Barney Frank On DADT & ENDA: Gays Need To Lobby Like The NRA

In an interview with Karen Ocamb, yesterday Rep. Barney Frank dismissed activism devices like marches and petitions, saying that if the LGBT community wants progress on DADT and ENDA, they need to lobby like the NRA - by calling their representatives personally and often.

"I’ve been begging people for years to lobby their senators. And I have very little sympathy with the armchair strategists who say – making it a piece of another legislation is hard to do. I really advise people in the community not to take the easy way out of trying to devise parliamentary tricks to get over the obstacles. Yes, as soon as they’re through lobbying their representatives, they’ve got to lobby senators. That’s the answer. There’s no trickery here. There’s no slight of hand. We need to get the votes and they’ve got to call senators and get senators to vote for it – and if they can’t get senators to vote for it – they shouldn’t be surprised if we lose. Look I’ve been telling people for years, we have a problem because still there’s some resistance on the transgender issue. People don’t want to hear that. I think maybe they’re afraid of having it tested. I believe the House will send the Senate a bill that will have good transgender protections – people have been telling me it’s no problem. We will mark it up. Well, let’s see. The only thing people should do if they want to get this bill passed is call their representatives, call their senators and after they’ve called – get other people to call their representatives and their senators, not people from some other place.”

Frank also repeated his famous dissing of last fall's March On Washington: "They only thing they put pressure on was the grass."