Obama contingent can't campaign at Pride
By Mara Math
An official contingent of Barack Obama supporters will be marching in the Pride Parade next weekend -- but they've been told not to wear campaign buttons or t-shirts and not to carry campaign signs.
An internal email from Rebecca Prozan, a member of Obama’s national LGBT leadership committee, went out June 15th asking participants in the Obama contingent at this year's parade to "refrain from wearing campaign-related materials in the march . . . to make sure the parade does not lose funds as a result of our participation.”
That surprised a lot of activists: The parade has always had its share of political campaigns. And some worried that the Obama camp, which has so far refused to support same-sex marriage, wanted to keep its distance from the community.
But the decision actually came from the Pride Foundation, which runs the parade. Pride argues that allowing direct promotion of one particular candidate would interfere with the group's tax-exempt status and would violate the conditions of a $77,000 annual grant from Grants for the Arts, which administers the city's hotel tax funds. And because of the group's tax-exempt status,
In fact, Brendan Behan, Pride's community mobilization specialist, told us that "Obama contingent participants can wear T-shirts of Obama as a senator from Illinois, but not as a presidential candidate."
As a nonprofit education group with a 501 c tax exemption, Pride can spend a tiny fraction of its budget on lobbying or campaigning. The city's rules also prohibit allowing unequal access to any one party or lobbying group.
It's hard to make the unequal-access point stick, since queer supporters of John McCain could also march in the parade. But Pride Executive Director Lindsey Jones put it this way: "They have equal access to not campaign."
Jones, who has been at the helm for five years, told us she didn't recall any active campaigning at the parade. "We only have four years of notes in our records," she said. "Maybe it's happened in the past, but we're all fallible."
Sup. Tom Ammiano told us that the rules have been in place for years, but people have always found ways around them. "The first time I ran for School Board, we'd made a big school bus and they told us we couldn't use it because I was a candidate," he said. "So we made a big fuss and in the end the put us last in the parade."
In other years, he said, "supporters of a candidate can just march along on the sidewalk. And sometimes they slip in and join you, and it's not a big deal."
Attorney Randy Shaw, founder of the nonprofit Tenderloin Housing Clinic, told us he thinks Pride's stance is misinterpretation of the law: "Clearly, no public funds can go toward sponsoring a political activity. But funds are sponsoring security, bathrooms, publicity, insurance etc.--- participants are not being "subsidized."
In fact, he said, "event organizers have no ability to enforce such a restriction, so it clearly is not covered by city restrictions on the use of public funds."
Jones disagrees: "When the Obama campaign questioned our guidelines, it was the first time we'd had a significant challenge to those guidelines, so I had people doing research, and the City Attorney affirmed our interpretation."
"There's a difference between having a standard guideline that we inform people about, and it's another whether we follow it," Jones was quick to add. "It's not an expectation of Grants for the Arts that we have an entire enforcement squad."
Prozan has a similar view. "If someone shows up to march in an Obama '08 shirt," she told us, "I'm not going to tell them to take it off unless they're sweating."
"To me it's an issue of freedom of speech, what some people would call a Constitutional issue," says activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca, an original member of Gay Liberation and a queer activist for almost four decades. "This is really discouraging coming from a community that in the past has itself been the victim of attempts to restrict its freedom of speech. Is $77,000 worth selling out for?"
To the question of whether the gain is worth the strain, Jones responds, "It's the responsibility of the community to make the changes they want to see." The Parade is 38 years old, she notes, and began as a gathering of 200 people; today, thanks to community demand, it has 20 stages and more than three-quarters of a million attendees.
The Parade has only had Grants for the Arts funding for 10 years. "If we come to feel that we need to forego that $77,000--that's how Pride changes. Every conversation we have, including this interview, changes Pride."
She urged those interested to "Pick up the phone and call me."
You can also email her at info@sfpride.org
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Comments (5)
This should be reason enough to vote for Nader/Gonzalez over Obama (whose chickenshit stance towards that hot potato is identical to McCain's (i.e. "Let the people decide").
In addition, Ichy's handlers never would have got the idea to start marrying people in 2003 had Gonzalez not made gay marriage a central issue in his campaign for mayor. And keep in mind that one of the main reasons that Gonzalez left the Democratic Party in 2000 was because Fat Albert opposes gay marriage.
The hypocritical low expectations of timid progressive Democrats never ceases to amaze me. Fifteen years from now Obama (who, in secret, is perfectly fine with gay marriage, no doubt) and his ilk will be jumping on the bandwagon with a inflated sense of self-importance, hindsight bias and, especially because it is stylish, cozy and 'safe', saying that they always supported gay marriage.
Posted by expatriate | June 18, 2008 07:14 PM
I'm no big city lawyer, but I've always found the Pride Parade rules to be overly conservative. The result seems to be fine for incumbents to deal with but problematic for challengers -- which would make sense if LGBT support were the status quo. Obviously, this presents problems at the national and statewide stages. Luckily, Obama's branding is so great that all you need is the logo (and I don't think my "California for Obama" shirt would violate the rule).
And Expatriate, there is no reason to waste your vote on Nader.
Posted by Bob Brigham | June 18, 2008 08:51 PM
There is no free speech issue here. The Pride Parade is organized as a 501c(3). This allows donors to the parade a tax receipt so that they can write it off from their taxes and it also makes them eligible for grant funding from the government. The restriction is that none of the money it spends can be used to promote a political candidate. By the same token, churches are also tax exempt and aren't supposed to promote candidates either.
If the pride parade wanted to allow political campaigning in its floats, it would be a simple matter of re-registering as a different type of non-profit status. However, doing this would mean that their donors couldn't get tax receipts and they would be ineligible for grant funding. This of course would make putting on the parade a lot harder.
Posted by Manish | June 19, 2008 03:34 PM
There is no free speech issue here. The Pride Parade is organized as a 501c(3). This allows donors to the parade a tax receipt so that they can write it off from their taxes and it also makes them eligible for grant funding from the government. The restriction is that none of the money it spends can be used to promote a political candidate. By the same token, churches are also tax exempt and aren't supposed to promote candidates either.
If the pride parade wanted to allow political campaigning in its floats, it would be a simple matter of re-registering as a different type of non-profit status. However, doing this would mean that their donors couldn't get tax receipts and they would be ineligible for grant funding. This of course would make putting on the parade a lot harder.
In the past, politicians have skirted this by simply putting on a float about themselves. Last year, State Senator Carole Migden, Assembly Member Mark Leno and private citizen Joe Alioto all had floats, but floats as themselves and not as candidates.
Posted by Manish | June 19, 2008 03:36 PM
I think Expatriate has some great reasons to exercise his/her democratic right to support Nader- namely Obama's chickenshit centrist positions on gay marriage, privatization of the military in Iraq (that Obama calls "ending the war"), single-payer health care, a border fence, kowtowing to AIPAC, public funding of presidential elections, the list goes on..
Bob Brigham, why not vote for your morals? Why waste your vote on someone whom the left has no interest in or means to hold accountable? who moves increasingly to the right even in the face of an assured Dem November landslide?
Posted by Wastrel | June 20, 2008 03:28 AM