Do you have a minute for equality?

Dear HRC,

No, I don’t have a minute for gay rights. I don’t even have a minute for lesbian rights which is a tad ironic on its face. I might have a minute for transgendered rights but only if I don’t stop to think about it (after all, the gender discrimination that transfolk face is the primary color to the pastel that any lesbian or gay man who doesn’t meet heteronormative gender expectations in public or in the workplace is often subjected to; trust me, I know). I would have a minute for civil rights or equal rights, but how would you ever know?

Your representatives, those scrubbed, shiny people you station on the street in those lovely navy blue t-shirts stenciled with your name and the equals sign never ask about those. No, those aren’t attention getting enough. They “don’t have time to educate people” that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people don’t want anything special yet they, and by extension you, don’t see how damaging the phrase “gay rights” is and how useful a tool it is for those opposed to equal protections under the law for everyone in every aspect of life. And don’t try to tell me that argument is past its pull-date, because it’s not.

You act as if you are the thought leaders in the lgbt community, as if you represent all of us out here, outside your big building in Washington DC. Yet, search as I might, I can find no mechanism for the average person, or even the average donor, to influence the direction of your programs. Your Contact Us form is a model of generic passivity.

Even if I wanted to talk to you about how badly you’ve bungled the “marriage equality” fight by sadly insisting on prizing assimilation through the use of the word marriage while you’ve ignored all chances to actually achieve equality under the law for legally bound couples, I couldn’t.

Even if I wanted to tell you that if by some miracle you succeed in getting that equality while calling it marriage that still doesn’t protect us out here from being fired from our jobs or being denied housing because we are, or are perceived as, different, I couldn’t.

No, your national board members guide the state-based steering committees quite likely as agents of policy and direction on which the decisions have long been made. There is no way to tell you these things or to even get any explanation on why you insist on proceeding the way you do.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I generally support the ideals that you say the phrase “gay rights” represents.

No one should lose custody of their child because she’s dating another woman.

No one should lose out on the sublime pleasure of expanding a child’s world through knowledge of math, science, literature, and all the other things we learn in school simply because he lives with and loves another man.

No one should be denied housing or access to public accommodations because her biology at birth didn’t match who she felt she really was.

And no one should be denied the measly comfort of holding his beloved’s hand at the time of death simply because they both have the same letter by the sex descriptor on their government issued identification.

If these are the things you stand for then yes, I support you, but I can not support the way in which you choose to pursue them. It’s exclusionary and it’s making the goals that we both so want unnecessarily difficult to achieve. But, again, I have no way of telling you these things because you will not, as represented by your front-line, by your street canvassers, let go of what is “easy” and what “pops.”

So instead I write to remind you of your very name: the Human Rights Campaign. I know that presents a communications problem itself; after all, Amnesty and other larger groups have so branded the phrase “human rights” in the American mind that most people likely think of refugee camps, physical torture, and forced sex slavery when they hear that phrase. Still, your name is not the Gay Rights Campaign. But rather than just criticize, which is so easy and often brings such a wonderful boost of pleasing chemicals to the brain, I’d like to offer a potential solution.

Look at your own visual branding. Take your queue from the mathematical symbol you’ve put to service as a political message. It’s simple, it’s elegant, and it says everything that needs to be said.

Yes, I have time for equality, but until you stop implying that we want something more than what everyone else has, how will you ever know if the rest of the country does too?