Comments on: SLDN to Obama: ban LGBT military bias with Executive Order http://www.washingtonblade.com/2011/07/26/sldn-to-obama-ban-lgbt-military-bias-with-executive-order/ the gay community's news source Sun, 19 May 2013 04:30:32 +0000 hourly 1 By: rob http://www.washingtonblade.com/2011/07/26/sldn-to-obama-ban-lgbt-military-bias-with-executive-order/#comment-26872 rob Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:56:17 +0000 http://www.washingtonblade.com/?p=26769#comment-26872 Following the DADT story has been bizarre – it just gets more bizarre each week

]]> By: Michael Bedwell http://www.washingtonblade.com/2011/07/26/sldn-to-obama-ban-lgbt-military-bias-with-executive-order/#comment-26801 Michael Bedwell Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:58:24 +0000 http://www.washingtonblade.com/?p=26769#comment-26801 With this pathetic petition, SLDN is only demonstrating the proverbial definition of “insanity”—repeating what has failed before. HOW does it make HONORABLE sense to simply resend the request Obama’s ignored since February while the concrete hardened on the Pentagon’s INTENTION to permit such discrimination they made obvious in the Pentagon Working Group Report released last November? And he will ignore this limp-wristed hanky waving no less.

In the absence of anything of substance, this will be lost in the avalanche of petitions every White House gets every day—to which this President has proven repeatedly indifferent. [And they don't even mention the fact that HE is also letting the Pentagon get away with denying important partner benefits to gay troops that even the DoD admits are NOT banned by DOMA.]

Abolitionists didn’t just “urge” Lincoln to end slavery. Suffragettes didn’t just “urge” Wilson to support their right to vote. Rosa Parks didn’t just “urge” Montgomery to let her sit at the front of the bus. Martin Luther King, Jr., didn’t just “urge” Bull Connor to stop attacking demonstrators with police dogs or President Kennedy to introduce a civil rights bill. David Mixner, et al., did not just “urge” President Johnson to stop the Vietnam War. Leonard Matlovich did not just “urge” the Air Force to stop discharging gays or President Reagan to finally adequately fund a fight against AIDS. Dan Choi, Jim Pieterangelo, Miriam Ben-Shalom, Evelyn Thomas, GetEQUAL, et al., didn’t just “urge” Obama to end DADT.

Couldn’t they at least hold a press conference in front of the White House alerting someone other than members of the gay choir that there even IS such an issue? How about a full-page ad in the “Washington Post” How about some guts?

I URGE them to get off their stomachs! And gay media to stop perceiving and promoting them as anything more that the political posers they are.

“It was the groups that would not take no for an answer. GetEQUAL, the 9/11 Healthcare…the first responders—who came here, who demonstrated, who chained themselves to the White House, who followed the President around and heckled him—absolutely would not take no for an answer—got their issues addressed. The people who were absolutely unrelenting, who didn’t try to play an inside game. It was the outside game that won this time.” – Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake, on the Lawrence O’Donnell show, “The Last Word,” Dec. 22, 2010.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” – Former slave & abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

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