I recognize people come to their opinion of the Democratic Socialists of America Party, a party different from the Democratic Party, usually based on their own backgrounds. 

I am a progressive Democrat. A first generation American; gay, and Jewish. My parents were refugees from Hitler, my mother from Austria, my father from Germany. My father’s parents were killed in Auschwitz. I have spent a lifetime working for civil rights, women’s rights, disability rights, and since I came out at the age of 34, LGBTQ rights. I was a union member when I taught school in Harlem. I worked for one of the most progressive members of Congress, Bella S. Abzug (D-N.Y.). Bella understood how to move forward the progressive issues she worked on. She won the right for women to get their own credit cards, without their husband’s signature. She is responsible for the curb cuts we see on every corner. She was the first to break the highway trust fund for mass transit. She fought against the Vietnam War, and to impeach Nixon. She introduced the first Equality Act for the LGBTQ community. She was named a whip by Tip O’Neill in her third term in Congress, not because she gave up her fight for progressive causes, but rather because she could get things done. She understood what compromise meant, and used it to move forward the progressive issues she fought for. 

So, people must understand, members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), are their own party, they are not automatically part of the Democratic Party. They have their own platform, different from the Democratic Party platform in many ways. Yes, the two overlap in many areas. But the differences are clear. 

DSA was founded in 1982 from a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), and the New American Movement (NAM). The merger was seen as a symbolic healing of the rift between the Old Left, represented by DSOC’s social democrats and trade unionists, and the New Left, represented by NAM’s activists who emerged from the social movements of the 1960s. Initially led by Michael Harrington, the DSA continued DSOC’s strategy of “realignment” by working within the Democratic Party to push it to the left, functioning as a small advocacy group for its first three decades. After the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist, and independent, never a Democrat, and the election of Donald Trump, the organization’s membership swelled from about 6,000 members in 2015 to 100,000 in 2026. This growth gave DSA a much younger and more activist base, which shifted its strategy toward one centered on building an independent political force. DSA’s platform calls for reforms such as a Green New Deal, single-payer healthcare, and tuition-free higher education, with a long-term aim of social ownership and democratic control of the American economy. They support defunding the police. DSA’s foreign policy is non-interventionist, strongly supporting spending cuts and footprint reductions to the U.S. military while also supporting pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist causes. That includes the abolishment of the State of Israel from the ‘river to the sea.’ 

As a progressive Democrat, I support universal healthcare, and have since Hillary Clinton introduced it to Congress when she was first lady in 1993. I support expanding Medicare, ensuring the solvency of the Social Security System, and making housing, childcare, and education, affordable for everyone. As a Democrat all my life, I supported Democrats who believe in the same things.

This may enrage many, but in my opinion one of the biggest mistakes the Democratic Party made was allowing independent, Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, to run in their presidential primary in 2016. When they did, they shared their voter lists, and enabled Sanders to get a foothold in the party without actually being a Democrat. He ended up screwing Hillary Clinton’s chances to be president. He attacked her throughout the entire primary, and even after she secured the nomination, he kept attacking, and wouldn’t endorse her for 30 days. When he finally did, he traveled the country, in essence pretending he was campaigning for her, when in actuality he was building his own brand, and writing his book. So yes, the independent, Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, who has accomplished nothing in a 40-year congressional career, carries a lot of responsibility for helping to elect Donald Trump.

Today we have Mamdani, mayor of New York, who proudly calls himself a Democratic Socialist of America. He is a charismatic leader, and helped a number of Democratic Socialist candidates in New York win their primaries. One who he endorsed for the state Senate in Queens, is Democratic Socialist Aber Kawas. She is the one who said the United States brought the 9/11 terror attacks on itself, believing we asked for and are responsible for the nearly 3,000 people killed. 

I have been, and will be, attacked, for saying the DSA platform is anti-Semitic for calling for the total abolishment of the State of Israel. For asking why there is nowhere in the DSA platform a condemnation of Hezbollah or Hamas, for their platforms calling for genocide against Jews in the State of Israel, while they are comfortable calling Israeli killings in Gaza genocide. While I may debate the term, I agree what Israel is doing is horrendous. Netanyahu and his government are committing war crimes, and belong in jail. But then so are Hamas, and Hezbollah committing war crimes. 

The way to stop all this is to rid the world of Netanyahu and his government, and the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. I believe the United States should stop funding Israel’s offensive weapons, while we still ensure they have an adequate defense. Iran and others need to stop funding the two terrorist groups. We need to separate people’s views of the Jewish people, from the Netanyahu government, in the same way we need to separate views of the Palestinian people from Hamas, and the Lebanese people from Hezbollah. That is the only way we will ever have peace and a Palestinian state. If we ever get there, we must ensure the billions of dollars needed to make it self-supporting. But to get to that state, the Palestinian people must also have the support of the world, including the states surrounding Israel, that have never given support to the Palestinian people. I don’t have an answer to all of this, and clearly no one else does at the moment. I believe the last time there could have been a Palestinian state, with Israel agreeing to it, was back during the Camp David accords.

