Joe Solmonese will step down as president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest and wealthiest LGBT political lobby, when his contract expires next March.
My criticisms of HRC have dwelt on its becoming too much of a strategic arm of the Democratic party. I’ll just note that it would be nice if the HRC board would consider the possibility that come January 2013, the U.S. might have a Republican president and a Republican Senate and House. It would be useful to have an HRC head who had some ability to understand and make the conservative-libertarian argument for gay equality, rather than a hard core progressive Democratic partisan. But the chances of that happening are meager.
It could be a very long time before the Democrats again have the presidency and both houses of congress—the situation during the first two years of the Obama administration (with a Senate super-majority for the first year and and half). That more advantage of this wasn’t taken by HRC is a bit of a scandal. No congressional movement on repealing the Defense of Marriage Act or even the liberal priority (at least during the Bush years) of pushing the Employee Non-Discrimination Act. And I believe there would have been no administration/congressional movement to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell if the liberal blogosphere and several progressive activists hadn’t bucked the “be nice to Democrats” line and demanded that action be taken before the Republicans took the reins of the House in January (plus, significantly, the October 2010 advancement of the Log Cabin Republicans’ lawsuit). HRC’s tune, instead, has been to play nice with the party that they so closely identify with.
Now I realize the GOP harbors fierce opponents of gay rights. Some of my critics seem convinced that this fact means that the LGBT movement should be in the business of advancing the party of the left. I think that’s the wrong take-away. We won’t have gay equality in the U.S. until both parties are on board. Writing off the GOP instead of lobbying it—and doing so by speaking its language of individual liberty (protection from government), not the left’s language of group rights (bestowed by government)—is not going to help get us there from here.
More. Being able to “speak the language” is important. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, overturning state sodomy laws, was written by Justice Kennedy, a Reagan-appointee. He repeatedly cited an amicus brief filed by the libertarian Cato Institute, primarily making a constitution-based individual liberty case, and ignored the brief co-filed by HRC (which focused on “victimhood” issues such as asserting that sodomy laws provoked violence against gays as a group).
But in politics just speaking the language isn’t enough. The ability to mobilize support is what earns the attention of politicians. That requires money and ground operations, and a willingness sometimes to cross party lines (as the National Rifle Association did by endorsing the re-election of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid).
Furthermore. David Boaz of the Cato Institute hails, in his blog post How Judges Protect Liberty:
four federal judges who had courageously and correctly struck down state and federal laws:
• Judge Martin L. C. Feldman, who blocked President Obama’s moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico;
• Judge Susan Bolton, who blocked Arizona’s restrictive immigration law;
• Judge Henry Hudson, who refused to dismiss Virginia’s challenge to the health care mandate; and
• Judge Vaughn Walker, who struck down California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage.
That’s a political perspectives that’s neither beholden to left nor right.