Petrelis Files

SF Prop 8 Leaders Holding a Meeting - Virtually

Here another piece of evidence making my argument that key members from San Francisco on the No on 8 executive committee fear contracting cooties from actually meeting in the flesh with the local community at a public forum.

Goof Kors, Kate Kendell and Tawal Panyacosit will be chatting online with Cathy Brooks tomorrow, and I give Cathy half a snap up for organizing and hosting this virtual talk, and posting a great announcement about it, but this virtual town meeting cannot replace the value and benefits that would come if, three months after the election, our local gay leaders came out of their rainbow towers for a series of town halls.

We've had the LA gay center's virtual town hall in December, which featured Kors on the panel, where questions were submitted to journalist Karen Ocamb who read as many of them as she could in the allotted time.

There also was the plenary session at the LA summit in January, which featured Kors on the panel, and Ocamb again served as moderator and read questions submitted on cards.

Now, Cathy is asking people to submit written questions that she'll posed to the three members of the executive committee, and I wonder why these leader are so fearful of being in the same room in San Francisco with the local community asking them questions directly, and not through a computer or moderator or some other filter.

Throw into the mix a blog post yesterday from my friend David Mixner, who says it's time to move beyond the still-resonating calls for accountability meetings with the No on 8 leadership circle. He wrote:

The only disaster would be if these endless conversations on Proposition 8 turned the grassroots off, grounded our vision for the future and diffused our power as a community. It's up to us to not let that happen.

Well, the disaster of turning off the SF grassroots started during the campaign when Kors and Kendell went on TV and proudly said the ads, a huge part of the campaign, weren't designed to win the hearts and minds of gays, and the turnoff continues today because our leaders won't hold public meetings even about our next steps or a regional report back from the LA summit.

Two sets of questions have been posed at Cathy's announcement page, with one really striking at the heart of EQCA's legitimacy and leadership:

1: To what degree do you suppose the current, long-standing disquiet is being fed by the perception that the people of EQCA (who, we were told, ‘did their best’) have resisted accountability for their best not being good enough? That is: had any of you come forward with a sincere, unqualified mea cupla immediately, taken your lumps (even if undeserved) might we have been willing to ‘move forward’ with EQCA?

2: What changes have been made to EQCA, to board membership or to policy? Given the current perception, (that EQCA has neither learned or changed) why should EQCA still be considered a viable organization?

Click here for much more info on Cathy's virtual discussion. She's still asking folks to send in questions, and she promises to aggregate them for a poll after the online gab-fest.

And I again call on Kors, Kendell, and Panyacosit to hold their own series of public discussions in San Francisco.