Assemblymember John A. Pérez, 46th Assembly District
Address to SAN DIEGO LGBT BREAKFAST
May 22, 2009
This is, in many ways, a bittersweet morning for us. We are here to celebrate what Harvey Milks life represents to our community. Just as we are here to mourn the hatred and bigotry that took that life.· We are here to celebrate the gains we’ve made, while the Supreme Court is about to release a decision which may very well confirm how much farther we still have to go.
We, as a community, need to recognize how poignant of a moment today is. 79 years ago, when Harvey was born, discussions about civil rights were purely academic.
Look at the world Harvey was born into. Women had almost no place in the workforce. Jim Crow still was legally sanctioned in the South, and unofficially in large swaths of the North. Deeply held anti-Asian sentiments here in California were still so pervasive that when Harvey was 10, only a few brave souls voiced opposition to relocating Japanese Americans to concentration camps. And in the year Harvey was born, the Lemon Grove School District in North County passed a segregation policy that was later overturned in the case of Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District.
The world that Harvey left was in almost every way measurably better, but its still one that we wouldn’t recognize today.
Leaders like Harvey Milk, MLK and Cesar Chavez are almost always defined more by the work left undone than what they accomplished in their lives. And that is almost the way it has to be: one righteous man or woman is needed to begin a struggle, but ultimately, the movement succeeds not because of one person, but because so many individuals band together as one.
Harvey taught us many lessons, but to my mind, there are three that really stand out. First, nobody will hand us our rights unless we are willing to stand up and fight for them. Second, the struggle for justice cannot and must not be lonely-we need allies. Finally, no matter what the setbacks or challenges, we must continue moving forward.
Harvey shattered a glass ceiling that would have prevented me from serving the people of my district. How did he do that? Persistence and tenacity. We remember that he was the first openly gay man elected in California.
But while we commemorate that electoral triumph, we don’t always note that he lost every race he ever ran, except for his last. He lost for supervisor and for Assembly. But he refused to listen to the naysayers, both within and outside our community, who insisted that supporting straight allies was the best way to win our rights.
We are fighting for our personal rights-Harvey understood that this isnt a fight that can be outsourced. And when he won, it validated something Andrew Jackson once said: one man with courage makes a majority.
How did Harvey win? By building a coalition. Its a difficult, arduous process, and he understood that too. It wasn’t a simple matter of a quid pro quo--that’s how you build a business, not a movement. By standing up for union workers in their struggle, we gained not just allies, but compatriots in our struggle.
Harvey Milk leading the Coors Boycott began one of the most enduring alliances in the modern American struggle for civil rights. Harvey understood that workers fighting for their rights against their employers could be a fight just as dangerous and vicious as our own. Banding together to make common cause wasn’t just a sensible move: it was, perhaps, the most important one.
That’s a lesson that is more resonant today than at any point since that turning point in our movement.
Today, the single greatest workplace protection for an LGBT employee is a union contract. More than 30 states allow workers to be fired for being Lesbian or Gay. Only 11 states protect the transgendered community from that discrimination. But in every single one of those states, a Union Contract provides the protection our brothers and sisters deserve.
Like Harvey, we have to move on every front. We can achieve a de facto ENDA right now if Congress passed the Employee Free Choice Act. Extending the protection of a union contract to every worker in America is the right thing to do by itself. We need to support Labor now, we need to call Dianne Feinstein now and demand she support EFCA. · We can do this now, and extend those protections now. Then, with Labors support, we can pass ENDA and strike out legally what was gained at the bargaining table.
That’s how we can reinvent Harvey’s legacy for today.
That legacy has special significance for me. My district is unique in that it is the only district to elect an openly LGBT person despite having voted in favor of Prop. 22 and Prop. 8. I am a realist. And I knew that realistically, being a gay man in my district would inevitably rise as an issue. Being a labor leader, I know that to win, you need to know the numbers.
So I did a poll. Of course the consultants wanted to try and finesse the question so it wouldn’t look bad. But I needed numbers. So I told them to put it bluntly: would you be more or less inclined to support John A Perez if you knew he was gay.
When informed of my background as a labor and environmental leader, as someone who spent every hour fighting for their interests, my support was in the 60s. When the voters learned I was gay, my support dropped 15 percent.
But then I had my consultants ask another question. Would you be more or less inclined to support John A. Perez if you knew he would be the first openly gay Latino in California.
I got 90% of those voters back. As a community, Latinos understand something about having to break barriers. And we understand having pride in our community. Knowing that fact about me enabled me to make our struggle relevant to people who had a separate but very equal struggle on a very personal level.
Next week, the California Supreme Court will likely hand down its ruling on the challenge to Prop. 8. We as a community need to remember that marriage is important, but its not the be-all and end-all of our movement.
Gay Californians are being discharged from the armed forces. Gay Californians are still denied domestic partner benefits by entirely too many employers. Disparities in healthcare access have led to a dangerous disparity between HIV/AIDS rates between whites and African Americans and Latinos. And when children in right here in San Diego County, in Ramona, need a permission slip to hear a classmate read a report on the life of Harvey Milk, we cannot for one second believe that our work is done simply because we can marry.
Regardless of how the court rules next week, our responsibility to the people who came before, and the generation that comes after us, is to continue working as tenaciously as Harvey.
This is a poignant moment for all of us. We are each blessed with a unique opportunity-to directly shape the world for that next generation in a way that our forebears were unable too.
We must continue to gain allies and strength. We need to continue pushing forward on every front. We need to remember where we came from-and use that memory to guide us to where we want to go.
There is one word that I haven’t used yet: HOPE. Before Obama, it was Harvey Milk who said you’ve gotta give them hope. But hope isn’t mine or his or yours to give. It’s ours to create, to nurture and to grow. That’s our mission. So let’s enjoy this morning, reflect on Harvey’s life, and continue on with our struggle.
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Workplace Equality - A Shared Agenda |
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Proclamation from President Obama |
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