Another Rift in the Democratic Party?

On Tuesday, The Austin American-Statesman had an interesting article about a rift in the Democratic Party. Not the one you think.

. . .an increasingly nasty lawsuit against the DNC, brought by Donald Hitchcock after he was fired as the party’s gay and lesbian outreach director, has exposed the rift between gays and one of the party’s most important constituencies, African Americans.

As an outsider to both groups, it seemed to me that the LGBT groups were looking for recognition, participation and a guaranteed voice in DNC matters. Many consider this a civil rights issue. While the use of the term “civil rights” seems to offend some AA groups, it does not necessarily look as if “civil rights” is the driving factor in what follows.

In my read of the available materials, the issue is power. Powerful AAs in the Democratic party want to keep that power in AA hands. An example of this was the recent election in Alabama of Patricia Todd, the first openly gay state legislator. In a race for the seat of a retiring AA legislator, with no Republican opponent, the Democratic primary would decide who held the seat.

Five people ran and the vote was close enough to force a run-off between the top two vote-getters – Todd, a white gay woman, and Gaynell Hendricks, an AA woman. The run-off was decided in favor of Todd by 59 votes out of 2287.

From Wikipedia:

[Todd's] run-off victory was challenged by her opponent’s mother-in-law, who claimed that Todd had received “illegal votes” and had filed a campaign finance report late.[4] That report contained information – a $25,000 contribution from the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and payments to two of her primary opponents – that opponents charged could have affected the outcome.

It was widely reported[5] that the contest centered around the question of race. Todd is white, and the outgoing legislator, like the majority of the district, is black. Many of the state’s African-American political leaders were apparently eager to keep the seat in black hands.[6]

A sub-committee of the Alabama Democratic Party (ADP) met to decide the contest and voted 5–0 to disqualify both Todd and her opponent, on the basis of what the ADP Chairman Joe Turnham called an “archaic party by-law”.[7] The by-law had not only been superseded by the 1988 Fair Campaign Practices Act but had not been followed by any candidate running for any office since 1988, including candidates for governor. It also emerged that the by-law was in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act and may well actually have been repealed.[8]

Following sustained pressure and newspaper editorials criticising the judgement,[9], the State Democratic Executive Committee voted on 26 August to overturn the sub-committee’s ruling by a vote of 95–87. According to press reports, the voting was “mostly along racial lines”.[5]

Footnotes at Wikipedia will take you to original articles, some of which are no longer available.

The NYT had this to say at the time:

The challenge was brought by Ms. Hendricks’s mother-in-law. But it was tacitly supported by Joe L. Reed, a longtime Democratic kingmaker and the party’s vice chairman of minority affairs. Mr. Reed had urged voters to support Ms. Hendricks, and at one point the Alabama Democratic Conference, a black political organization that he is chairman of, gave a check to cover the $3,000 fee needed to bring the challenge in case Ms. Hendricks missed the deadline. He also controlled the subcommittee; three of the five members were drawn from a pool of Mr. Reed’s appointees.

“This is really not about race,” Ms. Todd said in a telephone interview as she traveled to Montgomery for the hearing. “This is about Joe Reed controlling the party and trying to get his way, and he’s just a bully.”

Mr. Reed disagreed. “She doesn’t even know me,’’ he said, “so she wouldn’t be in any position to know. This is not about lifestyles; this is not about race. This is about whether she complied with the party rules.”

The Times seems to suggest the issue may have been race, but LGTB groups saw sexual orientation as the issue.

The WaPo reported the eventual outcome this way:

The Alabama Democratic Party Executive Committee voted 95-87 on Saturday to reject that decision. Party chairman Joe Turnham said no candidate has filed a disclosure report with the party since 1988.

The vote, which pitted vice chairman Joe Reed, a powerful black political leader, against other party officials, fell mostly along racial lines.

Prior to the Todd election, the DNC’s director of outreach to the gay community, Donald Hitchcock, was fired after his domestic partner, Paul Yandura, wrote a letter criticizing DNC chair Howard Dean to gay Democrats.

Hitchcock sued the DNC alleging discrimination. During the course of the lawsuit, the Todd election and other issues between the LGBT community and the AA community surfaced.

According to the Washington Blade:

Yandura’s open letter to gay Democrats in 2006 came shortly after reports surfaced that some members of the DNC Black Caucus opposed a proposal by gay DNC member Garry Shay of California to add gays to the party’s affirmative action guidelines for selecting delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

According to documents obtained by the Blade, Daughtry allegedly led a vigorous effort to thwart the plan.

Leah Daughtry, Dean’s chief of staff and long time party operative, is an AA woman who is also a pentecostal minister.

Shay’s proposal called for a DNC rule change that would require all state parties to set goals for selecting a minimum number of gay delegates, much in the same way that delegate quotas exist for African Americans, Latinos, Asian-Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and women.

Here’s where Donna Brazile comes in. Apparently she supported the change as long as it was voluntary, not required. Why might she do this?

The New York Daily News reported that Brazile, a member of the DNC Black Caucus, was among the Democrats who were concerned that Shay’s proposal could result in fewer black delegates attending the convention.

Not surprisingly, some information has come forth – from YouTube. The first clip is from the beginning of the Dean deposition. The second concerns the Shay proposal.

So, while this may or may not directly impact every NQ reader, it is instructive. Any group with power and a guaranteed voice is not likely to share that without a fight. In this case, it appears the main objection to full inclusion of the LGBT community in the Democratic party relates more to a potential loss of power than even race or sexual orientation, although those go hand-in-hand when people are grouped this way. But ultimately, it’s about power – and keeping it. Naturally, to the LGBT community, it is a denial of their rights.

Ironic from a civil rights standpoint, but predictable from a human one, and the Democratic Party is showing the strain. However, I’ll just bet the calculation within the upper echelons is that the LGBT community will just have to hold on. Where else can they go, right?? Well, maybe the Log Cabin Republicans, in a pinch?

If you are a student of irony, this is good. The Todd election was initially reversed based on a rule not enforced for nearly 20 years because it was superseded by the 1988 Fair Campaign Practices Act. The rule was also in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act and may have been repealed to boot. The panel that ruled the Todd election void based on this discriminatory rule was majority AA and appointed by Joe Reed, the vice chairman of minority affairs for the Democratic party in Alabama.

In the end, is this a racial issue, a gay / straight issue or simply about power? Yes, to varying degrees and individuals, it is about all of the above. However, it is clearly about keeping power in the hands of established Democratic operatives. In this case, those operatives are AA. Would the outcome be the same if the gay participants were also AA? Hard to say – in that case, other issues, like gay / straight tensions or religious ones, might have more influence. Would a gay AA win over a straight white person in a traditionally AA district? I have no idea.

In today’s political climate, with AA presidential candidate BO promising a “post-racial” inclusive administration, this issue is particularly poignant. How the Democratic Party handles this and how the AA community responds to the challenge of the LGBT community will be interesting, to say the least.

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