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There is a reason that some politicians are suddenly reversing themselves on the Defense of Marriage Act or on marriage equality itself.
Just as there is a reason a majority of politicians were able to muster up the courage to kill Don't Ask Don't Tell.
They can read polls.
And the reason those polls have shifted in our favour is due to one thing - us; lesbian, gay and transgendered Americans and our ever growing army of straight allies.
Over the past seven or eight decades (the organized political fight in this country didn't begin with Stonewall, it began with the Society for Human Rights, Harry Hay, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis) we have slowly but consistently come out, in exponentially growing numbers, to our friends, our families, our co-workers and our employers.
We have given the people who constitute the constellation of important relationships in our lives the chance to see the glaring discrepancy between the religious lies they hear in church and the reality of the much loved person who is their gay son or daughter. In many cases, these people loved us before they found out we were gay, and the resulting, jarring head-on crash between their preconceived notions of "those gay people" and the stark reality of their child, their flesh and blood, standing in front of them, forced them to begin the process of change.
The generation that grew up in the 50'sa nd 60's thought they didn't know any "homosexuals." The generation that is growing up in 2011 has a cherished, favorite aunt who is a lesbian and three schoolmates with same sex parents.
We have done the heavy lifting over decades and America is shifting on its axis as a result.
We fought a global epidemic ON OUR OWN and forced the medical and pharmaceutical communities to respond. Anyone worldwide who is battling HIV has Act-Up and the GMHC to thank for their very lives.
As tens of millions of us have come out, we have created our own political institutions. Some more conservative and corporate and DC friendly than we would like, but powerful forces nevertheless. LAMBDA, NGLTF, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, HRC, etc. We have created our own media and our own investigative reporting and, in the age of the internet, we have created our own web based political force, something which has had a profound impact on how the mainstream media covers stories affecting our lives.
We know full well how history will record the events that lead to the death of Dont Ask Don't Tell.
We know who killed it:
We did.
Aubrey Sarvis, the Palm center, LAMBDA, heroic LGBT servicemembers, long time straight allies, Dan Choi, gay bloggers, liberal websites. We all kept pushing and pushing until the mainstream media came around. We all kept pushing the power structure in Washington and across the country until the polls showed 80%+ of the country agreed with us and favoured the end of DADT.
That is when it became safe for politicians to align with our cause. Most of us have been engaged in this fight for many years with our time and/or money and we know how the final death throes of DADT went down. There are many Congressmen and women who battled for us, by our side, and in the end they were the ones who engineered the timeline that allowed the repeal to slip through in a congressional lame duck session. President Obama lent his help by publicly calling for repeal, corralling the military leadership and instructing them to begin organizing the dismantling of DADT and, of course, by putting his signature on the bill. LGBT activists kept the pressure up in the court system, until a federal Judge ruled DADT unconstitutional, helping to heighten the urgency (both in the military and in Congress) for repeal.
DADT collapsed under a tsunami of public and political pressure and the neverending powerful arc of history which marches slowly but inexorably ever forward in favor of justice and equality.
Marriage equality will come, more than likely through the courts, and it may come sooner than many of us expected.
But the end of DADT calls for a pause to engage in a bit of self congratulatory backslapping.
It's nice to feel firmly included in the dream of America.
And it's nice to acknowledge the truth.
We did it.
We changed our country.
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