Blind Prophecy

Well, it seems that the Human Rights Campaign has gone and gotten themselves into some hot water. Sorta.

Turns out, the person who leaked the Mark Foley emails (yes, those emails) to the press, was an HRC staffer. HRC confirmed it today and said that they let the staff member in question go because “HRC resources had been inappropriately used.” HRC also says that the staff member in question, whose name is not being disclosed, acted on his own and no one else at HRC knew of his plans.

There are some bloggers who are pointing to this as evidence of corruption within HRC, it’s increased radical nature (more on this in a moment), and others speculate that this is an effort to ruin HRC’s reputation (see here, here, here, here and here).

Personally, I think we should apply Occam’s razor to the whole situation. Somehow an HRC staff member got ahold of these emails and posted them, using them without HRC’s knowledge, and when HRC found out that this staffer used company resources for this, they fired him.

Now, I’ve posted before about some of my own issues with HRC, but I also know that most of the people who make up the HRC are good people doing the best they can. I frequenlty find myself disagreeing with them (for example, they were afraid to aggressively pursue inclusion of “gender identity or expression” in employment nondiscrimination law), but even so, I can still recognize that most of the HRC folks I’ve met are ethical and earnest. In fact, my biggest complaint is that I usually don’t think they’re radical enough. But they’re in politics and trying to change attitudes in the political beltway, and I suppose super-hyper queer radicalism doesn’t come off well in that environment. I’d be perfectly happy with the HRC if there was simply another major voice in national politics unafraid to go further.

I put myself in the position of this staffer, I’m not entirely sure I would have acted any differently.

Besides, nothing anyone at the HRC did caused Mark Foley to make innappropriate overtures to teenagers, nor did the HRC have anything to do with the apparent cover-up by Republican leadership. Let’s keep some perspective, you know? The efforts by neocons to pin the “fault” in the Foley situation on homosexuality, liberal strategists or whistleblowers is kind of pathetic in the end.

Well, off to Tahoe tomorrow.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys