What Can Be Likened to "Fiddling While Rome Burns" Once Again A House Seat is Lost To Another Anti-Gay and Anti-Trans Bigot While MassEquality Parties Away
Keiko Orrall, the GOP's and Kris Mineau of the Massachusetts Family Institute's choice for the 12th Bristol House Seat won in yesterday's special election against the "shoe in" Democrat, Roger Brunelle, Jr. Have you heard of Keiko Orrall or that yesterday there was a special election in the Taunton area? Probably not. Why? Because it seems that the organization that should be informing LGBT about such elections has better things to do.
I remember back in 2007 when I attended MassEquality's private "World Cafe" which was a staged "community determination" event to see if MEQ should continue after the marriage equality win, one of the things I heard said was that MassEquality's machine would "punish" legislators (via elections) who did not side on the correct side of marriage equality. I actually had hopes. MassEquality actually wanted to become "New England Equality" and to push marriage equality into the other states. The MA Transgender Equal Rights Bill was to MEQ small potatoes at that meeting as its planted shills were at every table asking us all to support a move on New England for marriage work continuing its salaries and narcissism. If we punished existing lawmakers for not supporting marriage equality in the 2007 vote, then of course we would work to not allow those who clearly were Anti-LGBT Massachusetts Family Institute or MassResistance minions to be elected in the future, right?
Wrong! See hero Rep.Barbara L'Italien's loss in the 18th Essex to Anti-Gay, Anti-Trans, Anti-Choice James Lyons and now this...Keiko Orrall, another Massachusetts Family Institute Darling....
But I digress...evidently I am not the only one. Last night I saw Kara Suffredini at the Club Cafe DADT Repeal Party headed by SLDN and getting her props for all the work it did to get "He Who Must Not Be Named (Sen. Scott Brown) to support DADT Repeal. Right. Kara was not at the polls or even at the Mothership for this very important special election. An Uber Bigot, a signer of the anti-gay marriage petition and one who will vote "no" on the MA Trans Equal Right Bill seemed not to be of much concern.
Last week when I wanted to find out what was happening regarding this special election, I made the calls to MassEquality, MTPC, The Caucus, and Mass Alliance. What MEQ's Field Director, Chris Riley told was that the extent of MEQ's involvement in this race was that it sent an email to constituents asking them to support the Democrat. When I asked if the Democrat, Ralph Brunelle, Jr. was for the MA Trans Bill, I was told, "we think so." I asked if a questionnaire that was specific to the Trans Bill was answered correctly by Brunelle. Riley said that she did not think that a specific question pertaining to the MA Transgender Rights Bill was asked of Brunelle. I was told, however, that Mass Alliance who endorsed the Democrat were the ones responsible for said questionnaire not MassEquality and that according to Riley, some sort of question pertaining to Transgender Rights most certainly would have been part of this questionnaire that Mass Alliance used in its endorsement process. Mass Alliance of course is the Coalition of Progressive Organizations ranging from Clean Water Action, Various Unions such as the Boston Teacher's Union, Mass Teachers Association to MassEquality, the Sierra Club, etc.
So, Chris Riley, MassEquality's Field Director with its Political Director coaching her in the background did not think a legislatively specific question was asked of a key candidate on what our community considers its # 1 priority, The MA Transgender Equal Rights Bill, nor could she tell me if the gist of the pro-Trans questions asked on the Mass Alliance questionnaire were about Trans Rights in general or Trans Rights as presented on the Democratic State Party Platform.
Jordan Berg of Mass Alliance was a bit more knowledgable about Democratic Candidates' support for pro-LGBT legislation than MassEquality. Though Jordan was not able to cite or quote the specific question or answer to my Trans Equal Rights Bill concern, he was able to tell me that Ralph Brunelle, Jr. answered it correctly. Funny, Brunelle and his campaign director refused to respond to any of my inquiries about his support or lack of support for the bill, but Mass Alliance assured me he was good on the Trans Bill. When I asked Jordan Berg why MassEquality said that they did not believe a specific question about the Trans Bill was asked of Brunelle, Berg's comment to me was, "We (Mass Alliance) are the ones that tell MassEquality what to do when it comes to endorsements." Ah.......
Since my first assertion on Facebook about this 12th Bristol Race before the Special Election, I was inundated by emails of concerned people, MassEquality supporters, who had not heard anything about this race of a bigot and her Pro-(?) lgbt opponent. But each and every one of these concerned gays told me that they had been hearing alot about MassEquality and the Taste of Provincetown Party all summer long. If Massachusetts keeps losing seats to the anti-lgbt nutbags such as Keiko Orrall and Kris Mineau and Brian Camenker keep playing better politics than our well-funded MassEquality and its coalition...we will ALL be "Partying Like It's 1999." And you remember what rights we had back then...