Today is supposed to be a day of protest by members of the GLBT community where they call in sick to work in order to demonstrate the importance of the community to society as a whole. This follows a similar series of protests carried out by immigrant rights supporters in 2004 and 2006.
As someone who has made no secret of his strong support for Gay rights and my strong opposition to Proposition 8, I do have to say I consider this to be a bad idea. When Prop 8 passed I discussed the theory that while some voters supported the initiative out of pure prejudice, many others did not. Some did so out of sincere religious or personal convictions and while I disagree with them I respect the sincerity there.
But the key group of voters were those who were on the fence, supportive of equal rights but on some level uncomfortable with the stereotype of the gay community (what I have called, for lack of a better term, the gay pride parade icon). To win over these voters it is key to show them that their GLBT friends are just like them, their friends and neighbors.
I do not think you achieve this by staying home from work and forcing your co workers to work extra hours and try to cover the slack. This only serves to increase resentment and anger from the people you want to reach out to. Now if they chose to do something like this on a non work day, to bring the community together on weekends to do work for charity, that would be a positive idea. But doing it on a work day simply hurts the cause you are trying to help
So let me be one to suggest that instead of call in gay to work day that we start a series of Gays for Charity weekends.