(Cross-posted at Pam’s House Blend)
From a posting on TransAdvovate entitled ‘Back to Oz’:
Yeh - that’s gratuitous, but, when it comes to the Oz wars, there’s no question: St. Barney threw the first ruby slipper.
In response to Matt Foreman’s shot at St. Barney on Signorile on Wednesday, St. Barney saieth:
In 2002, when he was the head of Empire State Pride Agenda, he lobbied hard to get through the New York legislature a bill that did exactly what our bill did last year, it covered discrimination based on sexual orientation, but excluded people that were transgender. Some people didn’t like that. Tom Duane said at the time that Matt Foreman excluded him from meetings on the subject. Matt Foreman not only helped get that bill through, frankly, and this I disagreed with, as part of the deal to get it though, that year the Empire State Pride Agenda endorsed the Republican George Pataki for reelection over an outstanding African American Democrat, Carl McCall. So you had Matt Foreman guiding to passage an ENDA bill that didn’t cover transgender….
And of course, on this compartmentalized historical moment-oid, St. Barney is right - not that this isn’t something that pro-inclusionists (including myself) haven’t brought up on numerous occasions.
Marti Abernathey remarks:
Since Foreman has said in the past that he regrets that choice and thinks it was a mistake, I’m not sure why Congressman Frank is bringing this up, except to smear him.
Its making me ill to say this, but I’m going to have to side with St. Barney on this. Sure, it is a smear, but its a legitimate smear. Its factuality makes Foreman a hypocrite (even if he truly has had a change of heart since 2002.)
Of course, St. Barney couldn’t leave it at a moment-oid of historical accuracy - the exception which proves the transphobic rule. He had to add:
I don’t usually talk like this, but no one in the history of the United States Congress has advocated explicitly for including transgender poeople in legislation as much as I have.
With that, I must conclude the posting. I’m now going to lock myself in my basement for a few hours. I sense a laughing jag coming on so strong that, were I to be even remotely in public view when it commences, would cause me to trucked away to the happy farm (though I will tack on the follwing questions to ponder whilst I laugh: Didn’t Queen Elizabeth of Birch say essentially the same thing about the Human Right Scampaign almost a decade ago? Hasn’t that been proven to be bullshit - over and over again? Does even St. Barney believe what he’s saying?)
