The Audacity to Vote — Green

I have before written on the emotionally masochistic relationship progressive Democrats have with their party — what I’ve described as a kind of Stockholm syndrome they have with their captors. In the past year Rahm Emanuel has told them to “fuck off,” Vice President Biden has told them to “stop whining,” and most recently, gay progressive Democrats (GPDs) got kicked in the groin by the Obama administration when it decided it would appeal Judge Virginia Phillips’s injunction to halt all “don’t ask, don’t tell” dismissals after an earlier declaration that the infamous law is unconstitutional. Here in New York, when marriage equality came to a vote in the Democratic-controlled state senate, the body failed to pass the bill by 14 votes.

Now that the midterm election is upon us, the Democratic establishment has employed the fear tactic to get its progressives in line by saying, “If you don’t vote us back in, think of what the alternative will be.” And much like progressive Dems in general, GPDs — most notably the Human Rights Campaign — have resorted to shameless (or is it shameful?) apologies for the party and administration’s shortcomings by asking for more patience because “change takes time” and habitually failing to call out the administration and congressional Democrats’ poor progress on LGBT issues, or they have gotten vocally angry, but with no intention to not vote Democratic.

And why is that? Just when the Obama administration could have shown some chutzpah and let Judge Phillips’s injunction stand, it decided to play more legislative hot potato to what, get a bill passed in a Senate that has already stopped a DADT repeal with a filibuster? And as President Obama talks from both sides of his face, promising DADT will end “on his watch” while his administration pursues its continued enforcement, somehow the charade gives the Democrats’ gay progressive members just enough rhetorical carrot to keep them from losing hope that they’ll at least win the right to marry and the right to serve openly in the military.

But can GPDs expect more than what the Democratic Party says it stands for? According to its platform, it is committed to:

• Repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” in a sensible way that strengthens our armed forces and our national security
• Ensuring civil unions and equal federal rights for LGBT couples as well as fully repealing the Defense of Marriage Act

That’s it. Nowhere does it connect LGBT concerns with immigration reform
or health care. As a party, Democrats are not “committed” to marriage
equality outside of guaranteeing equal federal rights to LGBT couples.
As a party, its collective understanding of “gay civil equality” is only
a matter of civil unions and military, and yet GPDs’ faith in their
captors remain in part because they believe there is no alternative. 
And that’s simply not true.