Progressive Coalitions and Facts of Life Strategies.

One takeaway from the otherwise disastrous (for LGBTQ+-inclusive folk) 2019 General Conference of the United Methodist Church: the anti-inclusion folk just plain out-strategized us progressives.

I'll leave to one side the possibility of improper shenanigans that may have helped traditionalists win the day. I have Thoughts and Feelings about that matter, but I'll save those for another day.

Even apart from any illegalities, though, it's undeniable that the traditionalists, mainly through mechanisms like the Wesley Covenant Association (WCA) or Good News do politics very, very well. They cultivate delegates, finesse legislation, and organize voting with a great deal of foresight and tactical sophistication. They think about who will speak for what motion/measure, what identity or rhetoric would prove most persuasive. They rank and promote slates of candidates and causes. They know how to discipline their coalition into adopting a following a strategy from above.

And it gets them results.

Now, progressives in the UMC such as the Reconciling Ministries Network strategize as well, as we in Louisiana did last week at Annual Conference. But left-leaning organizations generally prefer a "let 1,000 flowers bloom" approach. We value diversity and try (imperfectly) to avoid silencing or marginalizing minority perspectives. We encourage speaking and listening, even and especially when what we have to listen to involves criticism from below or from the margins.

Our diversity of backgrounds, identities, views, and causes makes the effort to organize around a single expression, a single strategy, painfully difficult. Who gets to speak right now? Who has to stay silent for that speaker to be heard? How can we translate the complexity of who we are into messages that compete well in an online attention economy? This is tricky and uncomfortable. We're hyper-aware of how focusing efforts for gay and lesbian inclusion, for example, can leave other sexualities (like bisexuality) conveniently on the back burner.

Issues get even more complicated the more intersectional we try to be. An ideal Church responds equally to racism, sexism, trans*phobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and all the rest. But in reality it often feels like addressing one problem means sidelining concerns about others. The conversation veers awkwardly in to a matter of immediate priorities--which cause do we unify around right now?

And when each of these causes is a life-or-death matter, when each has a long history of being ignored or sidelined, when each is full of veteran activists and survivors who are just plain sick and tired of being put off--well, it's just a nasty, unhappy game where even winning can feel like defeat.

I'd like to think another way is possible, that we can find ways of celebrating partial victories (Louisiana Methodists elected a slate of delegates that comes close to matching state gender and racial demographics! We elected our first openly gay delegate!) even as we acknowledge exclusions and shortcomings (Methodists have yet to broach the subject of trans* people in Louisiana. Talking about systemic racism in any real way--as it pertains to Louisiana--seems verboten. And we're still split on questions of basic LGBTQ+ rights). 

 Call it a facts-of-life strategy: you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have...a survival ethos for long-term progressive activism? (Not just progressives; non-progressive movements practice something similar.) Certain questions then get critical: how much good do you need to keep going? How much bad can you take, and for how long?