I'm not certain my gay friends knew what they were up against when taking on the Protect the Children crowd.
It's not like this Frog didn't warn them, especially when in the recent past, several well-known gay activist bloggers decided to bail out on one of their own, someone conducting daily (hourly?) hand to hand combat with those who deem themselves Protectors of Anyone Under 18.
When the battle grew a little bit loud and the resulting shrapnel a bit too public for their cause, well, let's just say, the online alternative crowd left a man behind.
Now they've all been left behind, stunned with the defeat of Amendment 2 (Florida), Prop 8 (California) and Prop 107 (Arizona) and subsequently dismissed by mainstream America.
"I just found out my state doesn't really think I'm a person," said Rose Aplustill. 21, a BU student from Los Osos, California.
Unfortunately, Rose, the Protect the Children argument is that effective. Irrational and fear-laden, but effective.
They don't care about your family. They don't care about my family. Mother and Father and Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot and Puff--that family, they care about.
Those of us who have been fighting these ahem traditionalists for years will tell you this--the Fear Crowd's ability to sway America's thinking is not only dangerous, it's fascist.
They start with a group that no one would ever care about--say people who have been convicted of an offense deemed sexual--an easy group to tar and feather and thump over the head with the PC Bible. Although their families cried foul, most folks looked the other way as concentration camps without fences were built all over this country, in the form of residency restrictions.
NIMBY. Not in my backyard.
But now, my friends...it is in your backyard. You--and your families--are the next target.
But we--those of us who have family members wrongly ostracized by a rabid political environment--are your neighbors--your walked through hell and back neighbors--like it or not.
We've been on the ground. We know the enemy.
We are here to help, not turn our backs on you.
I've Joined the Impact.
As Seattle blogger Amy Baillett said so well, "We need to show the world when one thing happens to one of us, it happens to all of us."
Yes. It. Does. Let's get busy fighting back. Together.
