Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Hey LGBT groups! Let's Copy Organizing for America's phone attack to Congress


I was just reading about the group, Organizing for America (OFA) making over 300,000 phone calls to Congress about Health Care reform.

Organizing for America is nothing but a group folks who basically support Obama and Health Care. If you signed on Obama's website during the campaign, you normally get these emails on the regular.

However, I was impressed that this group got together, organized and hit it big...

The nationwide "Time to Deliver on Health Reform" event is the most massive outpouring of support from Obama supporters since Election Day 2008.

Senate Democratic aides told HuffPost that their phones have been ringing off the hook. "We're getting completely crushed with calls, jamming our phone lines from the moment we opened," said one aide.

Another said they'd gotten "pretty much non-stop health care calls from OFA." A third also said their office was getting bombed and that four out of every five calls specifically mentioned the public option.

So I got to thinking... Could this be a format we (LGBT community) can use to address ENDA, Hate Crimes Act, DADT and DOMA? I think so.

If we organize a phone bank to do this type damage, we could make a strong impact on our causes. Think if we got the majority of the NEM attenders to make these calls, we could get this party started.

Barney Frank said we needed to hit congress up, why not try this tactic?

OFA has set a trend in contacting congress, our LGBT groups need to do the same. If not the HRC, then another group. Perhaps the organizers of NEM, Andy Thayer and Queer Liberation or LGBT Task Force.

This idea actually works and if we can get it together, this could work for us.

source

2 comments:

truthspew said...

Yep, our congresscritters need to hear from us frequently. We need to make them afraid to pick up the phone.

Kyle Leach said...

V, I saw this on Huff as well and thought similar thoughts about how effective it would be for our community. When I call or even if I convince a few people to call, it isn't the same as flooding the boards with thousands of calls.

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Viktor is a small town southern boy living in Los Angeles. You can find him on Twitter, writing about pop culture, politics, and comics. He’s the creator of the graphic novel StrangeLore and currently getting back into screenwriting.