Jon Green: Is Bernie Sanders exaggerating his gay rights record?
Jon Green for AmericaBlog: Is Bernie Sanders exaggerating his gay rights record?
If you used to simply oppose anti-gay laws because of federalism, and you now support full equality (Sanders is a sponsor of the Equality Act), you can’t say your position hasn’t ever changed. Right?
This is admittedly a finely-split hair, but it isn’t exactly a contradiction for Bernie Sanders to say he’s been a longtime champion of gay rights who has also moved with political convenience on the issue of marriage.
It’s important to keep in mind through all of this that Bernie Sanders is 74 years old, and that politics is relative. When Bernie Sanders says he’s always been there on gay rights, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he was sponsoring anti-discrimination laws like the Equality Act and campaigning for Senate on legalizing same-sex marriage nearly 30 years ago. It does mean that at any given moment during his political career, Bernie Sanders was erring on the side of LGBT rights. But for a really, really long time, all it took to make that statement true was simply being opposed to laws that directly sanctioned discrimination. And while other politicians may have been a step ahead of him in supporting anti-discrimination laws and marriage equality, most of them weren’t getting elected to statewide office.
It’s useful to note that Sanders just went through a similar critique of his record on racial equality. Sanders (more accurately, Sanders’s supporters) made a big deal out of marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, touting both as evidence that he was “with it” on present-day issues pertaining to racial justice. To which the Black Lives Matter movement said, in effect, “Dude, that was fifty years ago. Where are you now?” Marching with Dr. King is great, but it isn’t a platform in the 21st Century. What was radical in the 1960s is now mainstream Democratic politics today; if your campaign rhetoric assumes that isn’t the case, it’s fair for the activist wing of the progressive movement to assume you’ve stopped pushing.
To Sanders’s credit, he took that criticism in stride, making tangible changes to his campaign and releasing a racial justice platform. In this case, given his existing co-sponsorship of the Equality Act and celebration of marriage equality, a similar change in platform in response to Stern may not be necessary. What is necessary is the recognition that fifty years in politics leaves a long record — a record that is absolutely fair game for criticism, but fairer game if that criticism is made with its age in mind.
I think this is fair criticism of Mr. Sanders' record. As the author points out, where Mr. Sanders is today is not exactly where he was multiple decades ago, but over all his record is pretty decent, and he's been quick to listen and update his platform where he's been deficient.