Rep. Barney Frank has a great op-ed on Huffington Post today about what it means to fight for Democratic principles.
Written in response to Senator Obama's words about not wanting to refight the fights of the 1990's, Rep. Frank makes a few great points about why we are in those fights and why we have to continue them -- even if we would prefer not to.
It would have been nice in the nineties not to have had to fight to defend a woman's right to choose whether or not to have an abortion, and I would be very happy if that fight ended tomorrow. I was troubled when Newt Gingrich and his right wing band took over Congress after the election of 1994 and sought to put an end to programs to deal with continuing racial discrimination and the resulting inequality, and I am even more distressed that we have to continue to fight that battle against a Republican party largely opposed to all of these efforts -- consider the Bush Justice Department and its role in dealing with people's right to vote. As a gay man, additionally, I would have been delighted in the nineties if our conservative opponents had been willing to recognize our rights to be treated fairly under the law, and I would have saved a lot of time, as recently as this past year, if there was not continued strong right wing opposition to the "radical" position that people should not be denied jobs because of their fundamental nature, or that hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity should be treated less seriously than those based on racial or religious prejudice.
To be clear, Rep. Frank's words are not directed negatively toward Senator Obama, but he makes an important point that we are still fighting those battles today and if we choose to stop, the recourse will be losing the ground we've fought so hard to gain and hold.
I think the best way to summarize my concern is that if you tell people that we should not be willing to refight the battles of the nineties -- including many very important ones that we are far from having won -- and if you tell people to refuse partisanship, you may be inviting people to leave the battlefield to those with whom we have the biggest differences. Racial fairness, reproductive rights for women, an end to discrimination against sexual minorities, universal health care, the right of working men and women to bargain collectively with employers -- these battles we waged in the nineties remain essential to our vision today, and I do not understand why we should either be embarrassed about having fought hard for them, ten, fifteen or twenty years ago, or why we should not be determined to keep fighting until we have achieved success.
For all of us who have been frustrated by the Democrats' inability to do more since gaining the majority, Rep. Frank's words are a strong reminder of why those fights are unfortunately still not over. We all want more bipartisanship, but that won't truly happen until both sides believe bipartisanship means truly working together rather than just one side giving ground while the other takes more.