"Milk"'s prophetic lessons

I've been in Boston and New Hampshire the last few days ahead of Christmas, but one of the highlights of the trip remains the fact I finally saw "Milk."

The movie remains one of the most brilliantly made films I have seen in a long-time, but the arguably prophetic lessons it provides to activists within the movement for LGBT rights provide an extremely powerful road map they should follow. One of the main themes with which I walked away is the necessity to explicitly include LGBT people in any campaign to secure their rights or to fight against any efforts to curtail them.

"Milk"'s release coincides with the continued aftermath of the bitter passage of Proposition 8 in California and the ineffective and frankly incompetent campaign that failed to defeat it. Activists and others within the movement continue to point fingers, soul search and look forward to pending efforts to reverse Prop 8's passage, but these figures must follow the example Harvey Milk set in his activism that helped defeat Proposition 6 by an overwhelming margin in the Golden State in 1978. To neglect the very constituents they profess to serve is disingenuous and arguably indicative of their own internalized homophobia.