Venezuela furious at Obama's comments on ailing Chavez

[Ken Burch]

133. I was talking about a situation where you have LGBT rights and you also have

larger social and economic justice issues. This isn't about the question of whether LGBT rights are a legitimate cause or not, or whether they matter or not.

If you're in a Latin American country, and you're not wealthy(and let's face it, in Latin America almost all the wealthy are light-skinned), obviously things like social equality, the end of poverty, and the end of labor exploitation are probably going to be slightly higher on your agenda than LGBT rights. Doesn't mean you'd be against them, just that they might not top your list of priorities. If you have twelve kids and you're living in a slum in Caracas, for example(which means you're also probably mestizo or Afro-Venezuelan, you'd almost never be pure-blooded Spanish-descent in a neighborhood like that, due to the history or racism throughout Latin America), you're obviously not going to be focused on, say, same-sex marriage to a greater degree than you will be focused on being able to feed your kids or have their right to an education and health care and later, a job, guaranteed. There's nothing evil in acknowledging that. And there's nothing disrespectful to the LGBT cause(which I support just as strongly as you do, for the record)in saying it.

The best way to alter this reality is for LGBT people, in Venezuela and everywhere else, is to back everybody else's fight for social and economic justice with the same passion devoted to the ssm fight-to care just as much about the poor, about labor, about people of color(obviously LGBT people of color don't need to be told about the last part)and about everybody else on the outside, in this country and in all other countries. You can't fight for LGBT rights in isolation, acting as if no other rights and no other causes matter. You need to take the old IWW view that "an injury to ONE...is an injury to ALL".

You have to include everybody in the fight for justice...you can't just focus, as you seem to, on LGBT issues in isolation to the rest of the progressive/left agenda. You have to fight, equally, for the workers, for the poor, and for all of the dispossessed. Only if you do that do you have the right to ask those groups to back you.

Most LGBT people get that.

I hope this post has convinced you that you had nothing to be outraged about at all in my previous post. Are we good, now?