Proudly Out: Identity Politics for Democrats

When I was young and perhaps a little naïve, I thought then when someone said they were a Democrat it meant they were pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-worker, pro-access to health care . . . you know for all the things that meant being socially progressive.

Over the years I’ve learned that there’s an exception to every political rule. Clearly, not all Democrats are pro-choice.

For instance, there’s Bob Casey, the much lauded Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania. He has a 65 percent rating on pro-choice issues from NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League. In 2007, he supported an amendment to the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that would have codified the Bush administration’s “unborn child” regulation. If put into law, the regulation would have allowed states to make an embryo or a fetus, but not the pregnant mother, eligible for health care. The bill was just another attempt to erode the legal framework for abortion rights by recognizing an embryo, from the moment of conception, as a separate beneficiary of government programs. The amendment failed by one vote.

All we needed was one more renegade Dem and a mass of cells would have more access to health care than the pregnant woman carrying those cells in her womb.

There’s no doubt about it. The Democratic Party has moved more to the center. It had to in order to win. But despite the likes of Bob Casey, on the national level, today when we think of Democrats, we can feel safe that there are pro-choice Democrats in the White House and in control of both houses of Congress.

But our gains are sometimes also our losses. Here in New York State, we’ve been waiting decades for the Democrats to take control of the State Senate. For what has seemed like an eternity (actually only 43 years), the Republicans have had a stranglehold on the Senate in the Empire State.

When other states were passing gay rights legislation, New York lagged behind because the GOP owed its majority to the cross endorsements it received from the state’s Conservative Party. At the height of their power, the Conservative lets the GOP know that pro-gay rights legislation passing would mean losing those endorsements. So, for years, New York’s gay community wandered in the desert of discrimination.

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