One thing that's become increasingly clear to me over the last four years in politics is that on the progressive side, we're really all in this together. We either hang together, or hang separately. To be more granular, Howard Dean does not exist without the gay community. Howard Dean's first slug of money - before the internet - came from the gay community. People powered politics means all the people.
And women, well, I am really frustrated at the lack of representation of women within the leadership or pundit class of the Democratic Party. That failure leads directly to under-registering single women, who are the largest Democratic leaning unregistered voting bloc. It's different within different parts of the party and progressive movement, but we also have a real race and gender problem on our hands, and this has negative strategic consequences. How we live our lives, and how we organize our movement, is directly tied to our values and what our governance model will be capable of.
That's why, unrelated as it may seem to MyDD's focus, I'm pointing to this blog post by Terrence Heath on LifeBEAT, which is the music industry's charitable organization dedicated to raising awareness about AIDS and HIV among youth. LifeBEAT is having a concert and is featuring two reggae artists who have advocated for murder and violence against gays and lesbians. Right now, there is a plague of violence against gays in Jamaica because of the AIDS epidemic there. Complicity on the part of our music industry with a violently anti-gay agenda is a real failure of liberals within the music industry.
This is not ok. What's going on in Jamaica sounds very much like what happened in the 1980s in America, with discrimination against gays as the norm turning into violent fear. We are still living with those consequences today, in the form of the Bush administration, that uses this fear to drive us further apart from one another.
As progressives, we do not control any branch of government, but we do have control over our own actions and what we sanction in our own lives and our own projects. It is in choices like the one that LifeBEAT is making that measure our moral strength and how willing we are to stand up for our values. It was not, for instance, the administration that made dissent after 9/11 unpatriotic. It was the complicity of all of us, including Democratic party leaders and people like Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart, who did so by remaining silent and/or joining in the jeering and fear-mongering.
Dissent is now patriotic again, but that's only because of the collective choice of millions of people to stand up and say that we will not live in a country governed by fear. The people in America really are sovereign, and when we want something, we can get it. But that means that as sovereign as we can be, we must want that freedom, or we will be dominated by small and petty men.
Each of us has that choice, in our personal lives, like the organizers of this concert. Do we go along with the existing power structure, and stay silent and profit? Or do we make the hard decision and repudiate those who repudiate our values? It's not as simple as it may seem. LifeBEAT, which must make this choice and which has a board of influential and socially conscience individuals, has so far failed. And that failure, just like the freedom we achieve by speaking out, belongs to all of us. And if you know someone in the music industry who could put pressure on LifeBEAT to repudiate this agenda, you should do so.
We in the progressive movement need to live our values.
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