Speaking as a resident of one of those coastal states that already has an ENDA on the books, I can tell you from personal experience that just because an anti-discrimination law exists it does not automatically follow that the law will be strictly obeyed or that anyone will be held to account if it isn't.

State anti-discrimination laws do make life easier for many LGBT's, but the reality is that just as in the case of racial and ethnic minorities, the basic societal change we seek in the way we are treated by those outside our community will only happen once non-discrimination is the law of the land.

That's a big reason (for me, at least) why we must have an inclusive federal ENDA and why we cannot settle for anything less. State laws are great when they work, but the federal level is where real change begins.

Thanks for this, Bil. You know, I'm actually onboard with the idea of connecting people in local areas to organize together. When I heard that at the NN'09 caucus, that intrigued me greatly, and I asked for more details about it. It's certainly a gap that exists.

A few thoughts:

1. I fail to see how asking people to spend all this time and money to go to (in your words) "a big gay circuit party" will increase that networking. You could say that the march is actually more like a convention where you do that kind of thing. In some ways it is, and in some ways it isn't.

2. You say "All that money spent on marriage in California could have funded a half dozen flyover country state equality orgs for a year or two...". The same could be said for this too, on a smaller scale, right? If you could turn back time and folks weren't forced into the "what's done is done" mindset, and you could choose to not do this, would you?

3. I'm also interested why the arguments you originally made (below) are nullified, or or outweighed by "we have to rescue this thing"/"the path to equality is paved through DC" points. Just looking for honest responses, because I do think they are strong arguments.

Congress isn't in session on October 11th. What's the point of holding the march on a day when none of the participants can lobby the actual folks who can solve our issues?

This is a public relations nightmare for flyover country.

Sucking time, resources and queerpower to work on a do-nothing march on DC is a tactical mistake.

A march on Washington will not bring marriage equality to flyover country. It will help to prod conservatives to rally and focus energy and money into states like Maine (that could repeal marriage) or Indiana (where we've successfully fought off an amendment every year for almost a decade).

My first thought on skimming through this post, Bil, was you can come right on up to Illinois where we have all (including the Ts) have protections other than relationship recognition. And I think that we'll have some form of that within a year or two.

I guess the question is whether a critical mass of sorts has been reached so that federal is, for all intents and purposes, the only game in town.

I do have to admit that I have been...is resentful the right word?...tired? of California's issue regarding the word "marriage" practically taking the time and the money that it has.

Bil - Has there been meetings of activists in Indiana to discuss strategy, shared experiences, shared goals, and needs & concerns?
The central valley, and wilderness areas of California tend to the type of conservatism that you talk about and live with, I know, this is where I was raised. Moving to the San Francisco Bay area in 1965 (I was 16, long story) and finishing high school in 1967 gave me choices that I did not have in my old community.
My activism is a direct result of the claustrophobia, narrow-mindedness, bullying, and assaults that I endured from age 6 to 16. My activism tends to be simpler than our national organizations that often look like white men's social clubs. I wonder how many New York and Washington based organizations have people with farm experience? I know GLAAD has a few, anyone have an answer?
I believe the March on Washington will have positive effects for the participants, I am less convinced that Congress or the President will make any changes in their attitudes about and towards LGBT people. We are(again) going to hear a lot of platitudes from those in power and little action. This is a replay of the joke from the 1950's, "The queer is the homosexual gentleman who left the room."
I agree that the basics covering employment, housing, safety, and health should be addressed first, then marriage. Strong organizations that work to address local concerns are essential for quality of life and cannot be dictated from coastal based groups.
Gay liberationists were against traditional anything, sex, marriage, education, literature, and the idea that LGBT people were going to somehow become like everyone else was not acceptable. Try to find and read,"The Education of Edward the Dyke." for a taste of this belief.
I would be glad to explore this idea of local vs. national further. 34 years of activism has taught me a lot about what works.
Cleve Jones, Cindy Creager at GLAAD, and the Gay History Center in San Francisco can tell you more about me and the work I have done.
Thank you for writing and for exploring difficult questions and ideas about who we are.

Bil, your points on what's amiss in certain regions are well noted. What I fail to see is any concrete explanation of how this march will address these issues.

You keep mentioning the idea behind the march and the message? Who will this message reach? The national protests over Prop. 8 passage, arguably the largest for a long time, only received media attention for, what, 2-3 days? What did it achieve? Nothing.

DADT talks and interviews with heroes like Fehrenbach, constantly covered by CNN and Rachel Maddow; Dan Choi as well. Any action on DADT? Not a single move from Congress, and latest news coming from aides basically confirming to not expect DADT action in the near future.

DADT is easily the most supported issue publicly, followed by ENDA. Hate Crimes closely following. Any action? The Matthew Sheppard bill is stuck in limbo even 10 years after its lobbying.

Not only that, but how many people do you expect to attend? Not that many. You earnestly think this will even get on the radar of the national conscious? No way in hell.

Ultimately, states that you mention will have to receive justice by the federal courts. Congress won't do crap. Just look at how Healthcare, the meat and potatoes issue by which Obama was elected on a landslide, has been turned on its head and derailed by the right-wing.

If Demcrats can't even muster the votes for a basic premise of their party platform, how the fuck are they going to pass LGBT bills?

And are you sure even ENDA will help? I'm back in Florida, and all the employment protections in the world will do crap to shield you from an easy "cutting costs in a recession" disguise for prejudiced firing. ENDA will do very little to deter your everyday job loss over discrimination, since discrimination is so difficult to prove in a lawsuit.

