DSR wrote:
>
> lesbians in Oklahoma filing suit in a state, which is
> remarkably like Texas and where the ground for gay marriage is about
> as breakable as the rock hard ground of the Dust Bowl days is quite
> another.
But what if a group of them do it anyhow? Then what do you do? (I haven't followed this thread: has someone filed suit in Oklahoma?)
If some visible group launches a campaign of any sort, then that campaign, regardless of how abstractly unwise it might have been, is part of the terrain that needs to be considered. Objecting to it is something like a traveller objecting to there being a river to cross.
You have not only to know your audience; you have to know the realities of the political terrain on which you operate.
My favorite example of objective white racism comes from my own thought prior to my involvement in politics. It was a discussion at an English Department party back in the fall of 1962. The topic of black struggles in the south then going on came up. I remarked that if those struggles continued, we were morally obligated to support them, but that probably they were ill-timed.
I have no strong opinion on your argument, but you are perilously close to what I have called sandbox politics -- an error that often occurs when people discuss strategy and tactics outside of an organizational context. Put another way, before you can say what strategy (or tactic) "we" should follow, you have to establish how the "we" which is to make that strategic decision is to be constituted, and whether that "we" has (or will have) the political power to establish its strategy as hegemonic.
My tentative impression is that the "Gay Marriage" issue is now as much a part of the political terrain (of _all_ parts of the U.S.) as Pike's Peak is part of the geographical terrain of Colorado. Do your strategic thinking in the context of assuming that that issue will be in everyone's mind, opposing or supporting. You can't put it back in the bottle.
Carrol Carrol