Huddle Up: WEDGE ISSUES

[merrily]

34. I may not be the best person to speak, but if your kid's life is danger or your own, you might

become a single issue voter. Let me veer briefly from the so-called wedge issues.

Let's say, heaven forbid, that someone's child had a serious pre-existing medical condition that the family could not afford to take care of and one candidate was running on Medicare for all and another was running on ending Obamacare, Medicaid and Medicare. I would expect that parent to become a single issue voter really fast. In that parent's shoes, I would not be worried about foreign policy or interest rates on student loans or anything else.

In your case, your daughter is lesbian and you are a Democrat, so you probably did vote for the most pro GLBT candidate you could. I vote in Massachusetts, where Catholicism is a force, though much less than it was a few decades ago. My rep, a Catholic, though a fiercely pro-union Democrat used to be wobbly on choice and equal rights for members of the GLBT community. He has since changed his stand. And mercifully, I never had to vote for him before he changed because he doesn't get many primary challenges. But, if someone more socially liberal had a challenged him in a primary, I'm guessing you would have chosen the candidate best for your daughter no matter how good for unions my rep is.

If your daughter had been born a few decades earlier and had had the courage to come out to herself and then to you, you may have been a one issue voter as well. Especially if she were a guy. Lesbians got away with being "tomboys" or sports minded or whatever people told themselves about more masculine women then. Men who were more feminine did not get a pass, then, though, even if they were hetero.

BlueNorthwest is older than your daughter and came up in an era when NYC police would regularly go to gay bars and literally billy club people for nothing other than being in the bar--and the general public was more than fine with that. Police got cheered the same way Bostonians cheered them when they announced they had found Tsarnaev. No one would hire someone even suspected of being gay. And on and on. I totally understand his being a one issue voter.

If I thought Sanders were a racist or even indifferent to African Americans, I don't know who I would vote for in this primary. I see the other two candidates whom I might otherwise consider as more questionable on matters of race than Bernie, as well as on other matters. (Some older, prominent African Americans see war as a race issue, too.) It's not that race is unimportant to me, but that I see Sanders and his record very differently than some African Americans are seeing him and his record. I don't know what to do about that difference in perception. Maybe only African Americans who see him and his record differently can do something about that?

As far as people changing their candidatd because of how some DUers post or tweet, that I cannot understand. But I do understand being a single issue voter when your life and/or your child's life is at risk. And your entire community's lives.