Come on, Mr Clinton, do the right thing!
(Graphic: SNL, PhotoShoppery: mine)
Well, at this point, the ball is squarely in former President Bill Clinton’s court. His advisers and he are clearly informed of what speaking at Doug Manchester’s Hyatt Hotel in downtown San Diego represents. The question is: Does the former Democratic President of the United States of America intend to cross an AFL-CIO sanctioned picket line and violate a boycott brought in response to the hotel’s owner Doug Manchester’s huge contribution of seed money to Proposition 8 — the campaign to eliminate marriage equality in California?
According to a piece in Friday morning’s San Diego Union-Tribune, a Clinton spokesperson, Matthew McKenna, said, “He’s obviously sympathetic to this cause. I don’t think you can name a leader in the world who has done more to advance gay and lesbian issues.”
Right! That would explain why queer American citizens are still fighting to eliminate two key pieces of the Clinton legacy — Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. Clinton was great on the warm, fuzzy, I’ve got gay friends kinda stuff, but we queers got shafted on the biggies — the right to serve our country in the military and the right to have our relationships legally recognized. Here’s a great opportunity for, if not a do-over, at least a bit of make-up-for.
Courage Campaign needs your help right now. They’re gathering signatures on a petition asking the former president to wake up and smell the irony, if nothing else. Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign, in the UT piece mentioned above, points to the irony that Bill Clinton, by virtue of ignoring a boycott that sprang from Prop 8, would become inadvertently more deeply immeshed in the debate over marriage equality, “because Proposition 8 is being defended in court in part by Kenneth Starr, who 10 years ago built the case for impeachment against Clinton.”
Robert Cruickshank, writing at Courage Campaign’s blog, has the background, including a letter from Harvey Milk associate and founder of the NAMES Project/AIDS Quilt Cleve Jones.
Should Bill Clinton not reconsider, and relocate or cancel, his planned speaking engagement, a coalition of organized labor, GLBT groups, local civic leaders, and other community organizations will stage a rally Sunday morning at the Manchester Hyatt. The San Diego Equality Campaign has the details for the planned action:
Time: February 15, 2009 from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm
Location: Manchester Grand Hyatt, One Market Place, San Diego, California, USA 92101
Event Type: protest, rally
Organized By: Sleep With The Right People/UNITE HEREBackground: On July 10th, 2008, a coalition led by the San Diego labor movement and the LGBT community called for a boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt. Manchester’s Hyatt has brought the LGBT community and UNITE HERE together to fight for equality for gay and lesbian couples and justice for the workers at his Hyatt hotel. Doug Manchester has a history working against both:
Equality for lesbian and gay couples. Doug Manchester is one of the leading funders ($125,000) of Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative that discriminates against LGBT couples. The California LGBT community faces an extremely difficult fight to prevent an outright ban on their civil right to have legal recognition for same sex couples and equal protection for their families. While Hyatt may officially disavow Manchester’s contributions to Proposition 8 as a personal choice, the fact remains that their multi-million dollar LGBT marketing efforts must be seen as little more than sheer hypocrisy when the revenue this marketing attracts is then funneled into efforts that bite the hand which feeds them. In such a situation, we always have the ability to choose not to feed them any longer.
Justice for Manchester Hyatt workers. Manchester’s Hyatt allegedly forces housekeepers to clean more rooms than housekeepers at other Hyatt hotels, including the other Hyatt hotel in San Diego. In 2006, housekeepers began lunch hour protests against working conditions in the hotel, saying that their daily room quota had been increased from 17 to 30 rooms per shift!
Here, courtesy of the Manchester Hyatt, is a map and directions.
See you Sunday morning!
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