Setbacks and momentum

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time.We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. " -President Barack Obama

An Open Letter to the Membership (Homosexual Agenda, US Division):

We did not declare the “culture war.” We did not fire its first shots, nor did we ask for a war at all. But fuck if we aren’t going to win it!  Yesterday’s setback with the Maine gay marriage referendum is heartbreaking, but it is just one setback in a long-running war, declared on us by the wingnuts, that we are, in fact, winning year by year, slowly but certainly.

Consider these facts: Forty years ago, we were hardly on the map. We were the most reviled minority imaginable. Even otherwise reasonable people hated and feared us and used us scapegoats for every evil. While it’s true that far too large a percentage of our Membership still lives in fear of exposure and persecution, great gains have been made in many areas of our culture and many regions of thus country. The insinuation of our values into the larger society (as per the Articles of the Agenda) has been so successful as to doom inevitably the evil dreams of our enemies. Popular culture in the form of TV, movies, music and the online media is neither going away nor becoming more homophobic. Indeed, it has become entirely rude and unacceptable to act that way outside the rightwing mediasphere. They call it “political correctness.” I call it common civility. When they rail against our elitist “Hollywood” culture, what do they think the result will be?  Do they honestly believe that TV shows will start to ban gay characters? Do they think that Fine Living Network and HGTV and Bravo will simply go out of business? Do they picture a year when movies will preach homophobia and Nazism and then be feted at the Oscars for it? Do they really believe that the whole population will swear off secular music, books and visual art?  Do they dream of a homo-free internet? Do they expect everyone to adopt mall hair and prairie dresses? Also, aside from our inextricable presence in every nook and cranny of the mass culture, we have actually gained some real civil rights in the US, little by little. It’s been a two-steps-forward/one-step-back kind of progress, for sure, but the momentum is clear. Forty years ago, we had nothing. Now we have legal gay marriage in several US states despite our recent defeats in California and Maine, and that’s not going to change. We have employment discrimination protection in some of the states (and soon federally). They will not roll back these gains everywhere no matter how hard they try and no matter how hard they work on having excessive numbers of straight Christian babies (a fool's strategy if ever there was one! They're just creating more "recruits" for us!).

Which brings me to my main point: the trend of history and the default mode of reality is liberalism. When people wanted to end the atrocity of human slavery in America, conservatives freaked out and declared it would end the world. But slavery was ended and it was not reinstated and the world did not end. When women demanded the overthrow of the preposterous idea that they were not qualified to vote in elections, conservatives recoiled and warned that the sky would fall. Women gained the right to vote, and some real knuckle-draggers tried and failed to roll back that progress.  Women will never lose the right to vote. When tee-totaling religious nuts and other self-righteous moralizers decided that no one should be able to have a drink, they succeeded for a while. But Prohibition was a disaster, was repealed, and has no chance at all of returning. When sensible people realized that slavery hadn’t been sufficiently eradicated from our society, the great civil rights actions by the government and the courts and the people achieved new legal protections for racial minorities. The many attempts to turn back the clock on these advances have largely failed.  Abortion was legalized, and though the right to choose has been subjected to constant attack and erosion, the people will not tolerate the complete elimination of that right ever again. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court upheld sodomy laws, continuing the criminalization of our sexual orientation. But in 2003, an even more conservative Supreme Court overturned that precedent and it finally became legal in all fifty states to be gay. Over a decade ago, Matthew Shepard was murdered and the enemies of our people spent every minute of every day of that decade blaming him for it and celebrating the death of a faggot. Last week President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard Act, a far more devastating blow to our opponents in the long run than the one they inflicted on us in Maine last night.

The direction is clear: we will win. We will still have to fight a lot more battles in the years to come, but the gains we have made in the victories we have won will not be taken away. We will lose sometimes, but we will win a lot more often. It is the unstoppable momentum of progress, the undeniable validation of reason and justice. Bit by bit, the enemy will be worn down, taken apart, stomped on, destroyed. By declaring open war on us, they have done far more harm to themselves than to us. They’ve hastened their own end by decades. Sane people see through it. They see what hate looks like when they see images of people cheering because we can’t marry the person we love, and it disgusts them.


(note the religious rapture that hurting us seems to induce in them)

Occasionally I hear murmuring of accommodation among the Membership. Some people may think it just as well to adopt an attitude of live-and-let-live. I’d remind everyone once again that we did not start this war. We would have been fine with a live-and-let-live approach. Indeed that’s what we wanted all along. But they wanted a culture war. Well, they got their fucking war and they are losing it despite what happened yesterday. I say we press onward to final victory.

Long Live the Agenda!

Christopher Fletcher
Cell Commander