Roots of Equality

Today we went to the Equality Summit at the LA Convention Center hosted by EQCA.
The meeting started with a room full of hundreds of highly energized leaders which was exciting to see. This movement is not going anywhere with this type of talented energy behind it.

The agenda started with an election summary going over what happened in the No on 8 campaign. The panel included Geoff Kors and Lorri Jean who both went through the dry nuts and bolts timeline of events leading up to the election. Booooring.

There was interesting data presented by David Binder who did a post election voter survey. What I got out of it was that people basically voted against us because of their religious beliefs, people were much less likely to vote for 8 if they had a gay person in their lives talk to them about it, and that phone banking didn’t work (duh).

The party really got started when they collected a pile of questions for the panel. The discussion quickly degraded into a lynch mob who wanted the heads of Kors and Jean while the latter kept blaming the hired political consultants without taking a lot of responsibility for the oversight of those consultants.

The keynote Eva Paterson was spectacular and reminded us not to create a “circular firing squad.” She reminded us we’re all on the same side though personally I’m still waiting for some modicum of accountability on the part of the leadership.

The rest of the day consisted of break out sessions that accomplished pretty much nothing (at least the ones I was involved in) and involved just a rehashing of the usual broad ideas ie. We need to reach out to people of color. At least we met some pretty cool people. Another highlight was the surprise arrival of Antonio Villaraigosa.

In summary, this summit was EQCA’s way of reaching out to grassroots and non-”establishment” people in the movement. It also served to bring people in the movement together in the largest forum yet post-prop 8. Whether it was just a gesture of appeasement to the angry masses or a real effort to take our input and resources seriously is yet to be seen.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.