If nothing else, the controversy that’s surrounded the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act in recent weeks strongly suggests that it’s time to re-think how our community deals with politicians in Washington.

For more than two decades we’ve used basic, old-fashioned, grassroots lobbying to accomplish remarkable things at the state and local level. Here in Illinois alone, we’ve seen that approach bear fruit over and over again, passing strong non-discrimination ordinances that include gender identity as well as sexual orientation in Chicago and in such places as Peoria and Champaign.

Statewide, with Equality Illinois leading a broad coalition of diverse lobbying groups, we passed a comprehensive non-discrimination act two years ago that—once again—includes gender identity as well as sexual orientation.

Activists in other parts of the United States—from Atlanta to Dallas to Albuquerque—have done the same.

But in Washington, despite spending tens of millions of dollars annually, we’ve gone nowhere, to the point that some of our leaders are so desperate for a victory—any victory—that a few weeks ago they took gender identity out of the proposed ENDA bill, broadened the religious exemptions and changed the bill’s language to make it harder for gay and lesbian employees to get the same benefits enjoyed by their straight counterparts.

All this was done just to get a bill that sponsors thought might pass the House of Representatives. Never mind that it can’t get through the U.S. Senate or past the president, they say, implying that all they really want is something—anything—to try to present to gay and lesbian voters as an accomplishment in next year’s elections.

The proposed bill already exempts employers with less than 15 employees and doesn’t prohibit discrimination in housing, credit transactions and public accommodations, things included in virtually every state and local act passed in the last decade. Heck, why not take sexual orientation out of it altogether and just pass a resolution that asks people to please think really hard before they fire their gay employees. After all, that would be even easier to pass, wouldn’t it?

That most of the GLBT community around the country reacted with outrage when gender identity was dropped from the bill is reassuring. We now know—at least the great majority of us who live outside Washington—that when it comes to securing our rights, we really are all in this together.

The way our community came together to send that message has also been a positive development. When more than 300 groups in our diverse community—groups of all stripes from virtually every state in the U.S.—can come together almost instantly and work seamlessly with each other to present a unified front to Congress, it tells us that we have the means now to transform the way we approach change in Washington.

For decades our community has trusted a small group of high-paid Washington lobbyists to do things for us in the nation’s capital—an approach that hasn’t worked and often leaves many of us feeling disenfranchised. Just ask the “T” in our GLBT community about that.

Now we know that what we need to do is work from the ground up, trusting the strong grassroots lobbies we’ve built in our states to help us speak more effectively to our individual members of Congress and to work together—through the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and nationwide coalitions such as the Equality Federation—to give us a strong, confident voice on Capitol Hill.

And we need to work here at home making sure we elect members of Congress who support full civil rights and marriage equality for all of us. Again, that’s something that can best be done through our local grassroots groups such as Equality Illinois—not by sending our dollars off to Washington lobbyists and hoping that somehow, someday they translate into real progress back here. After all, when we give locally, we have local accountability.

It’s been a tumultuous few weeks. And by the time our readers see this, the bad version of ENDA may have passed the House, giving a few folks in Washington their small victory.

But out here in the heartland, where most of us live, we’ve won something even bigger—a brand new day. And things won’t ever be the same again.