Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Ex-ED of Stonewall Democrats Says They Closed in 2012

The Washington Blade's reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. just shot me an email about his February story about leaders of the Democratic National Committee promising to resurrect the Stonewall Democrats. Lou's story links to another Blade article, this one by Michael K. Lavers from January about the organization's executive director Jerame Davis confirming the group went out of business at the end of December.

Kudos to the Blade for these stories!

At the same time, let me state until today I obviously had no idea the Stonewall Democrats no longer existed. I'm surprised the Blade's stories didn't ripple beyond their web site and I wonder if anyone cared about the demise of the group.

I believe Davis has a responsibility to update the still-operating web site of his group, providing visitors with the information he shared with me this morning in an email:

National Stonewall Democrats ceased formal operations on December 31, 2012. At that time, we laid off all staff (that was only me) and closed our office. The organization is considered "on hiatus" at this time while a new group of folks works on forming a new board to assume the debt and rebuild the organization for a relaunch, most likely, in early 2014 . . .

A side note on your suggestion of folding into HRC - that's just not possible. HRC, whether it always appears that way or not, is a non-partisan organization . . .

Without NSD, the apologists at Log Cabin and GOProud are completely unfettered in their attempts to fool LGBT people into believing the GOP is more pro-equality than it actually is. Let alone the fact that it leaves no organization to bridge the gap between LGBT folks and the DNC or to keep an eye on our interests within the DNC.

If the best reason to resurrect the organization is to counter gay Republicans, who don't get any significant traction with gay Democratic voters or have influence beyond their small circles, it's not much of reason. And Davis' second point that gay Democrats need an organization to be their bridge to the Democratic Party seems very superfluous when we have HRC well-serving already in that role.

Sounds to me like Davis and the gay Democratic Party leaders, with their focus on the 2014 elections, want to revive the group to better buy and trade gay votes and suck up gay dollars. Without the Stonewall Democrats, gays won't suffer one iota.

Let's hope the revival of this group does not happen.

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