Fine By Us - in Campus Progress

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For Lucas Schaefer, like thousands of others who poured themselves into grueling Get Out the Vote campaigns, the drive out of Florida in November 2004 was long and awful. Lucas--who had not-quite-made-it through Grassroots Campaigns Inc's MoveOn Leave No Voter Behind fiasco--was apparently feeling particularly masochistic; so Lucas, who is a curious sort, forced himself to ride out the trip home with talk radio on. He baked for hours in the heat of right-wing victory tirades.

"It was the moral values moment," he recalled to me with disgust, referring to the polling question to which the majority of voters supposedly answered that they 'voted their values.' "All these pundits and various anti-gay groups were using that polling question to make it seem as if the majority of Americans were unsupportive of gay rights. These right-wing activists would spin the election of George Bush to empower themselves by further disempowering the homosexuals in the country. And I'm becoming angrier and angrier -- that's not true in my experience. That wasn't the America that I had just experienced in Florida."

In the time since the election, compelled forward by this experience, Lucas has been traveling across the country many times over with the Gay? Fine By Me T-shirt project, like a Johnny Appleseed sowing fields of fruity tolerance. This week in Campus Progress, I'm fortunate to have had the chance to write about this simple-yet-remarkably-ambitious idea that Lucas has helped grow into a true grassroots movement:

Today, Fine By Me campaigns have run in over 200 communities. Last month alone, at least 50 college campuses were treated to the coordinated display of 12,000 students, faculty, and staff who are openly tolerant of a diverse spectrum of sexual orientation.

Schaefer regularly travels to new campuses to give presentations about what the program is all about. From there, the effect is viral—the T-shirts have a way of moving themselves around—and every week a new group or two decides to launch their own campaign.

[S]ays Schaefer of his organization’s relationship with the groups that run Fine By Me campaigns: "Our experience is that this program can work in any community, and we’ll tell you what worked for us and what worked for other groups, but how you want to implement it is pretty much up to you."

At its heart, this is the essence of activism: taking a moral cause that a great number of people believe to be just, and making the essence of that justice inescapably visible.

And what I love best about this story is that Lucas--like the creators of this site, in fact--has been propelled forward by the experience of crushing defeat in 2004. Sort of (kind of) like how the Sex Pistols launched a thousand bands by slaughtering rock and roll -- perhaps we could say the same about George Bush and democracy. (Or maybe that's a stretch... Anyways, read up!)