So when we wrote about retail and wholesale activism, we were–unsurprisingly–thinking like good progressives, and looking at left agendas.
This week we’ve seen two news stories that shows how it works from the other side. Arthur D. Hlavaty pointed us to this horrifying story about a Lesbian who saw the wrong physician’s assistant in Florida, while the San Francisco Chronicle tells us about why the U.S. State Department thinks it’s okay to keep gay–oh, excuse us, potentially pedophilic–groups out of the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
The physician’s assistant was engaging in retail activism, presumably because she thought she could help the patient find heterosexuality and God. Our experience says that retail work has to be consensual to be useful … and it looks like she may have lost her job, which wouldn’t bother us in the slightest.
The State Department decision is a wholesale action which needs a response on the wholesale level. The claim that gay groups are by definition potentially pedophilic is, of course, a dirty lie. What about demanding that all nearly 3,000 the non-gay groups with consultative status “establish a verifiable process” to prove that they aren’t pedophilic?
The bottom line is simple: the American right wing is damn good at both wholesale and retail activism. That’s how they got where they are, and that’s how they’ll stay where they are unless we get better at both prongs and stay with them.