OPINION:
With apologies to Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude in “Hamlet”: The congressman doth protest too much, methinks.
Rep. Seth Moulton is none too happy about coming under fire from his fellow Massachusetts Democrats for his candid postelection assessment of the electoral problems his party faces because of its unbending embrace of identity politics, especially the transgender agenda.
Mr. Moulton suggested in an interview with The New York Times shortly after the Nov. 5 elections — which saw Republicans win the presidency and both houses of Congress — that Democrats would benefit from a course correction on transgender issues.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone, rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” he said. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Not wanting his young daughters to have their rights trampled by delusional faux females is the understandable response of a protective parent. But Mr. Moulton’s remarks drew immediate fire from many of his fellow Bay State Democrats, including the mayor of Salem, Massachusetts, where he lives.
In today’s political equivalent of the Salem witch trials, the city’s Democratic Committee even vowed to recruit someone to challenge him for his 6th Congressional District seat in a party primary in 2026.
In an MSNBC interview, the five-term lawmaker — who last month won a sixth term, unopposed — argued that the backlash only served to prove his point. He subsequently insisted that Democrats were “out of touch” on transgender issues.
Still, it’s not schadenfreude to note that Mr. Moulton would have more of a leg to stand on, morally and politically, if his position on the issue weren’t so changeable.
This is the same Seth Moulton who voted for the Equality Act, which would have broadened the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. He also co-sponsored, in 2022 and 2023, a Transgender Bill of Rights.
Mr. Moulton voted against the Republican-backed Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would have made it a violation of Title IX to allow a person whose biological sex is male to take part in an athletic program or activity designated for girls or women, wherein sex is determined solely by a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.
In other words, Mr. Moulton now appears to be trying to have it both ways on an issue on which there’s little or no common ground to be found — especially not when SheWon.org has documented a staggering 717 XX-chromosome female athletes who have been cheated out of 1,055 medals across 518 competitions in 35 different sports as a result of cowardly secondary school districts, colleges and athletic associations unwilling to just say no to transgender athletic interlopers.
Those 717 girls and women are not Mr. Moulton’s daughters, but they are someone’s daughters — or sisters, mothers or wives — and shouldn’t be placed in the untenable position of competing against rivals with undeniable biological and physiological advantages. (As an aside, it’s likely because of this that progressives conspicuously no longer label those who don’t share their climate alarmism as “science deniers.”)
Assuming Mr. Moulton has had a genuine change of heart and mind on the issue, he would face a daunting challenge getting his party to see the light.
Democrats have painted themselves into an untenable electoral corner by pandering to a minuscule but militant minority estimated at .003 of 1% of the population that is transgender, putting the latter’s selfish interests ahead of those of the 51% of Americans who are not pretending to be female. (Strictly speaking, it’s even less than .003 of 1%, because that number includes transgender men, most of whom don’t try to force society to indulge their delusions.)
Disappointingly, however, it appears Mr. Moulton is backpedaling faster than a circus unicyclist in the face of withering intraparty criticism.
In a late November interview with the left-wing Rolling Stone, Mr. Moulton insisted that he still supports transgender rights, but just wants Democrats to be more open to talking about the issue.
“Republicans are trying to take away civil rights from trans people, and they’re getting away with it because Democrats refuse to even engage in the debate,” Mr. Moulton said, suggesting his party just needs to improve its messaging on transgender rights. Perhaps most tellingly, he maintained he wasn’t proposing that Democrats should ban transgender women from girls and women’s sports, but instead just “wanted [Democrats] to have a message to fight back against attacks.”
That sounds like Mr. Moulton is using the Democrats’ shopworn excuse “We didn’t get our message out.”
But once and future President Donald Trump did that for them, with his devastating campaign ads attacking rival Kamala Harris on the issue, using the vice president’s own words against her.
Ms. Harris was unable to answer — much less refute — the ads attacking her extreme position on transgenderism, which went far beyond just athletics to supporting taxpayer-funded sex-change drugs and surgeries, even for illegal-alien prison inmates.
Mr. Trump’s ads are arguably the single biggest reason he won and will move into the White House in January, and no amount of backfilling by Mr. Moulton can plug the hole Democrats have dug themselves into on this issue.
They fail to heed the adage “When you’re in a hole, stop digging” at their own electoral peril.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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