As much as the Labor Day holiday marks the end of summer, it also reminds us that elections are just a few months away, and this November is extremely important for PA politics. I headed over to Steel City Stonewall Democrat’s web site to see what was up with their current efforts last week, only to find their site off-line. Days later it is still off-line and one has to wonder if this important Pittsburgh LGBTQ organization is gone or simply fading from importance.

This is a real shame for the Western PA LGBTQ community which looks to a group like SCSD for information on how various candidates rate when it comes to issues important to the community.Between SCSD and the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, Western PA voters had information available to them, but will that continue? Efforts towards the November ballot for Pennsylvania could not be more urgent than this year. The track record of Tom Corbett has been horrible for Pennsylvania, and now that The Keystone State has marriage equality, getting full state-wide non-discrimination protections passed is crucial. If we can’t make gains towards that end in this 2014 election we will have set efforts back to the point where we may env er see state-wide non-discrimination protections, and the situation will have been made worse for lesbian and gay couples across Pennsylvania. I’ll say more about that idea later because you may not think this election is so important, but it is, and I can support that claim.

Political progress towards equality requires action at many levels:

• Increasing voter enthusiasm and having an engaged electorate;
• an informed electorate who votes only for those candidates who will actually improve the state in regards to LGBTQ issues;
• support for candidates who move the state forward on progressive issues;
• turning out the vote for progressives- increasing the percentage of people who get out and vote;

Steel City and groups like it work on all these directions as well as others. In other words, groups like SCSD are critically important to the continued growth and health of a Western PA LGBTQ community.

I’ve always been impressed by those groups who do the very hard work of voter education and information spreading. I believe so many of the LGBTQ gains politically in Western PA were the result of the hard work of the now disbanded League of Gay and Lesbian Voters. That group more than any other worked miracles when it came to gathering information from candidates and producing a useful voter guide. These efforts of canvassing candidates, collecting questionnaires and making the information available is no small task. It is extremely hard work! Not hard like rocket science, but hard like herding cats. But it is essential work- critical work in my opinion.

I reached out to Jim Sheppard, SCSD president, and he replied only that the web site was experiencing “technical difficulties,” but one has to wonder if those difficulties are financial given the page error that is displayed for any SCSD web site:

Although I’m not sure if the outage can be blamed on the hosting provider or technical difficulties. Has the group simply become lazy or unproductive? Their Facebook page shows no entries since July, and their “about” page and listed officers are way out of date. Effective non-profits and especially those within the LGBTQ community must make communication, and transparency a priority, and clearly these qualities don’t mean much to the officers running Steel City Stonewall Democrats. I sure hope no one tries to suggest that they just don’t have time to update a Facebook page.

I haven’t attended the group’s endorsement meeting for a few years, but others have relayed to me that participation continues to dwindle. I wonder if memberships have dropped off, and what the group is doing about it? Can any group expect to remain strong and healthy when so-called important efforts like their push to unseat the current governor appear to languish as forgotten?

LGBTQ voters who seek to remain informed have fewer and fewer useful resources. The Gertrude Stein Political Club still makes endorsements and so does Equality PA, although EQPA’s efforts are not focused on Western PA but the commonwealth as a whole. Too, I’d evaluate EQPA’s efforts as being more about gaining political clout, rather than the also important task of voter education/engagement. Little can replace the almost old-fashioned effort to get members together to vote on candidate endorsements- what used to be the primary activity of SCSD.

Hey, Steel City Stonewall Democrats, if you need a reliable web site host, I can recommend one! Thomascwaters.com has never been off-line due to “technical difficulties” and I owe a part of that to my hosting companyTubu.net, which does whatever it takes to remain operational. In my experience, any technical difficulties have been resolved within minutes.

Let’s hope that any vacation from active work for Steel City Stonewall Democrats will end soon, as the group can be an essential player in helping to grow the voice of LGBTQ and allied voters here in Western PA. Or, let’s hope that the group gets new leadership who will focus on doing whatever it takes to not be an “account suspended” type of presence.