Dallas Voice :: Letters March 28, 2008
Will the conventions be fair?
by Geoff Staples

With the Texas Democratic Party Senate District Conventions being held this weekend (Saturday, March 29), I wanted to alert the community to what happened at the Senate District 23 Democratic convention in 2006.

I am a Democrat because I believe the Democratic Party to be the party of equality, justice, liberty, respect and economic opportunity for all persons. Unfortunately, the 2006 SD 23 convention caused me to doubt this belief.

I was a delegate and a member of the Resolutions Committee. In that committee, we discuss and vote on resolutions covering the gamut of current issues. At the 2006 convention, the Resolutions Committee voted down a resolution calling for universal health care and when it was brought to the floor of the convention, the convention affirmed they did not support universal health care.

Equally appalling, the Resolutions Committee voted down a resolution calling for gay and lesbian families to have equal rights to marriage and the benefits thereof. African-American committee members abused their one-vote majority and block-voted against the resolution while every other person on the committee voted for passage. During the discussion, some of the African-Americans even cited the Bible as justification for their vote.

When I brought this block-vote up to SD 23 State Sen. Royce West at the Dallas County Democratic Party Labor Day Picnic, he brushed me off saying, “That’s only one issue. I’m sure we agree on almost every other issue.”

To those of us suffering from this discrimination, it isn’t only one issue.

In the 1967 Loving vs. Virginia case, the United States Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling stated, “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man.’” The ruling declared anti-miscegenation laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional.

I have heard Eleanor Holmes Norton — an African-American woman, chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1977 to 1981, and current member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Washington, D.C. — state on several occasions, including her keynote address to the Dallas Black Tie Dinner in the early 1990s, that “sexual orientation is the functional equivalent of race for the purposes of civil rights law.”

I hope the GLBT community and the readers of this paper will watch to see whether African-American delegates to Saturday’s convention once again abuse their majoritarian power to deny the minority GLBT community our just civil rights. I know I will be watching.

Geoff Staples
Dallas

Dallas Voice :: Letters March 28, 2008.