Sunday School Lessons: To Tell the Truth
Jo Wyrick
Executive Director
My little third-grade Sunday school class at the First Baptist Church in Greensboro, NC taught me the important lesson that sins of omission and commission are equal in nature. Telling my mom that I had eaten my broccoli, when I had really just nibbled off a taste before scraping it into the trash, could technically be construed as true. However, conveniently leaving out a few key facts actually made my story as much of a malicious lie as telling her a flat-out fib.
I was reminded of that lesson this week when an inflammatory action alert from the Log Cabin Republicans incorrectly warned that Democratic Senator Max Baucus (MT) was prohibiting a piece of pro-gay legislation from moving forward in his role as Chair of the Senate Finance Committee. The alert specifically claimed that Senator Baucus was trying to block the Domestic Partner Health Benefits Equity Act, which would provide tax breaks to businesses offering health care to the domestic partners of their employees.
Oh, how that Sunday school lesson comes in handy now.
Senator Baucus fully supports the Domestic Partner Health Benefits Equity Act. In fact, he supported the bill when Republicans routinely blocked it while they held control of the Senate Finance Committee. Now, it is only because Democrats control the committee that we can expect this bill to finally move forward over Republican objections and under the Chairmanship of Senator Baucus.
Republicans have attempted to introduce an onslaught of amendments designed to prevent an up-or-down vote on legislation that would increase the federal minimum wage. When a Republican Senator asked to add an extremely watered-down version of the Domestic Partner Health Benefits Equity Act (one that would only give tax relief to the self-employed but not to corporations or small businesses) onto the minimum wage bill, Senator Baucus noted that he supported the more comprehensive version of the legislation. He also reminded the committee that as part of a Republican compromise over the minimum wage bill, all amendments related to health care would be considered at a later date. That was the end of it, until gay Republicans rang their false alarm.
I understand that if the Republican Party delivered little for LGBT families under their decade-long congressional majority, an easy press strategy would be to misconstrue the positions of Democrats in order to make the failures of the GOP look reasonable. It may be easy, but it is not effective. Our respective parties are better served when our organizations actually work to improve their positions rather than simply apologize for them.
National Stonewall Democrats is happy to defend the increasingly strong record of the Democratic Party on LGBT issues. However, our more important work lies in our efforts to further push our party so that it can represent our families even better.
Stonewall is currently undertaking the hard work of improving the Democratic Party from the inside by dramatically increasing the participation of LGBT Americans in party affairs. This not only allows our community to better serve as a resource for candidates and campaigns, but it creates additional pressure and avenues for Democrats to become more forward in their support of our families.
We are doing this in several ways. Stonewall is already working with activists to examine all state party platforms and improve their language on LGBT issues. We have constructed a comprehensive delegate-selection program for the 2008 Democratic Convention that is designed to compel state parties to engage our community more aggressively. We are teaching our chapters how to place Stonewall members onto key committees that influence and improve the policy of the Democratic Party. And we are training state parties on how to effectively work with the full-spectrum of our community from LGBT youth to people of color.
When I think back to that third-grade Sunday school lesson, I recognize that firing off cheap shots which omit key facts is fairly easy. However, it isn’t the right thing to do. Committing ourselves to improving the records of the Democratic and Republican Parties takes more muscular leadership, but it can accomplish much more.
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