Ocamb Reports On LGBT Leadership Summit

Reporter Karen Ocamb has posted her extensive report on what REALLY happened at the LGBT Leadership Summit on Saturday July 25th (that MadProfessah attended and was part of the Prepare To Prevail faction) to Bilerico.com and tries to set the record straight:

A blog for the San Francisco Chronicle came out fairly quickly after Saturday's statewide LGBT "Leadership Summit" in San Bernardino, California with the results of a non-binding straw poll about when the LGBT community wants to return to the ballot to repeal Prop 8: "93 people voted to go in 2010, 49 in 2012 and 20 undecided."

I was there. The count's accurate but it's far from the whole story. What really happened was that a vote was taken around 5:00pm - an hour after the meeting was supposed to end and a good number of people had left - and 93 people voted for 2010 and 69 opposed that idea. The count was justified as being taken among those who cared enough to show up in San Bernardino in late July ("sweltering" is one word that comes to mind) and stay until the bitter end.

Let's look at the demographics.

At its height, the over-heated church hall was filled with about 250 grassroots activists, mostly from the San Diego and Los Angeles area - a point loudly noted by leaders from Northern California who were receiving text messages from friends watching the Unite the Fight streaming video. Their online votes on a question just prior to the straw poll about how to best create a campaign structure had been discounted.

Additionally, before the two votes, when the room was about at 200 people, I counted the number of people of color and came up with 37. I asked both a grassroots activist and an "institutional" leader - stretching the number to 40 in case I missed a couple of people in the way back or outside - and they both independently concurred.

So while the straw poll accurately reflects the wishes of that late audience, the 162 people whose votes were counted do not necessarily reflect the wishes of the California LGBT community.