Monday, March 10, 2025 - Why is only one Democrat (of eight) catching flak for trans prisoner vote?

The Zoom call dust-up between state Senator Elena Parent and the mother of a trans child continues to catch the attention of local media and the political consultant class; the latest to chime in being the ⁠Atlanta Journal Constitution's Bill Torpy⁠, who zeroed in on an angle: that Parent is one of four Democrats who voted for a GOP-led bill (four others skipped the vote altogether) to limit taxpayer-funded gender-affirming care for trans convicts while in prison, and of those four, (eight if you include the four who didn't vote) Parent is the only one who's white. Torpy also noted that the backlash Parent is enduring on her social media is also coming from angry white constituents (assuming they're all her constituents. This all gets back to ⁠points I made last week: this aggression solves nothing⁠, nor would Parent's vote have, were it to have gone the other way. We keep doing this to ourselves, on the left. "Incremental" isn't a sexy term, particularly when invoked in politics, but "ideological purity" is the enemy not just of "progress, but eveen just "incrementalism," too. Hell, I got a testy email over it. Not to foster a conversation or enlighten (plenty of opportunity to ⁠win hearts and minds with personal stories⁠) but more to manifest division (and derision, but I'm a big boy; I can handle it). - - - - - - - - As damaging as Kamala Harris' campaign having no answers for the barrage of 'anti-trans' attack ads that lead some Democrats now to be more calculating with their support, so, too, was the perceived 'gaslighting' by the Biden White House (and re-election campaign) about Joe Biden's ageand mental fitness. At least that's ⁠what an aide to the First Lady became the first to say publicly from within that White House staff.⁠ Infuriating to hear, but unsurprising, too.