Bay Times: New A-holes
for Lorri Jean, Kors and Birch
Two lesbians with genuine spines, Kim Corsaro the publisher of SF Bay Times, and her star columnist Ann Rostow, in the current issue of their paper rip into, quite deservedly so IMHO, the criminally inept gay leadership that handed us a loss on November 4 with the Prop 8 vote.
This is excerpted from Corsaro's front-page editorial:
There is no doubt in my mind that Corsaro is hitting the No on 8 leadership failures on the head, failures that will soon be repeated because Lorri Jean, Kors and Kate Kendell are not acknowledging any responsibility for their incompetence. Since we lost, these leaders have placed all major blame for our loss on the Mormons, the Catholics or supposed gay community complacency.And we need new leadership. This paper could be filled with the number of people who wanted to work with the campaign to defeat Prop 8 but were turned away at the door - told they weren’t needed - people like Molly McKay from Freedom to Marry, who is one of the best grassroots activists ever when it comes to mobilizing for marriage rights. People like Robin Tyler, who put together an effective series of PSAs to reach people of color who may have voted with us had there been any outreach before the last week of the campaign ...
So all that experience and expertise - all of that heart - was turned away by our so-called “leaders.” In the most elitist, clique-ish, private clubish way imaginable, old political scores and turf wars were prioritized by the No on 8 leadership, who listened to no one outside their elite group, including lots of highly experienced campaign operatives.
Lorri Jean, the director of the L.A. GLBT community center, has released a campaign analysis that claims that the campaign leaders knew from the beginning that our community was behind 13 points in the polls, so really, we did OK to finish off just 4 points behind ...
And if Lorri Jean, who was supposed to be one of the primary movers behind the campaign, did believe we were 13 points behind in the summer, why did she take the month of July off to vacation in Alaska? And why did Geoff Kors, the other primary campaign decision maker, take off for Spain for over two weeks at the same time, if he knew we were losing? ...
The No on Prop 8 campaign was a disaster from the top down.
And Ann Rostow has a few things to say about our official leaders and the campaign:
Hey Kim and Ann, thanks so much for holding our leaders accountable and printing lots of truth in the SF Bay Times. Now more than ever, we need an independent and vibrant gay press to keep tabs on Jean, Kors, Kendell and Birch.Don’t you think we’ve spent enough time bashing the No on 8 campaign and that it’s time to turn the page and look forward?
Me neither!
Oh, I’m just kidding. But then again, the news that Prop 8 leader, the LA Center’s Lorri Jean spent a month in Alaska during the summer run up to the most important election in our history, while co-leader Equality California’s Geoff Kors was vacationing in Spain for more than a fortnight does give one pause.
Oh, and Michael Petrelis notes that former HRC Chief Elizabeth Birch gave over $9,000 to Clinton and Obama combined, but could not manage more than $500 to defend our community’s line in the sand. What’s that about?
Turn the page! Turn the page!
A computer foul up just destroyed a whole bunch of Prop 8 attack material that I could conceivably reconstruct, but I’m not going to do it. Because I just know that you are mature enough that you see no need to further excoriate the strategists who engineered our election defeat. Instead, you want to stay positive! And keep fighting! Me too! (Cue: GLBT Civil Rights Fight Song, Philadelphia Philharmonic Symphony version.)
A word to the wise: Don't donate to the LA gay center, Equality California, National Center for Lesbian Rights or Human Rights Campaign until they hire better leaders and deliver actual accomplishments that benefit gays.
5 comments:
SING OUT LOUISE!!!!!
This is really hitting them where it hurts.
The Center has some wonderful programs that deserve our support, but Kors and Jean REALLY need to show some leadership by admitting their own limitations and making a public commitment to learning from their mistakes so that the next fight, we win in the court of public opinion. Blaming others and not taking responsibility, when you are VERY highly-paid leader of a NON-PROFIT organization, is not good leadership. You can be a good leader and still make some mistakes, but you need to admit them and take responsibility for them, which no one at "Gay, Inc." has done yet. The community needs to DEMAND that these leaders analyze "what went wrong" and own it, and commit publicly to a new strategy that will win the hearts and minds of people who voted for Prop 8 over to our side. It's possible, with the right leadership -- whether it's Jean/Kors, or others. But in any case, there must be learning from the mistakes, and there must be change. We cannot afford to lose any more battles on this. If they hadn't excluded others, we might have won. Damn the Mormons and the Catholics and the Evangelicals, but we have to be able to fight them, and we can -- WITH the right leadership.
I have to wonder if it isn't, in part, a SoCal thing. Only one of the counties that voted No is down south, which begs the question: was everybody down there just too busy being faaaabulous or what? And demographics are no excuse. LA and Alameda Counties have very similar demographics, but the No votes were 49% and 62%, respectively.
I think it is wrong for us to take our anger out on our leadership by demonizing the heads of Equality California, LAGLC, NCLR, ACLU, etc. We lost this fight by only 4 percentage points. I vividly remember losing Prop 22 by 22%. That means in eight years, we gained 18% - that is a lot. I am a supporter of all of these organizations, and I really believe that they did all that they could to defeat Prop 8. I think that if they had instead done a lot of the things that critics have suggested since the election, we would have probably lost by a greater percentage. We should definitely look critically at the choices these leaders made and learn from what they did, but wholesale attacks on them personally are harmful to our community. It would be devastating to our movement if we lost all of these leaders now. Let's have critical, constructive debate, not divisive attacks.
They're not leaders. They did not lead.
What they did was outsource the ballot question to expensive, Democratic Party, feeding trough consultants with a remarkable ballot question record. But with no professional experience -- or life experience -- with the emotional nuances and moral authority requirements of gay issues, civil rights questions, or the M-word.
Our community leaders therefore needed to actually help. Guide. Lead.
Absent that strong leadership, the outsourced consultants were led by focus groups. It is what political consultants do. And, in this case, as any real gay leader should have told them, it's a deadly bad decision.
Anyone who has even merely come out of the closet to a parent (not that there's anything "mere" about that) knows one thing: You must understand and respect the heart of an undecided person, but never let them determine the level of honesty and forthrightness you use.
Had we actual leaders in California, they would not have allowed the consultants to pursue the kind of focus group-led, closeted, disingenuous campaign they did.
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