Although pro-homosexual advocates comprise a tiny percentage of the American population, they exploit Internet capabilities to organize their grassroots. The result is that the Gay Agenda is now a cornerstone of the Obama White House.
Take note that this article is from the Washington Post; as more newspapers go bankrupt, the mainstream media is fearing the age of the Internet.
-- From "Gay Bloggers' Voices Rise in Chorus of Growing Political Influence" by Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post Staff Writer 2/24/09
In the past, someone like [Blogger Pam] Spaulding would have been relegated to the sidelines. She doesn't work for national gay rights organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign or the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. She lives with her partner, Kate, an audiologist, in Durham, far from San Francisco, New York or Washington, where gay activism has been historically based. But now she's helping shape the agenda, one voice in a chorus of sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious, often in-your-face voices that is pushing established gay groups and redefining the meaning of grass-roots action in this new media age.
Take the immediate reaction to Proposition 8, the California initiative that banned same-sex marriage: Gay bloggers and online activists scheduled rallies across the country, from Providence, R.I., to Albuquerque. Opponents of Prop. 8 gathered on a Web site called Join the Impact, founded three days after Californians passed the initiative by a vote of 52 percent to 48. Facebook groups were created. "Californians Ready to Repeal Prop. 8" has 256,000 members and "Repeal the CA Ban on Marriage Equality -- 2010" has 277,000.
"What happened after Proposition 8 caught the national gay groups completely off guard. I think it surprised them. I think it really showed them that when it comes to harnessing grass-roots energy, they need to get online," says Kevin Naff, editor of the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper. "What happened online came together overnight for little or no money, and the protests were covered by the mainstream press. If national groups wanted to coordinate the kind of mass protests we saw, they would spend $1 million and take six months to do it."
Though Andrew Sullivan, the openly gay Washington media veteran, has been blogging since 2000, for many, the gay political presence online began nearly five years ago. That's when blogger Mike Rogers, a longtime activist, began outing gay staffers on Capitol Hill who worked for Republicans supporting what he called "anti-gay" policies. It was controversial, it was provocative, it got everyone's attention. But the gay political blogosphere wasn't just about outing. From the outset, it highlighted issues that bloggers felt were misunderstood, back-burnered or not fully covered by the mainstream media.
For instance, when it was announced that the Rev. Rick Warren, whose megachurch in Orange County, Calif., endorsed Prop. 8, would deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration, gay bloggers pounced. "The press made it seem like it was just a Warren versus gays story. It wasn't. It was a Warren versus gays and a Warren versus choice story. His stance on choice got less attention," Spaulding says. On inauguration weekend, when the opening prayer by Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay priest to be ordained as a bishop in a major Christian church, was excluded from the live HBO broadcast of the concert at Lincoln Memorial, bloggers pounced again. HBO ended up re-airing the broadcast with Robinson, and pressure from the gay blogosphere was one of the reasons why.
On the Internet, no group -- however controversial or on the fringe -- is invisible.
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An increase in maximum fines for broadcast indecency seems to be getting the attention of network television executives.
Since Congress raised the maximum fine from $32,500 to $325,000 last year, Pat Trueman with the Alliance Defense Fund said he has noticed more care being taken by networks.
"What you've got is appropriate screening of the material they put out to the public, and that's appropriate," he said. "That's what indecency law was supposed to accomplish."
But some broadcast executives are complaining, saying the higher fines chill freedom of speech. Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS, called them "unfair." He said his network turned away millions of dollars in Super Bowl ads that were deemed unfit for broadcast.
But Trueman pointed out that not all speech is protected.
"It will chill some material," he said, "but not every speech, not every word, not every comment is protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."