Amendment 1…

I won’t have to link to any story, because by now you know that North Carolina joined the states who have voted against all forms of civil unions between gays and lesbians. And obviously this law is written in such a way to deny trans folks marriage too.

In the next few days, there’s going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame to be shared. But the main problem here isn’t with any one group. It’s that the people who don’t like gays and lesbians are willing to work together on this issue, even if they hate each other’s guts on lots of other issues. Those people work together, and they make every civil rights issue into a football. Abortion, gay marriage, black civil rights, immigration laws; it’s all the same game to them, and in the political game, they keep scoring points because none of our lobbying teams work together like theirs do.

It isn’t the fault of GLBT groups that they failed to rally more troops, and it isn’t the fault of any one group that this got passed. It’s the fault of people who didn’t see a need to vote, because this is such a done deal. Who’s gonna vote for hate? Those folks who stay at home don’t see a big deal with not caring about an issue one way or the other, and if we can’t convince those folks to stand up for others, then this will always be the way every civil rights issue is treated, as a metaphorical victim of a popularity contest that turned into a gauntlet.

This is why I’m willing to speak up about issues that aren’t in my “core group,” because I recognize that we need all these people working together on the same page for every issue, and not just the problems facing them. This is hard when the problems facing each group are so huge, and there’s the temptation to only want to cover your people. I know there’s enough trans news that I could ignore violence against cisgender women and race issues and still not run out of issues to talk about.

But looking beyond my own group, I can see how abuse has become the standard for a lot of minorities, and this is happening because the people who approve of abuse work together. To stop it, all of us who are affected need to present a unified front on every issue. That’s a lot of work, more work than most people were hoping for. You’re already burdened, so who wants to pick up more weight? I completely understand.

And then there’s some folks in minority camps who don’t want to work with each other, either for past slights, or for ongoing issues that have remained toxic topic for both sides of various minority camps. I’m not going to list slights, because no matter who I name, it’s just going to anger someone when my intention is the exact opposite.

But putting it simply, if we can’t stand together, we will all find ourselves politically hung by the same influential lobbies. We can’t win when each of us is bound to defend only our turf, and no one can win a popularity contest again hate, because hate is always popular.