Should gays support Democratic Party?

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now constituted. Even under the most favorable conditions, the participation of the organized labor movement in politics as a faction of the Democratic Party has yielded very meager results. For the past six years the top legislative demands of the unions have been a fair employment practices law and the James P. Cannon repeal of the Taft-Hartley law. They couldn't get either one out of their coalition with the Democratic Party.

When the real showdown begins, labor on its side will be obliged to present real demands. The most militant and reactionary section of the capitalists, on the other side, will be setting out to smash the unions. What good is this Democratic-labor coalition going to be to the workers in such a situation? Why, it's really ludicrous when you stop to think about it. The strongest opposition to the civil rights program, and the strongest support to anti-labor legislation in recent years, has come from labor's "partners" in the Democraticlabor coalition, the Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party. That will not change. The capitalists, who in the last analysis rule the Democratic Party, will never permit labor to "capture it."

Under the pressure of the first big crisis the Democratic Party, as now constituted, will split, and the workers will posals to reverse the corporationinduced attack on working-class America are nowhere to be found in this fog of platform bombast.

In this election, however, even the rhetoric falls a little flat. What is more, only watered-down oratory drones out of the mouth of a man described by columnist Jack Anderson as a "chronic vice president who would represent America ideally at state funerals. " unions. Labor will be compelled to take the next step in political action-to break the coalition with the Democrats once and for all, and to form its own party....

In my view, a labor party will be formed under conditions similar to those under which the CIO was organized. And the party formed under such conditions and by such means cannot be a conservative party any more than the CIO could be a conservative union of the old type. Such a party will be of necessity, from the very first start, a radical, semirevolutionary party, with the most militant workers and the conscious revolutionists pushing it to the left.

And in this situation of political awakening of the workers, when for the first time the American workers as a class begin to turn to politics on their own account-then the revolutionary Marxist party, which has foreseen the whole development, which has theorized it long before it began, will find its own native environment, its natural field of work. It will become, in this great expanding situation, what is said in the scriptures, the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.

The revolutionary party represents the future of the workers' movement in the present. It begins with a theoretical program which foresees the whole line of social development, and assembles its preliminary cadres on that basis. This theoretical understanding and faith in the future deriving from it are the conditions for the existence and dogged perseverance of the revolutionary party in time of stagnation and reaction. But for its rapid expansion into a popular party of the masses, it requires a great surging class struggle. That will come with the next crisis which is already ripening.

their own electoral alternative-a labor party based on the unions.

"We chase around like a bunch of scriptwriters, " Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) candidly told The Wall Street Journal (July 16, 1984), "zapping the president with oneliners-totally oblivious to the distance between real America and Democratic rhetoric. "

What ever Hollings' intentions, that's the real truth, straight from the horse's, or in this case, the donkey's mouth.

International Viewpoint Fifteen years after the Stonewall rebellion in New York City marked the birth of the gay liberation movement in the United States, gays and lesbians have made some significant gains toward eliminating the discrimination against them.

Over 50 cities and counties have at least some degree of legal protection against anti-gay discrimination. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have passed comprehensive gay-rights laws. More than half the states now have no restriction on private adult consensual acts.

poll reported that while a majority still oppose the gay lifestyle, 52 percent favored laws protecting gays from job discrimination.

In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association ceased viewing homosexuality as an illness. The American Psychological Association followed suit in 1975. Gay rights has won support from numerous labor unions, including the United Auto and Aerospace Workers Union, the California AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Postal Workers Union. And a number of church groups have come out strongly in favor of gay rights.

In 1978 California voters defeated the homophobic Briggs Initiative that would have excluded anyone "advocating" gay rights from the public schools. This spring a similar statute was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Hundreds of thousands of people have mobilized in recent years to demand full civil and human rights for gays and lesbians. Every year Gay Pride Parades are held all across the country. Parades in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles have attracted as many as 300,000 participants. In 1979 over 200,000 people marched in Washington, D.C., for lesbian and gay rights.

It is such independent mobilizations of the gay community and their supremains inadequate. The AIDS epidemic has been used to justify a sex ban and police spying at gay bathhouses, and to spur greater opposition to civil rights legislation protecting gay rights.

Even citizenship is still denied to gay people. Last year the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the refusal of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to naturalize a Texas resident because he is gay.

The point is that nowhere are lesbians and gays free from anti-gay bigotry and homophobia. Further progress toward achieving lesbian and gay rights is being jeopardized by the orientation of large sections of the movement toward the two capitalist parties. While the Democratic and Republican parties sometimes give lip service to lesbian and gay demands, they have no real interest in the liberation of gay people. Instead, their purpose is to weaken and derail the The lesbian and gay movement has become increasingly dominated by lesbian and gay Democratic clubs. Hoping to curry favors from the Democratic Party convention in July, much of the gay movement finds itself disarmed and demobilized by their reliance on the Democratic Party.

Rather than looking to the capitalist parties for support, lesbians and gays should look for allies among organized labor, women, Blacks, Latinos, youth, and those fighting against nuclear weapons and U.S. intervention in Central America.

A massive, visible movement for lesbian and gay rights must be built that is independent of the parties of the wealthy, and is subordinate to no one. L A Socials Anton Fampidet_..

AUGUST 1984

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Public attitudes have changed. A recent nationwide Los Angeles Times