Wayne
Besen is a nationally recognized advocate
for gay and lesbian rights. A former staffmember
of the Human Rights
Campaign, Besen is the author of Anything
but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies
Behind the Ex-Gay Myth
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It
is the 21st Century and the cover of Time Magazine has
pictures of a chimpanzee and God under the bold headline,
"Evolution Wars". I turn on the television and a non-descript
talking head is promoting the bizarre idea that tax
cuts for the rich lead to increased tax revenue. I flip
the channel and an effeminate man is lisping about how
he prayed away the gay.
How did such weird and scientifically bankrupt ideas
find their way into mainstream culture?
The answer is at once simple and scary. GLBT and progressive
organizations have long been outmatched, outworked
and most importantly outfunded by the far right. For
the past four decades, conservatives have plotted
to remake America in their image by forming crackpot
think tanks, biased media outlets and faux research
groups designed to ape respectable mainstream institutions.
They have largely been successful and as a result,
dominate the national debate and control Capitol Hill.
Fortunately, this dominance may be ending, as progressives
finally get angry enough to act, and serious enough
to organize. The Washington Post reported on Sunday
that 80 wealthy liberal donors have pledged to give
at least $2 million each to a new group, the Democracy
Alliance, which will fund an array of advocacy groups
and think tanks to promote progressive ideas and combat
conservative propaganda. The group has a goal of raising
at least $200 million.
"To
be effective in the 21st century in promoting your
beliefs, it is necessary to have a financially secure
institutional infrastructure that has the capacity
to promote consistently and coherently a set of ideas,
policies and messages," Rob Stein, a Democratic
strategist who created the Alliance, told The Washington
Post. "We understand that it is very hard to
promote a belief system and to be operationally high
performing if you don't have multi-year funding."
The new group certainly has a major challenge ahead
of it. In 2003, Stein told The Post, 19 progressive
organizations with budgets surpassing $2 million spent
a total of $75 million. In contrast, the 24 national
think tanks on the right had $270 million in spending,
along with state-based policy centers' $50 million
and campus-based conservative policy groups' $75 million
to $200 million.
IIt is hard to believe, but there is a huge $295
million to $75 million funding imbalance favoring
the right. This means that when we engage in political
crossfire, to use the popular CNN metaphor, progressives
are shooting with BB guns and conservatives are blasting
us with bazookas. We are not poor people, so there
is no excuse for this.
It is about time that good Americans stand up and
combat the dangerous and kooky ideas of the far right.
The reason we are now in a political pickle is that
we have taken the dumbest route possible: The High
Road.
For years, we have patted ourselves on the back,
stuck our noses in the air and laughed off surreal
right wing ideas.
"No
one is going to actually believe that global warming
isn't real," we scoff, as we wave a dismissive
hand.
"The
evolution battle was definitively settled at the Scopes
trial in 1925," liberals confidently assert.
"No
one really thinks homosexuality is a casual choice,
like choosing between hair gel or mousse," we self-assuredly
cackle, as out leaders glide past "fly-over" country.
If you haven't noticed, we are out of power. We can
no longer afford to dismiss the right and refuse to
debate by arrogantly saying that we "don't want
to dignify" the idiocy of their ideas. In the
effort not to dignify, we allow our opponents to glorify
the inane. When we don't competitively offer a dialogue,
it becomes a right wing monologue. Until Air America,
for example, Rush Limbaugh freely spoke into the void
created by our silence.
The high road is quaint, but it is not the road to
victory. This, of course, does not mean we lower our
ethical or moral standards, it simply implies that
we vigorously engage and confront the right by knocking
down each and every dirty lie and myth, while proudly
putting forth coherent policies that make sense to
the American people. It is time we meet the right
on the low road they prefer to travel on and defeat
them at their own gritty game.
Thanks to the Democracy Alliance, the gay movement
is on the verge of getting a much-needed boost, albeit
this assistance only deals peripherally with gay rights.
But, the Alliance is crucial because at the heart
of the anti-gay industry are phony think tanks that
hoodwink people into believing that their prejudice
is grounded in science. Just look at the names of
our opponents and this will become self-evident: The
Family Research Council, The Family Research Institute,
The Culture and Family Institute.
The strategy of conservatives, particularly on gay rights,
has been to create confusion and throw enough pseudo-scientific
dung against the wall in hopes that some of it will
stick. Well, without proper funding on our side, a lot
of it has stuck, and now we live in a stinking political
outhouse. This new effort to dismantle the Neo-Puritan
propaganda machine is a godsend for the GLBT community
and essential for winning a culture war where we have
been badly outmaneuvered. It is finally time to put
away our slingshots and bring out the big guns.
