How The Human Rights Campaign Is Helping the GOP to Retain the Senate

[KamaAina]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/how-human-rights-campaign-helping-the-gop_b_9545778.html

In the past 24 hours, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest LGBT group, has come under intense fire on social media, including from many transgender people, for its lack of a strategy in combating the rapid passage of a heinous anti-LGBT law in North Carolina which strips existing LGBT anti-discrimination ordinances in the state and bars transgender people from using public restrooms that correspond with their gender identity.

But that criticism has followed an even more intense, week-long pummeling of the group on social media as well as from pundits and commentators, because of the group’s very curious endorsement earlier this month of Senator Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican whose defeat in November is critical to the Democrats winning back control of the Senate.

Kirk, in a very tough re-election, has come out in support of The Equality Act, a sweeping federal anti-discrimination bill protecting LGBT people, and had voted to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But Kirk has only earned a score of 78 percent out of 100 percent from HRC, while his opponent, Democratic House member Tammy Duckworth, has a score of 100 — in addition to a real shot at taking the seat and handing Democrats the Senate. David Nir, political director at Daily Kos, called the endorsement as “appalling as it is embarrassing,” and “pathetic and stupid.” Mark Joseph Stern at Slate acknowledged the “long game” HRC may be playing in backing GOPers who vote pro-gay, but nonetheless drew the line at allowing the terribly anti-gay GOP leadership to retain the Senate this year, observing that HRC “does not seem to grasp...simple reality.”

At The New Republic, Eric Sasson rightly pointed to HRC’s “serious diversity problem” per an internal report that leaked, and to the optics of backing a white male Republican with a meager score over a woman of color and a combat veteran who lost both of her legs in the Iraq war — and who has a perfect score. Chris Geidner at Buzzfeed had obtained the internal report last year, which called HRC “exclusionary,” “sexist,” and “homogenous.” This endorsement certainly lent more credence to that.

[Metric System]

1. That is baffling. We need to regain the Senate in November, nevermind that the Republican party is

anti-LGBT (regardless of Kirk's own views).

[LostOne4Ever]

2. The HRC lost me as a supporter long ago when they threw trans issues under the bus nt

[Bluenorthwest]

3. Human Rights Campaign = the Establishment as some of us and our candidate have been telling everyone

for some many weeks on DU. Many Straight Hillary supporters are very supportive of HRC while I see them as a racist, transphobic and sexist organization of Republican endorsing elitists.
Here is a classic Straight Splaining of HRC to LGBT thread three months ago:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511054265