the night that dykes & fags shut down broadway

now we know the answer to what all us obamaniacs can to do with all that leftover activist energy now that the election is successfully past: organize for gay civil rights. and boy, i think many mormons are going to regret supporting this misguided attempt at repression, no matter what their leaders preached in church.

if you are familiar with new york city, you can imagine how much mayhem shutting down broadway from 65th street to columbus circle DURING RUSH HOUR would create. it was a peaceful, but not at all a quiet, protest:

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proposition 8 has just ensured that full and complete civil rights for gay americans is the new social justice movement. about time. funny how things backfire. like george bush. if he wasn’t such a terrible president, we might never have gotten obama. in the same way, p8 passage backlash is almost certain to assure, sooner or later, that a constitutional amendment — federal, not state — guaranteeing complete equality for gays is on its way.

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i’ve been to my share of protests over the years, but i can’t remember one where so many signs had the word “Love” in them, and where people were totally focused and energized without being furious. the gay community, uprisen, is a formidable force indeed.

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couples who married in california are now in a state of legal limbo, as the proposition didn’t make provisions for what would happen to the 18,000 gay marriages already performed in california.

i suppose they could all move to connecticut and get remarried. over there, they could care less about whether or not the gays are getting hitched.

this is the first time that a law has even been introduced, let alone passed, wherein the sole intention is to take away rights that people already have. it boggles the mind that this even made it to the ballot. i guess we were all so busy frettin’ over the election that it just didn’t get enough attention.

the attention it’s getting now will more than make up for that, as progressives — gay and straight — unite to fight for the emancipation of disenfranchised californians. the first massive, nationwide protest (which some are already calling Stonewall II) is scheduled for this coming saturday.

visit join the impact to locate protests scheduled in your area. subscribe to their RSS feed to stay updated on the fight. it may take awhile, but this is one that we ARE going to win. it’s only a question of when. the gauntlet has been thrown down and the community has accepted it.

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let me take a moment to commend the NYPD for their restraint, if not their outright support, of last night’s protest. i didn’t see or hear of a single incident between marchers and police. for that matter, i hardly saw a cop at all until 8pm, which was apparently the previously agreed-upon ending time for this action. the organizers, one of whom had a megaphone, really did a good job of focusing the energy and bringing it down naturally, after a few thousand of us arrived at the columbus circle endpoint. it wasn’t as if we were being told that it was over when some officers started gently herding us toward the sidewalk; it was more like an acknowledgment of an ending that was already well in progress.

 

but we couldn’t leave without a little dancing:

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