National gay bloggers, Omahans thank you

LGBT people in Omaha have a lot of people in their own community and just as many (likely more) straight allies to thank for the recent passage of Ben Gray's ordinance. You know who all those people are, which is good, because this post isn't about them.
     It is about the people outside Nebraska who provided tremendous support to our effort by writing about it on a national level. At one point council members were receiving hundreds of emails a day; most of them were from out of state, and you know the fundamentalists weren't sitting on their hands.
     In 2010, when the Omaha Chamber of Commerce lobbied against LGBT Ordinance 1.0, Joe.My.God said this to its readers: "If you were planning on any business or personal travel to Omaha, let the Chamber of Commerce know if this news changes your plans."
     So many of them did, that apparently the server software must have thought it was under attack and shut itself down (AKSARBENT's supposition) because the website was unavailable most of the next day. When AKSARBENT called the Chamber to find out why, we were told by the receptionist that it was "broken" when she arrived in the morning.
     Over and over again, bloggers with a national audience like Andy Towle of Towleroad and Jeremy Hooper of GoodAsYou and Joe Jervis of JoeMyGod and Zack Ford and Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress — even Cyd Zeigler of OutSports — posted updates on the efforts in Omaha to get this thing done. And not because an LGBT ordinance in Middle America, 20 years overdue, was a big draw to their readers.

     On JMG, AKSARBENT noticed that one post about our efforts got just nine comments. A nearby post, about an "accordion" bus in NYC, got fifteen. Two hours later, Omaha was still at nine and the bus post had started to pull away. Still, the blogs gave Omaha more than generous attention.
     The gay bloggers in the so-called eastern establishment are anything but provincial. They understand how important it is that gay people in urban strongholds leverage their national influence on behalf of gay people who live in places where hostile heterosexual supremacists rule the roost. They never take for granted what they have achieved and prove it every day with their support of us and others.
     We are all in their debt.