Gay activists and the mainstream media paint a rose-tinted prospect on the advances of the gay rights movement. Load of crap. This country will take at least 2 more decades before we start seeing any real movement on the nation as a whole.

Texas has the protections for hate crimes and all, but when even the cops don't pay attention then what can you do? The same for here in Austin, I was protected from employment discrimination, but they can always find a reason to hire the "other guy".

Things aren't going to change until the fundies lose their power to poison peoples mind, and when my generation and those before it are in the ground.

Sorry, but that is the facts of it.

And don't get me started on HRC, buncha token gays for big biz/gov to be able to point at and tell us how they got them some gay 'friends'.

Just go away Joe, I ain't buying.

Re activist groups who don't agree with one another on how to proceed: it's very PC and idealistic of us to expect that each group should consult "the people most affected" before they make their own move. It almost borders on expecting that each group should ask permission of everybody else. We started hearing this expectation voice during the Prop 8 campaign, when there was disagreement on how to fight it.

But typically, in political disagreements, nobody ever does that. Mainstream example: the Democrats on health reform. Did the Blue Dogs consult with the rest of the party before veering off to do their anti-Obama thing? No. Did they consult with any of the Americans who voted Obama into office in hopes that he would do sweeping reform? No.

And I doubt that the Tea-Baggers consulted with Republicans who feel revulsion at the extremism and violence of this movement.

People who disagree usually think they're right, so the last thing they'd do is consult with anybody who might tell them that they're pushing their activism in the wrong direction.

I have a historical clarification to make, and I'd like to point out a possible strategy that Indiana has overlooked.

The last positive thing to happen in Indiana was the overturn of the sodomy laws.

The sodomy laws in Indiana were not "overturned" --- they were rescinded by the state legislature in 1971, in a sweeping updating of the state penal code that brought it much into line with the Model Penal Code drawn up by the American Law Institute in 1962. When the Lawrence v. Texas decision was issued by the US Supreme Court in 2003, it did not affect the situation in Indiana in any way that I am aware of.

Bil, when you tell the story about going to the police after your gang-rape attack, the details don't all compute, even though the terrible police treatment does. Did your attack take place in Indiana? Your narrative leads us to believe that it did, yet I doubt that you are old enough for this to have happened before 1971 (unless you were a child, and the police allegation that you were "a gay man and probably wanted it" does not indicate child abuse was an issue). If the policemen you speak of were Indiana officers, then their malfeasance is even more egregious, because probably there was no sodomy law for them to charge you under, and they were just bluffing you to frighten and discourage you, and to get rid of you that much quicker.

We have no hate crimes protections ... While state law requires police agencies to monitor and report cases that "could be" hate crimes (to see if we need a hate crimes law, of course!), but rarely do. Indianapolis, for example, reported a big fat zero for years until we made a huge stink about it on Bilerico-Indiana and other local blogs.

This is correct. Briefly, Indiana has a Hate Crimes Reporting Act which requires, rather ambiguously, that "bias incidents" be tallied by local law enforcement agencies and reported to the state. At first, the Indiana Human Rights Commission supposedly accumulated this data, but later this function was moved to the Indiana State Police --- who now, if you can get any statement out of them at all, mostly claim that the incidents reported are so rare there is no point in keeping count of them. Of course, this is not because such incidents do not occur, but because they do not get reported to the ISP.

In contrast, the Bloomington Human Rights Commission, under the outstanding staff leadership of attorney Barbara McKinney, keeps such records in apple-pie order for that city, as required by the Bloomington Human Rights Ordinance. That small city alone tallies scores of bias incidents every year, showing that the dearth of information re the rest of the state is because of non-compliance with the state reporting law and non-reporting of the incidents. [Read their lastest yearly report here.] (I can only assume that Bloomington reports its incidents to the ISP, where the data unceremoniously falls into some bit-bucket that leads to cyber-oblivion.)

The strategy that we have missed here in Indiana is that, if we wish to walk an extra mile to get hate crime protection here in this state, we might bring suit against the Governor, the Indiana State Police, and every county sheriff in the state, suing them to follow the existing Indiana Hate Crimes Reporting Act.

Before we do this, though, a consensus of attorneys would need to verify that the current law is ironclad enough that suit can be brought with any hope of a meaningful outcome. For example, if the law states that data collection and reporting to the ISP is optional and not mandatory, then we are dead in the water.

It is clear that the legislature might be hesitant to pass an actual hate crime law, if the legislation we already have in this area is routinely ignored and considered meaningless. Moreover, it is more difficult for us to lobby that a hate crimes law is needed in the absence of data showing that hate crimes do occur frequently within the state --- but the absence of such data is due to the non-feasance of the state itself.

I hasten to point out that, if this were done, it does not need to be a purely LGBT effort. There is a possibility that orgs that represent other minority groups, such as the state chapters of the ACLU, NAACP, NOW and similar groups, state inter-faith councils (if we find any), immigrant protection groups, and others might be willing to join us in presenting the suit.

Such an approach is high risk --- it could be expensive, and it could result in the existing law being meaningfully implemented, or it could result in the existing reporting law being rescinded by the legislature. And it is one of those things that, if the citizens concerned, whether LGBT and non-LGBT, are off doing other things, then it will never get done.

Allen, I believe the effective date of Indiana's repeal of sodomy laws was November 1, 1977, not 1971. As you stated, it was part of a general adoption of the Model Penal Code, and as I recall a lot of fundies were furious that it got by them. Had it been a separate bill simply dealing with sodomy, the prohibition might have stayed in place until the Wright vs. Texas decision.