Democrats and gays

Seen in isolation, President-elect Barack Obama’s controversial decision to invite conservative evangelical leader Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation would seem a sideshow, a kerfuffle on the way to history.

The truth is more complicated — and more significant.

Gays and lesbians make up a significant faction within the Democratic Party. They are a significant voting block, but they’re also key fundraisers and activists.

What’s more, many progressives see gay rights as the moral equivalent of civil rights.

But other mainline Democratic factions are deeply uncomfortable with the GLBT movement.

Exhibit A: The black community’s staunch support helped pass Proposition 8. That’s the ballot measure that recently stripped California gays of equal marriage rights.

Exhibit B: New York state Senator Ruben Diaz’s decision to road-block a Democratic majority in Albany, largely because he opposes same-sex marriage and other gay rights.

“The Democratic Party should not be a party of only two issues: Abortion and homosexual marriage,” Diaz wrote, in a statement issued over the weekend.

Obama’s invitation extended to Rick Warren — a man who compared same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia — looks a whole lot like Exhibit C.

It seems to me that Democrats are at a crossroads. They can choose to oppose further gay rights, formally and frankly closing the door on things like gays in the military and marriage rights.

Or they can embrace they idea that people in same-sex relationships are, well, human and therefore (to quote one of our founding documents) “created equal.”

But the time when party leaders can have it both ways is ending.

“Obama also said today that he is a ‘fierce advocate for equality’ for gays,” wrote columnist John Cloud last week in Time magazine, “which is — given his opposition to equal marriage rights — simply a lie.”

Tags: glbt