nominated him this year, gay rights groups quickly condemned the move.
Then the Gang of 14, a group of seven senators from each party, cobbled together a grand compromise: The Democrats agreed to abandon the filibuster on three of the president's worst nominees, including Pryor. In exchange, the Republicans agreed only to delay, for now, a vote on the "nuclear option."
Most progressive civil rights groups criticized the "compromise" because it virtually guaranteed the confirmation of three arch-conservative judges in exchange for little. A vote will still come on the nuclear option, only now it's more likely to involve a nomination to the Supreme Court, when the stakes are infinitely higher.
"We are very disappointed with the decision to move these extremist nominees one step closer to confirmation," said Nan Aron, head of the Alliance for Justice, in a reaction typical of liberal interest groups.
"Is there anybody on our side who is happy?" she asked rhetorically.
Nan Aron, meet Joe Solmonese, the newly installed director of the Human Rights Campaign, lead pacifist organization in the patsy movement for gay civil rights. He's plenty happy with the "compromise."
In language more befitting a judicial pronouncement than an activist organization, HRC and Solmonese issued a statement "lauding" a compromise that "protects our nation."
It certainly didn't protect gay Americans from William Pryor, and how is delaying an inevitable vote on the "nuclear option" any sort of victory? Will the odds be any better for a filibuster when there is even more at stake?
These so-called allies have never protected us at crunch time. They voted for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act. One of them, Bill Clinton, even signed that nefarious twosome into law.
They oppose marriage equality, and many won't even go on record about civil unions. They have thus far voted against the president's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but only on frighteningly tenuous, legalistic grounds.
Our national gay rights groups do not even keep track of how many members of Congress actually back marriage equality. Only two non-gay members, at least judging by the debate on the president's marriage amendment.
In the meantime, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, which used to be counted on as our most aggressive gay rights lobby, issued a navel-gazing statement mumbling something about a "deep foreboding" over the compromise. Perhaps they were still counting the money raised last month at their dinner starring Howard Dean, who was awarded the Task Force Lifetime Achievement Award despite his repeated dismissals of marriage equality with a wave of his hand.
It is not the job of a civil rights movement to offer political cover at crunch time. Conservative groups understand this and never scream more loudly than at their own allies when they waiver. Some liberal groups, like Aron's have learned that critical lesson.
Unless and until our own activists can summon the courage to demand our equality, we surely can't expect politicians to lead the way.