Is backing AT&T a civil right? GLAAD should know better

[Commentary] Wireless phone service has about as much to do with gay rights as zebras have to do with waterskiing. So gay bloggers were justified in hounding Jarrett Barrios, who until this past weekend was president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, after he wrote the federal government on behalf of AT&T, a corporation that had donated $50,000 to Barrios’s watchdog group.

Clearly, some activist groups have grown a little too fond of their corporate backers, at a cost to their credibility. A lawmaker who receives a letter from GLAAD or the NAACP on a mundane piece of business like a corporate merger might understandably give less credence to their letters on civil rights. Shilling for AT&T makes them seem more like paid lobbyists than clarions of justice; it carries more than a whiff of hackery.