Meet Sean Patrick Maloney, the Gay Congressman Fighting Off a GOP House
Supreme Court potentially throwing away 50 years of precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade to see where the GOP will lead us, he said ahead of the ruling to overturn it that came down on June 24. “I’m laser-focused on protecting the majority in the House to guarantee the rights and equalities of the LGBT community and so many Americans who are right now facing an unprecedented assault from an extreme Republican Party overturning a half-century of rights under the Constitution,” Maloney says. “And it won’t stop with reproductive freedom.
The course the Republican Party is on will inevitably collide with the rights and freedoms the LGBT community has fought so hard to secure.
We better wake up to the threat. It’s real.”The conventional wisdom of Beltway watchers is that the Republicans will walk away with the midterms thanks to unease over rising prices at the grocery store and gas station as well as the historic trend that midterms benefit the political party that is not in control of the White House.
Maloney’s eyes are open, but he hopes to shake voters into action in a year that has seen Roe overturned, a spike in mass shootings, and a GOP-led onslaught against LGBTQ+ rights.“[The midterms] are not predetermined; in not any way hopeless,” he says, “but everybody needs to fight.”He’s faced intra-party criticism for initially running against a fellow gay congressman, Mondaire Jones, after a judge scrambled New York congressional districts (Jones is now running in a different district, while Maloney is running in a reconfigured 17th Congressional District).
