Petrelis Files

Cleve's March Gets Pass from GetEQUAL;
435 Congressional District Teams?

Last summer and fall, Robin McGehee and Kip Williams were leaders with Cleve Jones in organizing a gay march on Washington. One of the many grand, and broken, promises they made to the community included a supposedly already-existing network of activists, numbering in the hundreds.

A release from march leaders, made the following claim:

"Equality Across America (EAA) is a network of decentralized organizers in every one of the 435 Congressional districts. These organizers form Congressional District Action Teams (CDATs) that work within their own communities to achieve full equality for LGBT Americans and their families. [...] The event will be held Saturday, October 10, and Sunday, October 11, 2009 in Washington, D.C. Each EAA Congressional District Action Team will mobilize its community to attend the event."

After the march, the Bay Area Reporter wrote about how those teams weren't exactly coming together:

From the beginning, Jones insisted that the event would be a scaled down affair, with the only goal of the march being full federal equality and that the way to best achieve that would be to establish action teams in all 435 congressional districts across the country.

It remains to be seen exactly how many of those teams have been formed. Jones said Tuesday that he thinks groups have formed in some 200 districts. "But that's kind of fuzzy," he added.

Unfortunately, those teams never materialized, but a few months after the big promise of the Congressional district organizers was made, McGehee and Williams, along with others, started GetEQUAL, at an invitation-only retreat in February. Too bad they and Jones didn't deliver those promised teams.

Today, GetEQUAL released pretty good vid, visually and politically speaking, but with the most annoying and distracting music-track, looking at historical promised made to the gays by the likes of Pelosi, Senator Harry Reid, Congressman Barny Frank, and Human Rights Campaign leader Joe Solmonese. Check it out:




I have no problem attacking Democratic Party leaders for their failures to deliver change to the gay community, but GetEQUAL is too restrictive in who they single out for criticism.

Why no footage of Republicans and their trashing of us and our plight? Would it kill GetEQUAL to spread the blame and criticism to both parties? How about also providing us with answers about the broken promise of the Congressional district action teams? They might have helped prevent our losses this year.

That extremely narrow focused vid isn't even the tip of the iceberg of truth about all the guilty parties, political and within the community.

Here's a notion: GetEQUAL starts to apply equal criticism toward Democrats, Republicans and the leaders of last year's march on Washington.