MINISTRY FROM TWO POLES

No-one has commented on more lucidly, nor collected articles about, The Dallas Principles than Lawrence at First Light. I am posting his comments and articles he cited here, minus any identifying details, since First Light is a membership based list serve. Feel free to go to the link and sign up if you are allied to the cause of LGBT equality.

The meeting in Dallas which produced “The Dallas Principles” is another in a recent series of efforts by grassroots and out-of-the-mainstream activists to stimulate greater popular initiative and control over lobbying to achieve greater TLGB equality. In many ways, it seems to me that it’s at least partly a reaction against the failure of ‘official’ activist groups to defeat Prop. 8 in California last year, and partly an expanding anger and unhappiness over the go-slow approach of national groups like The Human Rights Campaign, which seem to be unwilling to make hard demands of persons in power.

The strength of the Dallas 24, who met to hammer out some foundational goals of the TLGB community in 2009, seems to me to be that they are not tied to top-heavy bureaucracies with huge budgets that support highly-paid staff with power, status and positions to protect. Perhaps their weakness is pretty much the same: they have no official standing, no ongoing structure, little serious connections to the people in power, and are just as much self-selected as the organizations which they believe are failing to achieve community goals quickly enough.

Despite a flurry of media releases, they’ve gotten precious little mainstream news coverage. What they have going for them are basically internet blogging audiences (how large? unknown), some potential funding resources (how much? unknown) and initial enthusiasm and desire to make an impact (how lasting? unknown). The Dallas Principles are scarcely arguable, but their influence is very much up in the air. But if you’re weary of the questionable pace and product of the ‘big boys’ of community lobbying, you have nothing to lose by checking out the Dallas bunch. Continue reading ‘Dallas Principles’