Why I’m still a Democrat
I have friends who hate the Democratic Party. Frankly there are aspects of it that annoy the hell out of me, too. The wokeness is such a turnoff, with its intellectual narrowness, smug superiority and obsession with race. At its most ridiculous extreme you get a situation like the one in San Francisco, where a woke school board decided to rename schools named after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln because they were deemed to be “racists.” Even in ultra-liberal San Francisco, that shocked a lot of people, and it looks like those school board members will be recalled.
I can’t really blame people who leave the Democratic Party, although I do think that because of Trump, the Republican Party is an even worse choice. Some of my friends would never admit to being Trumpers, nor would I ask because it’s none of my business, but I suspect they are. I admit to being a never-Trumper and a never-Republican. But my loathing of the Republican Party preceded Trump and will last after he’s gone, and for a very simple reason: As a gay man, I’ve been aware for the last 40 years that the Republican Party wants to kill me.
Hyperbole? No. Fueling the Republican Party since the 1970s has been the odious, dangerous conservative-Christian movement in America. That includes evangelicals, Pentecostals and extreme Catholics. These people peddle the pathological lie that gay people are (fill in the blank: satanic, going to hell, depraved, hated by God). There are elements within this lunatic cult that believe God sent AIDS as punishment for gays (which always makes me giggle: Does God send tornadoes to trailer parks because she hates evangelicals?). These sociopaths make no secret of the fact that they would like to eliminate gay people from America. They may not come out and call for the murder of gay people, although some of them do call for our forced incarceration or segregation. But at the root of their rhetoric lies the simple, atavistic desire to rub out gay people, and as we’ve seen in Hitler’s Germany and anyplace that ISIS controlled, such a desire, if unopposed, leads inevitably to genocide.
I don’t expect non-gay people to understand this. We gays have been hunted down by the straight majority our entire lives. We’ve been ostracized and made to feel demonized even when we know we’re good people. This hatred of gays is accurately called “homophobia” but it’s been systematically organized into a movement called the Republican Party that is the party of hatred and death. I truly believe that, at the heart of every homophobe is a kernel of pure evil.
This is why I remain a Democrat and not a Republican. For all the complaining I do about the Democratic Party, I never forget the many blessings it has given us: an end to child labor, labor unions, Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Endangered Species Act, the environmental movement, the minimum wage, women’s rights, gay marriage, fighting climate change, supporting trans rights—the list goes on and on. Republicans opposed every single one of those initiatives because of the evil that has putrefied their souls.
This is why I’m proud to be a Democrat. I call myself a “moderate” Democrat because I believe in the moderately left-of-center ideals propounded by Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and President Biden. But make no mistake, I loathe the woke people as much as the Republicans loathe them. We need to reform our party by bringing it closer to the center, and the way to do that is by rejecting the reverse-racism and arrogance of the wokes.
“I don’t expect non-gay people to understand this. We gays have been hunted down by the straight majority our entire lives. We’ve been ostracized and made to feel demonized even when we know we’re good people.”
Gee… there’s no way that any other minority group could understand how this feels, right? Like, maybe if instead of your sexual orientation, it was your race that caused such a huge impact? But no, Dems are just obsessed with race, for no reason, smfh. It’s sad because you’re *so close* to having compassion for other groups, but still so far.
Dear “A Liberal,” I agree with you. I wrote that in a moment of passion–passion built up over a very long lifetime of being threatened by the majority. In my voting and in my personal beliefs, I know that every minority group has experienced the same prejudice. I hope every day to come closer to the perfect mind, the same as you.