Countering the Right:
Mobilizing our Communities

Jean Hardisty, Author & Commentator

Jean Hardisty and Alejandra Sardá opened the Retreat with a provocative analysis of how to mobilize our communities and counter tactics launched by the religious and political right. A well funded and highly organized machine, the right's success at framing and shaping national and international policy continues to consume valuable time and resources from the LGBTI community.

Jean Hardisty, founder of Political Research Associates, in Boston, Massachusetts, has studied the religious and political right in the United States for thirty years. She shared a four prong strategy designed to keep activists educated and buoyant during a time she described as the worst political climate since the Vietnam War. "Do your homework," she urged. "If we don't understand why there is a resurgence of the right wing in this country, and we don't have a complex analysis of that resurgence, we will fight with simplistic slogans and apply pressure in the wrong places."

She also counseled against caricaturing the right using demonizing language -- a tactic often used against the LGBTI community and one which ultimately precludes all possibility of dialogue. "The right are not uneducated rednecks and fools," Hardisty reiterated. "They are middleclass believers who often feel they are looked down upon and shut out in society. And we share many of their concerns about materialism, consumerism, TV culture and violence."

"To me, power is the ability to transform oneself and to transform the world we all live in." Alejandra Sardá, Mulabi - Latin American Space for Sexualities and Rights

Hardisty advised activists to resist compromising in order to make political headway. "Racism, torture, the distribution of wealth, religious intolerance, victimization of those who are marginalized -- we know where we stand on these issues," she declared. "There is no room for compromise here."

Alejandra Sardá, Coordinator of Mulabi - Latin American Space for Sexualities and Rights, in Buenos Aires, Argentina noted the insidious and prominent role fear plays in the Argentinean religious and political right. "Fear," she warned, "immobilizes us. And unless we overcome that, we will always be at a disadvantage."

Slowly but surely, many citizens are bravely transcending that very real fear. Sardá spoke of women marching in the streets and demanding safe and legal access to abortion; this, despite the certainty that their President, fearing reprisals from the powerful Church, is set to block any such legislation. She shared stories of citizens accessing power in new ways: workers occupying vacated factories and transforming them into successful cooperatives; and citizens, without becoming a formal part of government, participating in municipal decision making.

Sardá also imparted a message of hope, solidarity and resistance to progressives living in the United States. "Having grown up under a dictatorship," she said, "I know how it is to live in a country where your civil liberties are restricted, where your government is torturing people and killing people, and there is nothing you can do. The best thing you can do for yourselves and if you want to make a contribution to the world at large, is to work locally to confront your government. It is very hard on the outside of the U.S. to hear the resistance, to see the resistance. I know that everybody in this room is part of that, but we don't hear you enough...Be more vocal. Keep resisting."