Identity politics. It is present in the rulings coming from the left-skewed mind of Sonia Sotomayor. It is present in the leftist tactic of classifying everyone by their social group and pandering to each separately. The problem with this approach is that once in power, the Democrats simply cannot please everyone. This is something that President Obama has learned the hard way.

I was reading this article called “Gay is not the new black” where the author makes clear that the gay community needs to stop criticizing Obama and that the African-American community’s plights have been worse than the gay community’s. Pretty silly if you ask me, given that they are supposedly on the same side, but it is a testament to what the left has done in this country. Since the majority of gay people are white in this country, it makes that community somewhat incompatible with the African-American community. Which leads me to some facts: Obama has not spent political capital on gays. That’s a fact. Gay people have all the right in the world to criticize him, as long as it’s civil. My second point is that the plights of gay people throughout history has not been pretty. There have historically never existed any safe havens for gay people, while there is an entire continent where the majority is black. To trivialize their suffering is a slap in the face to the spirit of the civil rights movement.

The lesson here is simple: identity politics cannot exist in a free and equal society. The Democrats’ vision of each racial group, ethnic group, group of similar sexual preference having a special consideration in the eyes of the government only further divides our society. We need to respect everyone’s rights regardless of “classification” otherwise one group’s gain due to race will be another group’s loss due to race. Conservatives would do well by using the inevitable rifts in the Democratic Party, rifts caused when a Gay candidate or Black candidate or Latino candidate serve their own constituencies or neglect a particular constituency. The only way that conservatives can win the votes of people interested in full participation in the American Dream is to make clear the message of conservatism. Conservatives already believe in individual freedom and human rights, we just need to cast off the image of intolerance that the mainstream media and the left has helped create. Individuals in these communities also need to realize that being seen as a category or a label only further divides us.

-AG