If you don’t know who Tori Osborn is, you should.
The former executive director at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, she has some major LGBT advocacy street cred. Most recently she ran the progressive organization Liberty Hill Foundation and was a senior advisor to big-time marriage equality supporter Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles.
Osborn has not been quiet about that fact that she found the No on Prop 8 campaign wanting, to say the least. But what’s really got her going these days is the lack of self-reflection from some of the people who ran the campaign about what went wrong. She doesn’t name names, but one can assume she’s directing her comments to the likes of Geoff Kors at Equality California and one of her successors at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, Lorri Jean.
Here’s what Osborn has to say about the lack of what she calls “humility and self responsibility” in her recent blog posting, titled “Indictment.”
“Nobody has accepted responsibility for failure and stepped up to lead a coherent, community-wide discussion of where to from here. As a result there is too much finger pointing, and a startling loss of credibility for established LGBT organizations and leaders. Without a humble and truth-telling self-assessment, the energetic protest and proliferation of new young activists may well evaporate, or be too narrowly contained within one single–-if exciting–strand of the LGBT movement: web activism. Or, inaccurate analysis will become set in stone and lead toward division rather than powerful motion forward.”
It’s a dire warning, but seems warranted. Hey, am I a web activist?
