Amen! I wrote an article at the end of last week begging Democrats and allies and friends to fight harder for us, to see what's going on, to get tough.

Sadly, the Democratic establishment seems more than reluctant to fight back. You can occasionally get a kind word of support from a Democratic politician, but the full-throated rhetoric Republicans are using is just not matched by Democrats.

Republicans are pulling no punches, going to war as hard as they can, and the mainstream Democratic response so far is to turn the other cheek.

We could be using this. Polls indicate the American public are overwhelmingly supportive of LGBTQ people and issues. Democratic leaders could leverage that support to whip up enthusiasm for the Democratic Party. But they seem reluctant to, they seem more interested in targeting hypothetical centrist voters (who they apparently think are queasy on queer issues) than fighting for their faithful constituents and engaging our fiercely faithful friends and supporters.

In my own state of Michigan just last week, a Republican candidate for the state legislature who is proposing harsh anti-LGBTQ laws, sent out a fundraising mailer disguised to look at first like a letter from the local school system advising parents that their child had been placed on a waiting list for gender-reassignment surgery.

If you read queer news sources, you know about this. Because we're reporting it, because it's outrageous. Not least because children are not eligible for gender-reassignment surgery in the United States and nobody suggests they ought to be, contrary to this politician's fear-mongering tactic.

But you'd be hard-pressed to hear about it anywhere else. One place you won't hear about it is from Democratic Michigan politicians. They're acting like they want the whole issue to go away. They're making it pretty darn clear that we're on our own. They expect us to vote for them, but they sure as hell aren't giving us much in return, not even public denunciations of obvious bullshit.