This whole gay thing is a pretty close match for the environmental movement. Early on when there were genuine problems with pollution and habitat destruction driving species toward extinction and such, the environmental movement mobilized and turned things around. Early on when there was some pretty ugly discrimination against gays, the gay rights and media and etc, took actions to 'normalize' homosexuality and attitudes moved to what I feel was the appropriate stance (e.g., 'Some natural fraction of people are homosexuals and who really cares if someone is gay?')
Both movements were, as I see it, taken over by people with a political and social engineering interest. These engineers leveraged the momentum of these perfectly reasonable and necessary movements for their own goals and thereby turned them into a charade. Very counterproductive. If the legitimate people of both movements would have quit while they were ahead and rejected the usurpers, the world would have moved forward. Now both movements are a joke and increasingly seen as a threat to humanity (by me at least.)
Allow me to differ. What you're seeing is just the intersection of a lot of lionization showered on your doughty problem-fighters with good ol' human nature.
1. "Power on a whole tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Thanks to, uh, "democratick courtesie", we automatically assume that the leadership and
only the leadership is corrupted by power. But the sad fact is, ordinary folks are corrupted by power too. No more so when they think their power is the power to do good and right wrongs. To paraphrase G.K. Chesteron: a robber baron knows at some level that what he's doing is either immoral or will escalate to immorality: this realization restrains him. Contrariwise, the do-gooder simply cannot fathom how he could ever be immoral while do-gooding: this blind spot means he doesn't know when he's become corrupted by power. Remember, I'm also talking about ordinary folks.
2. "The Tradition Continues." This item is really tragic, because it comes from the better part of the "usurpers"' nature. They see themselves as joining a movement that has a mighty and lionized tradition. In order to live up to the example of the pioneers, they have to escalate - else they're just coasting on the dogged work and abuse heaped on those pioneers. Never mind that objective conditions suggest that it's time to de-escalate; they don't want to be like the stereotype of trust-fund brats!
The moral? There's a lot of profoundly counterintuitive wisdom in the maxims that say good deeds and good works are best done in the dark. This sucks - I much prefer the rule that good deeds should get the reward of good publicity - but we humans are what we are.
"Power on a whole tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."