No Time for SF Gay Town Hall; HRC Solmonese Holds Meeting at Chevron
Will wonders never cease? Even though HRC's Joe Solmonese couldn't be bothered to hold a town hall forum in San Francisco to inform the gay community about his group's work on our behalf and hear our concerns about the direction of HRC, he did hold two invitation-only meetings while in the Bay Area.The first was last night when Solmonese appeared before members of HRC's SF Federal Club members, people who give $1,200 annually. And his second meeting was today, before executives and workers at Chevron.
Look, I can understand there may be reasons for HRC to deliver something extra only to folks who can cough up big bucks annually, and invitation-only forums are one way to make big donors feel special, and, I fully support Solmonese speaking before Corporate America to advance gay equality, but, these things should NOT prevent him and HRC from organizing free town hall meetings.
After all, Solmonese and his group claim they represent all of America's gays, so they should be much more accessible to average gays, especially those of us who don't/won't/can't donate to HRC.
Here are excerpts of a report on Solmonese's meeting at Chevron today:
Joe Solmonese (President of Human Rights Campaign www.hrc.org) was the keynote speaker at Chevron today. Chevron, Clorox, and the company that I work for (which cannot be named) hosted HRC to discuss LGBT equality in America. [...]Glad he's fighting for us all. Now, if only he would be amenable to meeting with us all through town halls, web-casting those forums, starting an interactive blog on HRC's site and answering the mounting questions from bloggers and gay journalists, he might have more of us feeling just like this blogger who was at the Chevron meeting today.
Joe’s message was clear. Here is what I took away: [...]
The corporate scorecard is being applied to the healthcare industry. Legislation is being addressed to be more inclusive of ‘any person’, as opposed to the terminology ‘spouse’. Hate crimes legislation is being addressed on a federal level. Bad politicians such as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum are being ousted with HRC efforts. They fought Ann Coulter’s column when she used derogatory verbiage, which lead to her column being removed from nine papers. And the list goes on.
Joe spoke for about 45 minutes to a group of about 100 people. Afterwards, I took a moment to thank and meet Joe with the other people from my company. He is a short guy who appears to be in shape. He has a good handshake and a good smile. He’s been with HRC for a few years now; I’ve been with them longer and happy to see someone as charismatic as him on the front lines, fighting for us all.
Michaal, thanks for calling my attention to this over at my blogologalog.
ReplyDeleteI just have two observations, 1-cent each for 2-cents total:
1. In general, I hope that the HRC President spends 80-90% of his time talking with non-gays. They are the key to the LGBT future, as you must realize.
2. There is little question that HRC has an image problem of sorts.
Some of it is not deserved, and that is a real problem for the Community. It's hard to guage, of course, but there is a lot of griping without a lot of substance behind it. This has the effect of making it hard to sort out what might be honest and constructive criticism.
After that, I don't share your view that more talk with the Community will lead to consensus or necessarily address the HRC's problems. In other words, I think there are plenty of people who will continue to be dissastified, even if they had all the information they wanted about the HRC and perhaps even an equal amount who will be even MORE upset.
By the way, it is awesome that you've dug up their lobbying figures. Can you dig up the ones for some other organizations? The Gill Foundation? NGLTF? SLDN? LCR?
Last, you could help me by giving your view of why people seem so hung up on the fact that HRC claims that they represent the LGBT community. Everyone kinda knows that sort of claim is just a ... marketing thing, or whatever ... just as much as NAACP doesn't speak for all black people nor Greenpeace for all Greens.