It was nice of the Obama campaign to respond to my email to them about Donnie McClurkin headlining Obama's southern gospel tour. No, not a substantive response but a form-response put together with talking points they want to sell to people who are either stupid or have no idea what they are talking about. Here is the response, in segments, with my reaction:

Thank you for sharing your strong objections to statements of one of the performers on the recent South Carolina gospel tour. I appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns directly because I strongly disagree with Pastor McClurkin’s deeply hurtful and offensive statements about sexual orientation.

Now McClurkin is "one of the performers"? He was THE headliner, Senator, and you are not fooling anyone. On top of it, you are missing the point. This isn't about whether you disagree with McClurkin's comments on sexual orientation. This is about you putting a bigot on your campaign stage to promote your campaign. Would you give a racist the center stage on your campaign platform and try to get around it by issuing a meaningless statement like "Oh, but I strongly disagree with that guy's racist remarks!" You are exploiting the homophobia present in the black evangelical community for votes. You are showing contempt for both that community and the LGBT one.

I have always clearly stated my belief that members of the LGBT community are our brothers and sisters and should be provided the respect, dignity, and rights of all other citizens. I have consistently supported gay rights throughout my career, and I will continue to work for an open, tolerant society where people of all sexual orientations are protected and their contributions are valued. To honor my commitment to promoting tolerance on the gospel tour, I asked Rev. Andy Sidden, an openly gay South Carolina pastor, to open the tour and offer a prayer. I’m glad he joined us, because we have to speak to people we disagree with in order to confront issues that are important to gay and black communities, like the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Lame excuse about how he asked both a bigot and an subject of the bigotry to join the same concert. I'm not impressed. This is like saying he asked both a racist and the President of NAACP to come on his campaign stage so all is now peaches. The rest of the email was about how someone at the Human Rights campaign thanked him for including this gay pastor, and yada yada. No one has a problem because you included a gay pastor (even if he was a white gay pastor preaching to a mostly black, evangelical religious community who were also being preached to by a popular black pastor saying God delivered him from homosexuality, gee, I wonder who the crowd would take to), Senator. The problem is not that you included him - even though as an afterthought. The problem is your pandering to the extreme religious components and having a person with outspoken bigoted views appear on your campaign stage - the particular issue he is bigoted about is less important than the bigotry itself.

Obama recently made a very pointed decision about the LGBT community - that he wouldn't take renowned anti-gay pastor Donnie McClurkin off his gospel tour across the south, despite repeated warnings of McClurkin's feelings about gays, who ended up telling the crowd from Obama's campaign platform that "God delivered" him from homosexuality. Nice. By the way, if you want to know more about the flap, start with this open letter from "pastordan" on Daily Kos, and do a Google or Yahoo news search on "Obama McClurkin anti-gay." Obama made a decision to pander to some in the African American religious community in order to surrender his principled support for equal rights for all Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. So I made a decision too. And I wrote to the Obama campaign telling them my decision. Here is the letter, verbatim:

Dear Sen. Obama:

I am writing you today with a heavy heart. But I am not writing you with a request, or even a demand. I am writing you today to inform you of a decision that I made as a citizen and a voter. I am a proud Democratic activist. I am also gay. I'm 24, and an American of Indian descent. There was a point in time when your message against homophobia in African American churches was inspiring. Painfully, however, that lasted only until your political fortunes gave you wind of another reality: that the rift between the African American religious community and the LGBT community could be exploited for your political gain. You went on tour with Rev. Donnie McClurkin, a known homophobic activist, who declared on YOUR campaign stage, "God delivered me from homosexuality."

This culmination came after you rejected calls from the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities and proponents of tolerance from all walks of life to take Rev. McClurkin off your campaign tour. I believe your actions to be pure political pandering. You believed that pandering to the homophobia that exists in certain corners of the African American religious community would net you more votes than you would lose in LGBT support from this act. Perhaps that is true, perhaps that is false. But that is NOT right. You choose to open our wounds instead of choosing to bringing us together. Bringing a homophobic person on stage with a gay pastor does not help the situation. If your message was unification and tolerance, you have utterly failed to deliver it. You should have chosen African American religious leaders who rejected homophobia and rejected anyone that espoused it. You did not just offend me politically. You didn't even just offend me. You hurt me. You hurt me at a very personal level. At a time when the California NAACP is fighting in the California state legislature to pass marriage equality into law and standing side by side with the LGBT community, at a time when black religious leaders are denouncing homophobia in increasing numbers, the person you, the most prominent African American politician in the country, chose to headline your gospel tour is not someone who fights on the side of justice but on the side of homophobia.

You say that while you disagree with McClurkin's position, you would not exclude him because many African Americans believe the same as he does. Well, isn't your job as a leader to lead for justice and against those bigotries? That is a pathetic excuse, Senator, and you know it. You are trying to claim that a big tent has to include bigotry, and that is preposterous. And so, I have come to a decision. And that decision is that I cannot vote for you, and not just in the Democratic primary. I cannot vote for you in the general election either - even if you become the Democratic nominee for President. I cannot - I will not - support a candidate who knowingly promotes a homophobic religious figure on his campaign platform.

Lest you think this is because I was personally offended as a gay man, you are right. But it wasn't only because of that that I made this decision. I draw the line in the sand when politicians pander to any group and sacrifice their stated goals of equal dignity under law and associate themselves, willingly, with known bigots of any kind, be they racists, sexists or homophobes. This is such a line. Obama has crossed it. Good riddance, Barack Obama.

I got an email alert from the ACLU about how California Senator Diane Feinstein, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is about to meet with Administration Officials to consider an expansive version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The expansion under consideration would grant blanket and retroactive immunity to Telecom companies for cooperating with the Bush Administration's illegal wiretapping program, and would give the President the authority to seek "basket" warrants that would let them collect and keep forever the communications between any American and anyone outside the US without satisfying the 4th Amendment requirement for probable cause. If you are interested, read more about the campaign on ACLU's website. Here is my letter to Sen. Feinstein:

Dear Sen. Feinstein, I am writing you both as a constituent and as a concerned American weary of expansion of governmental power that trample on the Constitutional liberties of the American people. I am writing to urge you to use your influence as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee to block any legislation that could retroactively grant immunity to America's largest telecommunications companies for their cooperation in illegal wiretapping of Americans, and/or grants to the President the power of "basket or blanket warrants" that would require anything less than the 4th Amendment standard of probable cause in its issuance for every American it targets. It is easy to expand the government's power because of a threat to our security, Senator. It is difficult and yet far more necessary to vigorously defend our liberties precisely at the moment such expansions are tempting. Our bill of rights were written not during peacetime, but during wartime, at a time when America did truly face an existential threat. I urge you to take the path of our founders and expand, not contract, the rights and liberties of the land of the free.