It is an interesting experience to be the subject of these slightly bizarre personal attacks by Nicole Murray Ramirez. Is it just me or did that last one seem particularly … frenzied? My essays addressed issues of policy and leadership. I hoped for some articulate rationale for a mayoral endorsement that works against LGBT community interests. What I got was … something different.
Murray Ramirez recently suggested that Harvey Milk would accommodate a Republican Party whose platform calls for severe restrictions on the civil rights of LGBT citizens. That a local LGBT “leader” would promulgate such a position, which is completely inconsistent with the legacy of Harvey Milk, is troubling at a community and municipal level. It defies belief that a member of the Leadership and Advocacy Board of the Harvey Milk Foundation would voice such blatant nonsense.
This is why this discussion matters. The advances made by the American LGBT community happened because we are part of a coalition of “us’s” as Harvey Milk named it. We have a hero, who became a hero because he championed the cause of people who didn’t have a seat at the table of power. That is what he stands for. That is why he is important, not just to LGBT folks but to workers and women and people of color. Not just in San Diego or California, but all across the world.
He is not a symbol, as Murray Ramirez would have you believe, because he was once a closeted gay Republican. He does not inspire millions across the globe because he had a close friend who was a Republican, or because he went along to get along. He is a hero because he stood with the workers and the elderly and the disenfranchised. He is our hero because he gave us hope when we did not have any.
As we enter the Sochi Olympics all eyes are turned to the frightening ramifications of international homophobia. Several articles and documentaries show the connection between the evangelical right wing forces that crafted the Republican Party platform attack on LGBT rights and Russia’s anti-gay legislation and Uganda’s “kill the gays” bill.
One of the groups fighting this international exporting of homophobia by U.S. conservative factions has been the Harvey Milk Foundation. In much of the world the civil rights of LGBT folk is not just a topic for Sunday brunch. It is literally a matter of life and death. For Murray Ramirez to blatantly misrepresent and undermine the Harvey Milk legacy and the international advocacy of the Foundation out of pique at being challenged by a lesbian, or fear of losing relevance or ignorance of what the Republican Party platform actually says, is simply unsupportable.
When put in the context of Russia and Uganda, does it become clearer why it is so important to stop giving the Republican Party’s homophobia a whitewash? When you vote for a Republican you implicitly accept their platform which is patently homophobic and misogynistic. That has consequences. It is well documented that Harvey Milk stood against homophobia and for a coalition of workers, women, neighborhoods and the LGBT community. So does the Democratic Party platform. So does David Alvarez.
Harvey Milk spoke directly and unequivocally about the issues that mattered to him:
“… And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us’s, the us’s will give up. … [The success of the LGBT community] gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.”
This discussion matters because the success of the LGBT community in San Diego places it in a leadership role in the coalition of workers, women, people of color and others who are trying to make San Diego a better place. Harvey Milk’s legacy provides us guidance about the importance of that coalition, both at home and abroad.
To use that legacy, and the successes of the LGBT community, to pull us backwards into governance by and for the entitled and intolerant is unacceptable. No amount of raving, personal vitriol and invective against me will alter that fact.
We can do better.
