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In town for the annual Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Carolinas Dinner Feb. 24, HRC Executive Director Joe Solmonese took time to speak with me in the lobby of the Westin Hotel in uptown Charlotte. We talked about a variety of topics — perhaps most interesting was his take on the current slate of presidential candidates.
I was surprised to see this huge online support for Tim Hardaway after he announced that he “hated gay people.”
There are always gonna be people who hate. No matter how hard we try there’s always gonna be a very small number of people who hate gay people, who hate people of color, who hate women and who hate Jewish people. That’s just always gonna be the way it is. What I thought was interesting was the number of people in the NBA who felt compelled to come out and express a very different opinion.
If the election were held today — who do you think is the most viable candidate?
Ouch. That’s a two-part question [laughs]. Today, John Edwards looks viable. If you play forward this theory in a three-person field that if two of them start to squabble one of them comes through the middle — well that would be John Edwards. I think it’s far too early to know, but I do think on the Republican side it’s very interesting because Mitt Romney’s stock goes up everyday and John McCain’s goes down every day and it may very well be — if Mitt Romney is the nominee — that gives the Democrats the best chance they’ve ever had. I think in our community we need to get to know where Hillary, Obama and Edwards are, understand the subtle differences between them, decide who we like, they’re all pretty good, even though none of them support marriage. I think Giuiliani is an interesting co-factor in all of this. I think the most important thing is that we have some segment of our communities inside these campaigns.
Who’s the most electable?
Again, I think if the election were held today, Hillary, Obama and Edwards are all more electable than anybody on the Republican slate. That has more to do with the war and President George W. Bush. They overwhelm everything. They overwhelm that Hillary is a woman and that Obama is black and everything else. If the election were held today I think any of the three could win. The question is, what does that environment look like a year and a half from now — and that’s just hard to know.
Why do you think so many people use religion as an excuse for bigotry?
People who are so blindly following every tenet of the faith and every page of Scripture and using it to justify their prejudices — I just think there are so many people out there who have kind of lost their way and are fearful. I think they — the evangelical right — understand that and that’s who they go after. If you need to make sense of the world, if there’s something you just can’t figure out and someone kind of gives you a clear path, you’re very likely to follow it. It’s everything from “I’m afraid about my relationship, my family, my future and my kid’s future.” It’s much easier if someone puts something in front of you and says “look, you’re having trouble keeping your marriage together and your family because of the moral decline of this country” and they can take all your angst and direct it toward somebody else. It’s kind of human nature. It’s easier to take all your fear and angst and direct it at something else. I think that’s what’s at the core of the Evangelical Right.
How important do you think local LGBT community centers are?
I think they’re incredibly important. Like all things, they’re on the frontline of the work. They are the frontline service-provider to the community — whether that means HIV testing or providing a place for a meeting.
Are you aware about what’s going on with the community center here?
Yes.
Some people in the community have raised the question that the money that is going to HRC from this city is taking away money that would otherwise be going to help the Center. How do you respond to that?
The same way I respond in every city that I go to, because the same question comes up in every city that I go to. We’re not taking money away from anyone. We have a very straightforward, upfront conversation with our members who are coming to these events about the fact that we are a national organization. Anybody who thinks that Rick Santorum didn’t get up everyday and think, “I don’t wanna just make gay people in Pittsburgh miserable, I want to make gay people in Charlotte miserable. I want to make gay people in Asheville miserable,” would be mistaken. His bigotry did not stop at the Pennsylvania border. He was a United States Senator who said “my agenda is everybody. I wanna go after every gay person in this country.” We understood that and we came here and said “we need to get rid of Rick Santorum and we need your help.”
To say that we’re taking money away — you’ve got to respect what motivates people to give. There are a lot of people who give $100 or $100,000 to HRC because they want to get rid of Rick Santorum. They want a Congress that is more representative of our community. I respect that motivation.
The fact of the matter is, national organizations travel the country to large cities and raise money for a national effort. But whether it is the work we did — and we worked tirelessly this year to reauthorize Ryan White, to beat Rick Santorun or, now, begin an extensive lobbying effort at the North Carolina delegation on issues like hate crime and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) — it’s all about North Carolina. It’s just that it isn’t always so immediately obvious as to how it’s all about North Carolina.
Given that HRC has donated money to help out Black Gay Pride here, is it possible that some of the money raised from this event might go to help the Center?
I don’t know what kind of arrangements have been made on a local level, but I am going to talk about the Center and encourage people to do what they can to support it.
North Carolina has been able to successfully stave off an anti-gay marriage amendment for three years in a row now. What do you think that says about the people here?
What I really admire about the people of North Carolina is that they understand the importance of their legislature. Your political activism has been locally focused as much as it has been nationally focused, whether it’s the election of someone like [State Sen.] Julia Boseman or focusing on your legislature. It’s obvious the people here are aware and I think that has had a lot to do with the fate of the marriage amendment.
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