But whatever happens in the Middle East, if we want people in the United States to succeed, if we want to make sure the poor and the middle class can do more than just exist, if we want to provide affordable, decent healthcare, housing, job opportunities, and childcare, etc., the Democratic Party must not think redefining themselves as the Democratic Socialists of America, and all the baggage they bring with them, is the way to go. 

While DSA candidates will succeed in a few big cities, this is not where the vast majority of voters in the nation are. If there is a positive Democratic Party platform, and we allow candidates in each district to run on the particular issues they feel can win for them, we can move the vast majority of the nation to more progressive positions, and to younger Democrats. That is the direction the Democratic Party must move in if we are to take back Congress in the midterms, and then the presidency in 2028.

There are a host of candidates around the country who are running, and winning, in Democratic primaries, as Democrats, not as members of the DSA Party. In not one of the districts we need to flip to take back Congress, is being a member of the Democratic Socialists of America a positive thing. 

To begin the process of taking back our country, let’s all support Democrats across the board, up and down the ballot. If we do, we win! 

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.

Yesterday, on the last day of Pride month, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Matthew Vines where he argued that the push to identify as “queer” is a contributing factor to modern backlash to LGBTQ+ rights. In the piece, he argues that “being gay is not a rebellion against ordinary life.” As a queer public historian, I disagree — being LGBTQ+ is a revolutionary act because American society was and continues to be built on heternormative, cisgendered standards. We need only look at yesterday’s Supreme Court decision upholding bans on trans athletes to realize that LGBTQ+ rights are still greatly under attack. 

Vines and other white cis gay men and women who refuse to use the term “queer” or understand their bodies, identities, and relationships as political fail to recognize what secured their rights protecting them against discrimination and to marry the people they love. 

Remember your ancestors

The Stonewall riots, largely considered the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, was a reaction against a police raid that began in June 1969. It was groundbreaking pushback against systemic police brutality and state-sanctioned incarceration of and violence against LGBTQ+ people, and by and large, these riots — which mobilized the larger LGBTQ+ community — is the reason that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have the right to marry the people they love. 

It is because of Black queer and trans people — people who recognized that queerness is a political act as much as it is an identity — that Vines’s rights were secured in the first place. Denying the identity of “queer” not only perpetuates the very stigma surrounding this word but that which surrounds queer and trans people as a whole, and it denies the rich legacy of our queer and trans ancestors who fought for the rights we have today. When queer and trans people reclaimed the word “queer,” previously a slur against us, it was a call to resist the very gender and sexual assimilation that made the weaponized the slur itself. 

Because at its very core, the United States remains a nation that enforces and exalts a heterosexual, cisgender majority. To be queer, to resist and reject standards that normalizes and essentialize gender and sexuality, is a countercultural act, whether or not people like Vines are ready to acknowledge it. Historically, there has been a contingent of the LGBTQ+ community, largely those with the most privilege, who have historically and presently attempted to sanitize the community’s image and its events — to exclude trans people, kink and BDSM, and drag — on the grounds that they infringe on a family-style event and “give the community a bad name.” 

Freaks Are family

Back in 2000 the Millennium March on Washington pushed for gay and lesbian assimilation, arguing that they — we — are like everyone else. Vines appears to copy and paste this language into the piece he published yesterday. But in response, the “Freaks Are Family Contingent,” a group organized by the DC Radical Fairies and Bi Insurgence, marched as an alternative to the main group. This group, which purposefully included witches, trans people, people practicing kink, and people who are poly, called out assimilation as perpetuating the same marginalization that gay and lesbian people faced 50 years ago. To this day, “Freaks Are Family” remains a rallying cry for radical inclusion and resisting assimilation in Washington, D.C., and beyond. One of my dear friends — Rev. Eric Eldritch, a long-time Radical Faerie and community leader in Washington, D.C. — was part of this groundbreaking movement. 

Maybe Vines has a point. There are members of the LGBTQ+ community that remain settled and complacent in their privilege and refuse to recognize the fragility of their and others’ civil liberties. As historians and political scholars have argued, attacks on trans people’s rights will likely proceed threats against same-sex marriage, which itself was secured just over 10 years ago. 

Risking his and our rights

On the 10th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, Oklahoma senator Dusty Deevers said that gay marriage is not law because “there is just no right ot gay marriage in the constitution.” Deevers made this comment during a conversation with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who believes that the Bible justifies Christians killing gay people. The news was first flagged yesterday by Right Wing Watch, a watchdog group for far-right action, and further by LGBTQ Nation voicing concern for his inflammatory statements about drag queens and LGBTQ+ books in elementary and middle schools. 

