A Different Look at HB3

Two weeks ago, Democrats in Monroe were wringing their hands over the fear that competing

Democrat candidates would split the mayoral vote and hand the election to unelected Robert

Burns. Last week, they were wringing their hands over a legislative act to make Monroe’s

elections partisan, which would have almost certainly meant the mayor would lose in a

Republican primary or a one-on-one general election. This week, we are faced with the

likelihood that the legislature will cancel our election altogether, give Burns another year, and

move our municipal election to coincide with national elections, diluting attention to our local

issues.

Methinks we have protested too much.

I understand the offense at the legislature’s apparent overreach last week, although by law cities

are creatures of the state, but many people focused too much on the process and too little on the

outcomes. That’s a downside to elevating ideological purity, where some of us like to argue,

above practical effects, where all of us have to live. Maybe this worst-case scenario will teach us

a lesson.

I cast my first vote at age 17 in 1972 – I would be 18 by the time of the general election, so I was

permitted to vote in the primary. I was there at Ground Zero of both Democratic ideological

purity and the Republican shift to white supremacy – I voted for George McGovern and against

Jesse Helms. I have opposed both for most of my life. Now my retirement from practicing

journalism allows me to speak more freely, although I remain unaffiliated politically.

Ideological purity is damaging to Democrats because their coalition is broad and diverse. It holds

the Republican coalition together because that coalition is narrow and monolithic, characterized

by fanatical devotion to a cult of personality. In other words, Republicans find their identity in

who they exclude; Democrats find their identity in who they include.

Because my personal starting point is human equality, I tend to agree more often with the

Democrats, but I have a substantial “plague on both your houses” file. I rage-quit Facebook

several years ago when putative liberals were defending the exclusion of Sarah Sanders from a

restaurant in Virginia. Their arguments echoed the lunch-counter racists of my youth. Exclusion

is exclusion. The only justification for exclusion is bad behavior at that moment, i.e., behavior

that threatens the rights of others presence. There is no right to feel offended.

The practice of DEI since 2020, when the George Floyd protests led to a host of unqualified

people getting DEI jobs in companies, turned ideological in a way that I believe contributed to

the election loss – the first attack on Kamala Harris was “DEI candidate.” The language of “gay

rights,” “Black rights,” “immigrants’ rights,” “women’s rights,” etc. led to the understandable

confusion that we were talking about special rights for special interest groups. Maybe some

practitioners were, but we should have meant equal human rights applied to everyone. The only

message that has brought progress, from Abraham Lincoln to FDR to Martin Luther King, is

human equality. Again, the right-sounding ideology produced the wrong outcome. In Monroe,

money from the dissolved DEI committee was transferred to Winchester despite an effort to

make it available across the city, signaling that DEI is for Black people rather than for everyone.

The Preamble to the Constitution identifies its desired outcomes, including “establish justice,”

“ensure domestic tranquility,” “provide for the common defense,” and “promote the general

welfare.” We would be better off if those outcomes became a measure of constitutionality – a

bill, for example, that takes food and other resources from hungry people contradicts that goal.

Whatever the Supreme Court says, we can uphold those goals in our discourse – for everyone,

including our opponents. We can subordinate our ideologies to solidarity, human community, and

common good.