There’s a battle going on in the leadership of Gay Rights organizations:

In the past week alone, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay and lesbian advocacy group, has accepted the resignation of its executive director, appointed its first non-gay board co-chairman and adopted a new, more moderate strategy, with less emphasis on legalizing same-sex marriages and more on strengthening personal relationships.

Social change is slow: women’s sufferage, prohibition, civil rights — all took decades of preparation. The gay leadership ensconced comfortably in the liberal bastions on the coasts made a grave miscalculation as to timing the big push for acceptance. Their time has not yet come. They must be patient.

But others involved in the drive for gay and lesbian equality say the Human Rights Campaign’s approach smacks of pre-emptive surrender and wrong-headed political calculation.

“For a certain segment of the movement, for which I would certainly elect the H.R.C. as poster child, it means that the error was that we were wanting too much too fast,” said Jonathan D. Katz, executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale. “It is entirely characteristic for them to believe that what is required is a sort of retrenchment and a return to a more moderate message. They are, of course, completely wrong.”

It is Katz who is completely wrong, but it takes a Republican to point it out:

Trevor Potter, a Republican elections lawyer and a member of the Human Rights Campaign’s board of directors, said the group’s new approach was not a retreat but an acknowledgement of changed circumstances.

“It’s a wake-up call,” he said. “Just continuing to do what we were doing would not be productive.”

But liberals always continue to do what is not working: throw more money at education instead of looking at restructuring, make concessions to the enemy instead of confronting it, keep Social Security the way it is in the face of an aging population and certain bankruptcy, oppose Medicare reform, and on and on and on.