If the folks at Equality California were committed to democratic engagement with the grassroots and holding regular public forums in San Francisco where breakthrough conversations were taking place, I'd ask the executives about their still-active political action committee to win back gay marriage rights.
After breaking a promise to announce their decision by the end of September, EQCA yesterday said they would not be heading up a ballot repeal effort next year to reverse Prop 8, and they made a new promise to the community. Actually, it's the same damn thing they've been saying since they led us to the Prop 8 defeat nearly three years ago.
EQCA says every gay needs to talk to our neighbors and friends about our lives, as if we are not already doing that, and they will develop winning talking points for us to mouth to our social networks.
Are the LGBT people of California so pathetic we really need a multimillion dollar organization to assume we're all meek creatures not already engaged in such chats, or that we're saying the wrong things, and we need their alleged cutting-edge research to help us communicate with the world?
EQCA's opting out of mounting a 2012 repeal is an excellent decision, but the drawn out, slipshod and less-than-transparent approach they employed to arrive at the obvious decision revealed a Keystone Kops element that further undermined activist faith in the group.
The California Secretary of State's web site reports the EQCA Issues PAC is currently active and has a nice chunk of change sitting in the bank. This PAC, as the screen capture clearly shows, was tasked with holding the money for ballot proposition to restore gay marriage via the voting booth. Click to enlarge both images.
I'd like to hear from EQCA about the reasons why the PAC has gone through a number of names, just so I have a clear understanding of evolving purposes of the committee. Let's look at its most current activity report with basic financial numbers:
This EQCA gay marriage PAC has $469,030 in the bank, spent $33,622 and received no contributions for the first six-months of 2011.
Now that EQCA has no repeal effort to organize, what will they do with all that money and if donors asked for refunds, would the lobbying organization give folks their money back?
We LGBT people of this great state deserve a statewide advocacy group that consistently holds breakthrough conversations with ordinary folks, where we can ask about this PAC and lots of other important concerns.
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