Once again the Democratic National Committee is tripping over itself, and its constituent groups, to extend the reach of its “inclusion.”
I have written before about the Democratic Party’s quotas for its convention delegates (here and here). Although the Dems, like most quota-mongers prefers to speak of “goals,” goals with penalties for not reaching are nothing if not quotas or, as I wrote in the first of the posts linked above, “a ‘goal’ is merely the polite label a quota dons in mixed company.”
I’ve also written before, here, about the effort to extend these “goals’ to gays, or more precisely, the LGBT (Lesbian/Gay/Bi-sexual/Transgender) community. Now they’ve done it, in the form of a new “inclusion” rule. Still, this move left some gays, or LGBTs, feeling dissed.
By unanimous voice vote, the 447-member Democratic National Committee on Aug. 19 approved a rule change that requires party leaders in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to establish “inclusion programs” to increase the number of gay delegates selected for the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
The vote came several weeks after party leaders, in behind-the-scenes negotiations, turned down a proposal by gay DNC members to include gays in the party’s long-standing affirmative action rule for selecting delegates. That rule currently is limited to African Americans, Latinos, Asian-Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and women.
Critics called the new inclusion rule a rehash of existing DNC policies calling for inclusion of gays in the delegate selection process. Gay Democratic activist Donald Hitchcock, the party’s former gay outreach director who was ousted by DNC Chair Howard Dean, noted that the new rule doesn’t require state parties to set the same goals for including gays that the affirmative action rule includes for other groups, such as African Americans.
The states reason for treating gays different from the favored groups is interesting, and reveals considerable confusion, or at least inconsistency, in the justifications offered for racial preferences. The National Stonewall Democrats and the DNC’s Gay & Lesbian Americans Caucus hailed the “inclusion program” as a “major breakthrough.”
Officials with the two groups said they yielded to objections by some African American DNC members, who felt the affirmative action rule should be reserved for groups that historically have suffered the denial of voting rights.
Hmm, think about that. The Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was proposed in 1919 and ratified in 1920. Does the DNC really require that half the delegates to its convention be women because in the past their right to vote was restricted? Was the right of “Latinos” or “Asian-Pacific Islander” to vote restricted in many states? I’m not aware of such restrictions in Alabama or Virginia. If past voting discrimination is really the rationale for preferential treatment, perhaps current preferences ought to be imposed only on states that discriminated in the past against the particular group.
But wait; there’s more. Andy Tobias, the DNC Treasurer, and Jo Wyrick, the National Stonewall Democrats executive director, said that
the inclusion rule for the first time calls on state parties to strive for “full inclusion” of GLBT delegates to the national party convention in proportion to their numbers in the “electorate.” The rule does not say how state parties should determine the proportion of gays in the electorate or whether the proportion should be on a state or national basis.
When Ward Connerly proposed amending the California constitution to prevent the state from collecting racial data, liberals — which is to say, Democrats — loudly protested that failure to collect such data would make the enforcement of civil rights laws impossible. But if that is so, how can the Democrats prevent their politically correct new “inclusion rule” from being a dead letter if they do not require potential delegates from every state to specify their sexual preference? Moreover, wouldn’t such information be required to prevent, say, the “over-representation” of bi-sexuals at the expense of the transgendered? Should black lesbians count in two categories, or would that be double-counting?
The Democrats, predictably, decided to sweep these questions under the rug.
NSD spokesperson John Marble said DNC officials said they would work out details of the proportional figure later after consulting with gay Democrats and others.
The work of “inclusion” specialists, it would appear, is never done.
John,
After a bit of case law reading on the Voting Rights Act (due to the BAMN suit), it is apparent to me that Parties, in the act of selecting delegates and placing or not placing names on the ballot, are considered extensions of government and subject to the VRA (following the VRA passage, the Democratic Party in southern states would use its Party Rule structure to exclude blacks – this circumvention was quickly, and rightly, quashed by federal courts).
So one could imagine a Democratic Precinct Delegate bringing a Voting Rights Act case against the Party for race quotas at the convention. And its alot more sound theory than BAMN’s VRA claim that giving everyone a vote on an issue denies blacks some defined voting right.
Chet – I think you’re absolutely right. But even more significant, to me, than the fact that Democratic convention quotas are probably illegal (and should be if they’re not) is what they say about the Dems’ values. How seriously should we take, for example, their frequent claims that they oppose quotas when they impose quotas on themselves, and probably would on the rest of us if they could.
I agree, I was just trying to point out the possibility of such a case for anyone out there who might be reading.
Can’t you just see the Democratic Party requiring each state to certify that its delegation is diverse with the following: “I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.”