200,000 march on Washington for equal rights for LGBT people

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On Oct. 11, as many as 200,000 LGBT activists and straight allies descended on Washington, D.C., for the National Equality March (NEM), whose single demand on the federal government was “Equal protection for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states! Now!”

March participants and observers were inspired by the political potential embodied in the huge mobilization. It included a high percentage of newly radicalized young people, who created a sea of rainbow flags that could not be ignored. However, out Congressman Barney Frank drew ire from the LGBT community and others for his attempt to downplay the march’s significance. He had said that the only impression the march might leave behind would be upon the grass beneath the marcher’s feet.

Organizing for the weekend-long event was done primarily via the internet—the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, the NEM website, text messages, etc., and with no centralized office or staff. Equality Across America (EAA) orchestrated the event on a “shoe-string” budget of $250,000, a fraction of what previous Equality marches had spent.

EAA is led by Democratic Party member David Mixner, gay liberals like Cleve Jones, and a more youthful layer, including Kip Williams of One Struggle One Fight. There were no corporate sponsors. According to The Nation, Williams said, “Every penny … came from individual donors who believe in us.” No funding was received from national LGBT organizations: “They didn’t offer, and we didn’t ask.”

Prior to the march, on Oct. 9, President Obama addressed an exclusive $250-per-head, black-tie event organized by the nation’s largest and best funded LGBT lobby, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). As the keynote speaker, Obama promised to end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), which since it was enacted 16 years ago has resulted in the forced dismal of over 13,000 gay and lesbian members of the Armed Services. His remarks were often met with wild applause. But many leaders and activists in the LGBT movement considered his speech similar to those he had given on the campaign trail—eloquent rhetoric with little substance. Obama offered no concrete proposal for ending the homophobic legislation.

With a decision pending to expand troop levels and to send between 40,000 and 80,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, and with the situation in Iraq continuing to deteriorate, it seems that the administration is testing the waters in order to discern what kind of response it might expect from the Pentagon and Congress regarding the viability of ending DADT.

A protest was organized outside the HRC event, and although the crowd was small, the mood on the street was defiant, with demands to end not only DADT but also the Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA), and for the passage of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The former effectively bars same-sex married couples from receiving nearly 1300 federal benefits that heterosexual couples already enjoy and also nullifies their marriages should a legally married same-sex major push nationally is to organize teams throughout all 435 congressional districts to “pressure” representatives and to campaign for candidates who are “friendly” to LGBT issues.

The sum total of this political strategy entirely ignores the potential independent strength of 200,000 who marched in Washington and the 8.8 million LGBT people in the United States. The challenge for the movement is to create an alternate political pole, to build a force that is independent of both the Democrats and Republicans, who have proven time and again that, as a whole, they are the political defenders of a system that treats LGBT people as second-class citizens (see the October SA for more on the Democrats and Obama). Viewed in this light, it is this type of strategy that earned the Democratic Party leadership the title of the “graveyard of social movements.”

Of course, with so many newly radicalized people in motion around LGBT issues, there is an opportunity for radicals to begin a discussion about why it is so important to build an independent movement for LGBT equality, and to win a layer to an anti-capitalist viewpoint based on the idea that equality can be guaranteed only when the capitalist system, which falls back on homophobia as part of its larger divide-andconquer strategy, is replaced by an egalitarian socialist society. n