So there's an article in today's New York Times that suggests that the Republican organizing majority in the New York State Senate is going to be composed entirely of white men, that it is not going to look like New York and that it is not going to be friendly to the problems of "minorities." Guess who is concerned with this. Rubén Díaz Sr. Here's what he told the Times:
Now, there’s nothing for them. There’s nothing for minorities. Of course it concerns me. What are we doing? We minorities, we’re not getting anywhere.
I suppose it all depends on how you define "minority." Here we are again using the race/ethnicity paradigm to describe a situation that should be more complicated than that.
Regular readers of Daily Kos who are interested in New York politics and LGBT issues should be very familiar with State Senator Díaz by now. You've read about his utter contempt for the rights of LGBT New Yorkers here and here and here and here. "Virulent homophobe" is probably a good description of his position.
I'm sure he sees no hypocrisy here. Minority rights in the Díaz formulation apply to ethnic minorities and to this remarkable new religious minority, bigoted Christians. To be fair about the ethnic minority issue here, the new Congressman and former State Senator Hakim Jeffries and the Reverend Al Sharpton are concerned about under-representation in the governing coalition; in fact Rev. Al has a demonstration planned for tomorrow. The IDC (the Democrats who are caucusing with the Republican minority - think of them as blue dogs) of course want to assure New Yorkers that all of them will be represented but that really smacks of self-justification here, especially since the group's leader wants some black and Latino/a senators to join him in caucusing with the Republican minority. Yeah. Right.
I'm sure the racial and ethnic minority issues can be worked out if anyone in the leadership of the New York State Senate wants then to be worked out. I'm afraid that this idea that the strain of white Protestantism that has dominated American culture since the landings at Plymouth and Boston is being discriminated against in current American society because it has increasingly unpopular views about the rights of LGBT Americans will be with us as long as it's fanned by people like Tony Perkins and Bill O'Reilly and other bigoted Christians like State Senator Díaz here.
(Yes, I'm keeping it short. Still absolutely numb and it took more energy to write this than I expected. Off to the mortuary today to explain that the only entity beside Social Security that needs a death certificate is me because all the bank accounts are JOINT because we were MARRIED. Yes, I'll have the marriage certificate with me. Oh, did I mention I'm not sleeping well?)