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HRC Already Has The Perfect Candidate, So Why Aren’t They Considering Her?

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I remember Cathy Woolard for her tenacious courting of former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn during the military gay ban repeal fight in 1993. I nicknamed her “old iron ass” because she spent hours sitting in his office, waiting for the opportunity to speak to him. She walked the halls of the Senate with Nunn, always in pursuit, tenaciously relentless in never letting him forget that gays served in the military and deserved equality.

Last week, Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend broke the story that Joe Solomonese was stepping down as President and CEO of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) after seven years leading the nation’s largest and wealthiest LGBT organization.

A widely mentioned possible candidate to replace Solmonese was Cathy Woolard (initially reported in Metro Weekly Chris Geidner). But HRC quickly confirmed she was not under active consideration for the post.

 

 

The outstanding question for the HRC’s Board of Directors is what direction will it seek during the second decade of the millennia? Do they have the courage to change course, to break free from their past that is steeped in maddening secrecy? Can they become more forthcoming and transparent with a community that hungers for equality? The “Millennials” will not be satisfied with perfunctory answers and enticements such as wine and cheese parties supported by the best marketing of an American non-profit.

 

 

My sources have confirmed Woolard is a current consultant to HRC and is presently not under active consideration for the leadership post. There is nothing suspicious or nefarious about Woolard consulting for HRC. She has not only been an HRC employee in the past, but has also been a consultant to them on numerous occasions over the years.

If it is true that Woolard is not under active consideration, then she should be and her name should go to the top of the list. I offer a strong endorsement of Woolard’s candidacy as a former colleague, a fellow public interest lobbyist, who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with her, pounding miles of Congressional pavement during our efforts to repeal the military gay ban in 1993. We later worked together on the original introduction of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in which she was instrumental in securing Coretta Scott King’s endorsement of the measure.

She is deadly smart, does not suffer fools gladly, she knows how to communicate with people, she is affable, fun, and like so many Americans, has lived most of her life in a state that has not supported LGBT rights. Cathy Woolard deeply understands the emotional scourge and sting of discrimination having experienced it herself.

A Woolard candidacy has a number of really good things going for it that should be strongly considered by the HRC Board of Directors:  1) She is a Southerner and is deeply familiar with the political landscape of the South and the difficult terrain of negotiating for LGBT rights, having worked with friend and foe alike on these issues; 2) She has worked for HRC in Washington, D.C. and understands “Inside the Beltway” politics, which will appeal to and reassure Washington insiders;  3) As a former elected official in the City of Atlanta, she understands the necessity for transparency and open governance—the Achilles heel of HRC, who has resisted transparency and the light of day, clinging to institutional secrecy and exclusivity.

Indeed, HRC actions during the latest round of gay politics in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) repeal effort elevated criticisms of the organization to a pinnacle level of disapproval by voices from all parts of the community. Woolard knows that winning is important, but how you win and bringing as many supporters with you, is vital too.

Another plus that is of inestimable value, as a person from the South, Woolard has a strong network of African-American colleagues and friends, having worked with people of color throughout her career. As an elected official in Atlanta, she has worked with some of America’s top African-American politicians. And because of this experience and exposure to people of color,  there is no doubt Woolard would address the diversity issues at HRC, which remains a tarnished  legacy of its predominantly white leadership team and Board of Directors.

With Woolard at the helm, there is no doubt HRC’s leadership style, along with its political and communications strategies would change. She could be the right medicine at the right time.

So, just who is Cathy Woolard?

Cathy Woolard is a Southerner, Atlanta-born, lesbian activist who became the first openly-gay elected official in the state of Georgia in 1997. Not satisfied with domestic politics and activism, Woolard is also an international humanitarian who got hooked on international development early in her life as a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Micronesia for two years in 1980, after graduating from University of Georgia.

Bitten by the international bug as a Peace Corp Volunteer, Woolard has been an intrepid traveler all of her life, traveling to far-flung jaunts in India and New Zealand during recent years, to name just a few.

Cathy grew up in an Air Force family and became a gay activist initially as a member of the Atlanta committee for the 1987 March on Washington. Following the March, she was HRC’s Georgia field organizer and was promoted to a lobbyist position in 1992, moved to HRC’s Washington offices where she remained for seven years, advancing to the position of National Field Director in 1994.

During her organizer time in Atlanta, Woolard came of age as an activist, along with many others in the Georgia gay community who were galvanized by the 1991 firing of lesbian Cheryl Summerville, a cook in a Douglas, Georgia Cracker Barrel restaurant. In protest, Woolard was arrested along with other activists. A nation-wide boycott of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain ensued and Summerville later testified before Congress in 1994 during the first set of Senate ENDA hearings presided over by the late Senator Edward Kennedy.

Woolard returned to Atlanta in 1996 to run for elected office and became the first openly-gay elected official in the State of Georgia in November 1997, when she was elected to the city council. She ran for re-election and became the first woman Speaker of the Atlanta City Council in 2002, one of the first openly-gay city council presidents of a major metropolitan city in the United States. Woolard chaired the council’s transportation committee and became an enthusiastic policy wonk on how to effectively transform Atlanta’s mass urban car and light rail systems hub during her tenure.

 
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUaw1G46XgY&version=3&hl=en_US]

Woolard is married to Karen Geney, her partner of more than 23 years and they live in Atlanta’s Glenwood Park neighborhood. During her City Council tenure Woolard became a plaintiff in a legal action filed by the Atlanta City government in 1999 against John Oxendine, the now former State’s Insurance Commissioner, for refusing to permit domestic partner benefits to employers who wished to offer them.

Following her failed Congressional primary challenge to former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in 2004, Woolard returned to consulting for progressive groups, including Planned Parenthood of Georgia, League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, and the Gill Foundation, as well as the HRC. While considered an up and coming politician in the Atlanta scene, she decided not to run for Mayor in 2008 and opted for a position with CARE, an Atlanta based non-profit that is a leader in international development as its Executive Vice-President for Global Advocacy and External Relations in 2008, returning to her first love of international development. Late last year, Woolard returned to her consultancy business after her sister died of cancer.

The outstanding question for the HRC’s Board of Directors is what direction will it seek during the second decade of the millennia? Do they have the courage to change course, to break free from their past that is steeped in maddening secrecy? Can they become more forthcoming and transparent with a community that hungers for equality? The “Millennials” will not be satisfied with perfunctory answers and enticements such as wine and cheese parties supported by the best marketing of an American non-profit.

The times have changed: LGBT blogs are ubiquitous, the news cycle never stops, the community is more diverse, younger and more progressive. We live in an age of instant globalization. Young LGBTQs will not be satisfied to wait for equality carried out by a leadership style of “take it or leave it” and “our way or the highway,” which has been the case with HRC more often than not.

Woolard knows this, but does the HRC Board of Directors?  Stay tuned.

 

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.

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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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15 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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19 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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22 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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