Uppity Fag Blog:
EQCA's Passive Aggressive Town Hall
Patrick Connors is a skeptical colleague of mine who blogs at Uppity Fag, where he primarily tracks news accounts of heterosexual people sexually abusing or otherwise mistreating their kids or adult acquaintances, and he also attended Equality California's town hall meeting in San Francisco on Thursday evening.
He didn't come away persuaded that a 2012 Prop 8 repeal ballot initiative was a serious proposal before the community, and he uses the right dose of snark summing up what went down at the meeting.
Memo to EQCA: it behooves you all to start writing reports about each town hall and posting the reports within days after the town hall meeting takes place. It says much about what is wrong with your communication skills that you have not yet issued a briefing back to the community about the May 19 forum. This is the age of quick info, and trust me, gay Californians hunger for fast reports about your town halls.
Here is a long excerpt from Patrick's essay, EQCA's passive aggressive town hall meeting, and I urge you to read the entire piece, especially his end point involving a sleazy used car salesman. Take it away, Patrick:
The evening began with a presentation from Mr. Minter about the Prop 8 trial ... The CA Supreme Court has to chime in about standing. The 9th Circuit court takes over again after that. Decisions can go in any direction and could end up at the US Supreme Court sooner on one matter or later on the big picture which makes everyone shit their pants just a little bit. ...
Mr. Minter didn’t specifically mention this overused phrase, but at the end of his spiel he could have uttered: “I’m just sayin’…” and it would have been fitting.
Next up was David Binder from Binder research with a SURPRISE! He had a slide show to present with results of a telephone survey (that was commissioned by EQCA and others for an undisclosed fee) conducted with 900 Californians between May 10 and 14. ... I can’t exactly regurgitate ANY of the specific findings because the results weren’t made available to the audience in a printed take away format.
The panel was asked if the slide show would ever be accessible and the panelists all took turns looking at each other and belching.
I guess that means the results probably won’t be available. ...
Any questions raised about a campaign to repeal were deferred to the “we’ll have to take that under consideration” file because the matter of campaign strategy hasn’t been addressed. Any opinions raised about the dismal No on 8 campaign that was directed by EQCA in 2008 were politely considered, defensively addressed or more or less ignored.
EQCA wants us to decide if we are interested in participating in a campaign that they won’t tell us anything about. ...
Reports, proud muckraking, photos, videos and musings from the veteran LGBT and AIDS human rights advocate Michael Petrelis. Based in San Francisco since 1995. Contact: MPetrelis_at_AOL_dot_com. Vote Petrelis for BART Board District 9 in November!
Aren't you sweet??!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Michael...oh, and FYI I followed the Town Hall meeting that took place tonight in WeHo via http://www.equalitynetwork.org/
They "live blogged" the meeting that had 150 rsvps and at least 100 people in attendance.
Jim Carroll was there as was Andrea Shorter...but no one else was identified (maybe David Binder too but I don't know for sure).
If I read a summary (Karen Ocamb and Lester Aponte were there too) I'll share it with you.
Thanks again - for hanging out and for the promo!
glad to learn there was live blogging of a well-attended forum. always good to see more communication and especially regarding the EQCA roadshow across the state. i hope lots of folks in LA and other areas take the time to write up their own blog reports.
ReplyDeleteAs I commented here a few weeks ago, the entire EQCA-sponsored "debate" over whether there should be an effort to repeal Prop 8 in 2012 was a sham. In February, EQCA told Matt Baume that a repeal wasn't even on the radar. This is reflected in one of his Feb. video reports on Prop 8.
ReplyDeleteSome 6 weeks later, it announced with some fanfare the need for a conversation to consider whether to repeal. Now, if they were at all serious about this, they would have had to be actively working to get things in place in 2010. They did nothing. They certainly wouldn't be first raising the issue 18 months before the election and only 6 weeks after they had admitted that it wasn't even on the radar.
The whole thing was kabuki theater. One wonders if they raised any money off of the false expectations of a 2012 repeal.
From what I've read about other Town Halls, EQCA was asked about their financial resources and the response was they "have money."
ReplyDeleteThen they whined about having to pay a multi-hundred thousand dollar fine for some breech of campaign laws that was not explained.