As reported in the New York Times, thousands attended the "Rally for Women's Lives" near the Capitol on April 9 to protest violence against women, "a term they applied not only to rape and battering but also to political assaults on welfare spending, abortion and affirmative action."
The five-hour rally was organized by NOW and endorsed by more than 700 groups, including labor unions, environmentalists, and groups advocating on behalf of abortion rights, civil rights, disability rights, gay rights, victims rights and welfare rights
In speech after speech equating physical attacks with "political violence," the 50,000-plus demonstrators were admonished to oppose proposals to reform welfare and curtail affirmative action programs. "Be it personal terror or political terror, it has just one purpose -- control," exclaimed Feminist Majority president Eleanor Smeal.
All this sounds wearily familiar to those of us who have slugged through recent "lesbian, gay, bi and transgendered" rights marches. Here's the formula: take a basically sound goal -- either equality for gay and lesbian citizens or ending violence against women -- then lump in every item of the far left's political and social agenda, and accuse anyone who declines to support the "united front" of being a reactionary bigot.
That's essentially what happened to the Log Cabin Club in Washington, D.C. As reported by Darice Clark in the Washington Blade (April 7), the rally was organized "in the spirit of multiculturalism and coalition building," and as a protest against the "war" on poor women and the Republican Congress's Contract with America (the Contract on America in leftspeak).
The Blade story notes that "most gay organizations agreed to endorse the rally" with the exception of the Capital Area Log Cabin Club, the local organization of gay Republicans.
"We take very seriously the need to work to combat violence against vulnerable and targeted populations, including women and gays," Carl Schmid of the Log Cabin Club wrote to NOW. "We are quite willing to endorse and cosponsor nonpartisan efforts toward this end....However, the actions you ask us to endorse are not nonpartisan."
But Marquita Sykes, a lesbian activist at NOW, replied to the Blade that "my personal opinion is that if the main focus is violence against women...by not endorsing, you don't support the main issue."
Baloney. Gay and feminist activists on the political left have done all they can to exclude libertarian and moderatetoconservative gays and women from their respective movements. It's ludicrous to expect a gay GOP club and other gay organizations not on the left to support a broadbased agenda defending race and genderbased preferences and maintenance of a failed welfare system that, in their opinion, has turned our inner cities into a wasteland terrorized by fatherless boys -- a culture of dysfunction supported at taxpayers' expense.
The libertarian group Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL), while deploring violence against women, also refused to endorse the rally because (as its president explained in a letter to the Blade) the event was "designed to support a tired rendition of all the leftliberal welfare statist nostrums that the American people rightly reject."
Nevertheless, NOW's National Action Vice President Rosemary Dempsey, a lesbian activist, defended the "grand alliance of the left" approach, telling the Blade that "attacks" from the Republican Congress "are based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and class and we just can't have that."
If Ms. Dempsey and her compatriots wish to advocate on behalf of a welfare statist political agenda of ever bigger government engaged in increasingly more intrusive social engineering, aimed at eliminating individual initiative and obscuring the relationship between work and reward, that's their business. But she ought not to expect the over onethird of selfidentified gay voters who chose Republican congressional candidates in the last election to follow suit. And what arrogance to imply that they're racist, sexist, and homophobic for failing to do so!