Good thoughts, Marc. I’ve never mentioned that I very much enjoy seeing your perspective – we seem to agree on a lot, but to come at it from such different angles, that you nearly always give me a fresh viewpoint on what’s being said. That’s very helpful to me, and I’ve never acknowledged it to you, so I’m taking this chance to say it on open board.
Paddy, what I got out of Frank’s website is that he sincerely tries to be both the representative of the people of the district that elected him and a voice for GLBT folks nationally – and that therefore he and his staff will deal by e-mail only with the folks he represents (and presumably those he and his staff initiate contact with). He wants stuff from the rest of the country in hard-copy correspondence (and presumably will answer them) to avoid overworking his staff with e-mails on the issues of several million gay people, many of them activists who correspond with legislators regularly. for whom he’s the only veteran, leadership-role voice in Congress.
That was the same sense I got from his website too, Poly. I’ll see if my mother can’t drop off a letter (the copies of the post that I sent to various people/organizations had intros to them to make it seem like I wasn’t just doing a mass email.) later next month, or I’ll do it next time I’m back near DC.
BTW, since you brought up Dr. King and his legacy in a gay context, Donna Payne, black organizer for HRC, wrote an excellent op-ed piece on the connection between the racial civil rights movement and the gay human rights movement that’s worth reading in the Advocate.
I’m resurrecting this thread, which has been moribund, in order to post a link to a story in this week’s Advocate about a program for GBLT youth in Connecticut, for the benefit of those who have expressed interest in working on similar programs.
Andygirl, if you should find time, you might summarize what the group you’re working with does, and perhaps assess how well it functions, and what might make it work better (Dopers are good at coming up with resources to help things they support).