Towleroad has a round-up of recent discussions that have centered around members of Congress (MCs) who are members of the LGBT community, yet have voted against generally liberal or progressive positions (most recently voting with the GOP majority in the House to ‘shut down’ the government).  This has led to a good deal of debate about the disconnect between LGBT elected officials and the putatively progressive community they are part of.  Michaelangelo Signorile describes the voting behavior in question:

Since taking office, Sinema has voted with the GOP against economic justice issues that progressives, including LGBT activists, view as crucial. Both she and U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), an openly gay former Clinton aide, also elected for the first time in 2012, have voted with big banks and Wall Street time and again. Right out of the gate, Maloney, who took a lot of Wall Street money, voted with the GOP on the debt ceiling early this year, and actually co-sponsored a bill that would roll back reforms of the very Wall Street practices that led to the economic collapse. He even voted with the GOP to take authority over the Keystone XL project from the president. Like Sinema, he also voted to jeopardize Obamacare or shut down the government. And he too was supported in his election campaign by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, the Human Rights Campaign, and other gay and progressive groups, touted as a progressive.

The assumptions behind the idea that Sinema and Mahoney should vote in accord with liberal or progressive values are, I would argue, fairly faulty.  At the core of this argument is an assertion that there is a connection between liberal or progressive values, on the one hand, and LGBT identity on the other.  While it is true that there is a tendency in the LGBT community to vote for Democrats and Democratic candidates, this is hardly a universal trait and, more critically, is a poor measure for the whole panoply of political attitudes.  Party ID is a useful but blunt measure for policy preferences.  For example, some measures show that in the most recent presidential election, LGBT voters favored President Obama 3 to 1. However, polling done prior to the election indicates that much of this may have more to do with Obama’s favorable stances toward LGBT issues rather than universal approbation of Obama’s or Democratic policies more generally.  As just a few examples: 60% of respondents in the Logo TV poll report supporting the Affordable Care Act while approval ratings among LGBT voters are higher than the general population, but, aside from gay rights issues, the approval ratings for Obama’s handling of health care, general economic issues and unemployment/jobs each hovers around the 60% mark.  These results indicate that perhaps 2/3 of LGBT voters are support or are in agreement with Obama and the Democrats on important issues of the day.

The White House’s record on LGBT rights in general has been strong.  It is equally indisputable that, over time, the Democratic party has grown more friendly to the LGBT community than the Republican party.  The connection that Signorile and others bemoan between liberal or progressive values and LGBT voters, citizens and representatives is not created by attitudes on economic issues, foreign policy and so on.  Rather, as political scientist Kenneth Sherrill has argued, what may be driving much of this partisan loyalty is a sense of shared fate (a sense of group identity or shared consciousness that can lead to perceptions of common interest) — many LGBT voters may default to the Democratic option because of their positons on LGBT issues.  To infer from this that the majority of LGBT individuals share a liberal or progressive outlook is faulty inference.  Normative desires for LGBT representatives who are also ideologically “pure” members of the Democratic coalition are fine, but to turn these into operative assumptions that LGBT voters are primarily or predominantly liberal is a step too far.