It wasn’t so long ago, just over six years ago in fact, when the Democratic Party was facing some serious backlash from its LGBT constituents over its silence on the issues which matter most in our lives. President Obama had taken office a little more than a year and a half previously, and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act had just become law, but the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…” hadn’t happened yet.
Many LGBT Democrats, particularly those in the working class, were more than a little upset with the party because the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which President Obama and many congressional Democrats had promised to act on during the previous election season once the election was won, had gotten no legislative attention in Congress and not so much as a substantive peep from Obama or anyone in the White House.
At the time, the White House and Democrats in Congress seemed to feel that working class LGBTs who were struggling in the wake of the economic disaster the United States was still climbing out of, should be satisfied with the passage of an inclusive hate crimes law which looked good on paper but didn’t actually help anyone maintain a home, keep any families together, or protect a single worker from rampant anti-LGBT discrimination.
Slogans like “The GayTM is closed!” began to appear online. The LGBT community began to rally and call out those who were choosing to remain silent on ENDA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…”. A key constituency the Democratic Party had come to rely on had finally become fed up with being pushed aside and was making sure people knew it.
The DNC, at least, realized this was going to be a problem for them going into the 2010 midterms. Since Democratic elected officials were apparently afraid to address potentially controversial LGBT issues with the midterm election season approaching, they rolled out the Chairman of the DNC to run point on dealing with the LGBT community, a guy named Tim Kaine.
Kaine, of course, adhered to the Party standard of talking much but saying little, even to the point of making a video in which he implied that the fight for LGBT equality was somehow a new thing. “…progress can’t be achieved overnight.” Kaine said in the video, as if he’d somehow forgotten that over 40 years had passed since the Stonewall Riots.
Kaine also promised that the Party would do “everything in our power” to pass ENDA, but in reality it would prove to be another three years, well after Democrats had lost control of the House, before the Senate actually took a vote on the bill, and about halfway into President Obama’s second term before he publicly addressed the issue while in office.
Now we’re hearing a lot of complaints that Kaine didn’t take advantage of opportunities presented during the Vice Presidential Debate to call out GOP candidate Mike Pence on his horrific record of anti-LGBT discrimination. While it’s of course frustrating to many of us that Kaine chose not to take that opportunity, his rationale for not doing so is what should truly anger us most.
“That was an opportunity,” Kaine said. “I would have loved to have had a 93-minute debate instead of a 90-minute debate.”
Consider what this statement implies, that everything else discussed at the debate, including the barbs the candidates threw at each other, is more important than LGBT equality and more deserving of airtime. It speaks volumes on the importance Kaine places on LGBT equality and the priority he and Hillary Clinton place on bringing these issues into mainstream public discourse with the election almost upon us.
It’s arguable that Kaine and the Clinton campaign felt that championing LGBT issues during the debate would have hampered the Clinton campaign’s efforts to bring GOP voters who are unwilling to vote for Donald Trump into the fold. If so, then LGBT voters are forced to wonder if we can really count on a Clinton Administration to fight for us once safely elected to office, or if we’ll see the same kind of low-hanging fruit picking on LGBT rights we’ve seen during the Obama Administration even when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
At least this time it’s the candidate herself, rather than a surrogate, doing damage control. In an op-ed published in the Philadelphia Gay News, Hillary Clinton makes similar promises to those made by Obama nine years ago. It’s important to note, however, that this op-ed was released to just a single LGBT newspaper, not nationally or to mainstream media, just as President Obama’s op-ed was released only to a small group of LGBT-focused blogs. It forces you to wonder if the Clinton campaign is serious about its support for our community or if they’re really just looking to mollify a much-needed minority voting constituency while keeping us and our issues as far under the mainstream media radar as possible.
There’s only one credible choice for LGBT voters and the Clinton campaign knows it. For the vast majority of us, as well as for clear-minded straight and cis voters, voting for Trump is simply not an option. Just as in the case of the campaign’s failure to keep its promise to fill out the Trans United Fund’s Presidential Questionnaire, these events are a little too similar to last time around and therefore cannot help but call into question the Clinton campaign’s real level of support and priority for LGBT people and issues.
Like it or not, for good or ill, Hillary Clinton is our candidate. She has to be. We can only hope that her promises mean more than Obama’s did.