Deevers clarified that “Obergefell isn’t settled law. It’s besetting immorality imposed by judicial decree, and court opinions can be referred to as ‘settled law’ only if they are rooted firmly in the Constitution and the heritage and the tradition of the American people.” This is pointedly incorrect, but it is an argument that is increasingly being used by far-right leaders to argue that precedent-setting decisions are not set in stone. 

What largely kicked off this moment was the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The pivotal ruling handed down in 1973 ensured federal access to reproductive justice, and yet nearly 50 years later, it was overturned and followed by a number of states instituting their own laws banning abortion, even in situations of life and death. People have died not only because of these bans but because of medical professionals’ hesitancy to provide vital, lifesaving care for fear of losing their medical licenses or being sued. 

Thus, it made sense to many LGBTQ+ activists in 2022, that same-sex marriage legal protections, especially those from the landmark 2015 Supreme Court Case Obergefell v. Hodges would be the next to fall. 

Right after the U.S. overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas released an opinion stating that the court should also reconsider the decisions in other landmark cases, such as Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges. These rulings protect access to contraception, LGBTQ+ relationships and marriage. And like Deevers’s call today, Lawrence also argued three years ago that the Due Process Clause in the Constitution does not secure any of these rights. Calls to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges is rising day by day, and distancing himself from queer people and the wider movement will not protect him. 

In truth, Vines’s opinion piece reveals that he is pointedly not “queer,” but as many queer people have called out in the last 24 hours, that is not a good thing. When he and others fail to be not only support but participate in the revolutionary movement to liberate all LGBTQ+ people, to stand and fight in solidarity with trans, nonbinary and intersex people who are repeatedly targeted by the government, stripped of their identification documents and access to public spaces, and killed for who they are, they are part of the problem. 

They become the very marginalizers that 50 years ago targeted people like them — the white cis gay men and women — who lost their jobs and their lives for who they loved. Truly Vines is not “queer,” but in doing so, he not only compromises the strength of the very community that secured his present rights to live and love authentically but the rights to do so in the future. 

As a child, my relationship with cars was defined by instability and fear. That changed when I got to ride in an autonomous vehicle (AV) for the first time in 2024.

Growing up my father was obsessed with cars and he purchased and leased more than 30 vehicles. Unfortunately, this obsession ultimately drowned our family in unsustainable debt. Worst of all, my childhood was marked by the terrifying reality of riding in vehicles driven by family members under the influence. No one should have to face the fear of consistently having to put their life in the hands of a driver who simply should not be behind the wheel.

Unfortunately, that trauma shaped much of my life. It is one of the reasons I chose to move to a city to build roots and start a family. I intentionally chose multimodal cities where reliance on a personal vehicle wasn’t necessary to live a meaningful and enjoyable life.

However, in 2024, while living in Phoenix, Ariz., my relationship with transportation changed, for the better. I was introduced to Waymo, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service. What began as a curiosity quickly became a revelation. I fell in love with the service and what it offered:  safety, comfort, and remarkable reliability. In fact, I valued the experience so much that I ranked in the top 3% of all Waymo riders nationwide that year.

For someone who grew up terrified by the unpredictability of human drivers, riding in a vehicle programmed never to drive drunk, be distracted, or enraged at fellow drivers was transformative. It wasn’t just transit. It was peace of mind.

Now, as a Ward 6 D.C. resident, I am urging the Council to bring this technology to our nation’s capital through the Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Authorization Amendment Act of 2026. With rising crash related fatalities and a transit system working to meet growing demand, the case for bringing AVs to the District has never been more urgent. 

In the D.C. area, pedestrians are twice as likely to be killed than they were a decade before, despite many efforts to make streets safer. Beyond safety, there is a glaring equity gap in the District’s transit options, particularly for communities East of the River, who routinely face agonizingly long travel times and service delays. Ride-hailing wait times are also getting worse in the District and these residents remain among some of the most severely impacted.

I don’t view these gaps through an abstract or distant lens. I have biked more than 1,500 miles across the District, logged more than 600 rideshares, and ridden the infamous X2 bus route for several years. I’ve seen the absolute best and worst of our transit ecosystem. In my work supporting at-risk and homeless LGBTQ+ youth, I have also seen firsthand how transportation gaps can become barriers to basic survival. Getting across the city can take at least two hours by Metro. This isn’t a minor inconvenience — it’s the difference between making a job interview, a therapy session, or a medical appointment.

In a city striving for Vision Zero to eliminate all traffic fatalities and seeking to deliver equitable transportation, ignoring a technology that systematically eliminates the deadliest variables of driving is a policy failure we cannot afford.

Several organizations representing affected communities, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving, already recognize the immense potential of AVs to eliminate human error and curb the crisis of impaired driving on our roads. Now is the time for the Council to act.

Together, Council members Charles Allen, Brooke Pinto and Matt Frumin have a unique opportunity to implement one of the most innovative AV regulations in the country.

The Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Authorization Amendment Act of 2026 isn’t about replacing public transit; it is about building on it. By passing this bill, D.C. can join forward-thinking cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami in delivering safe mobility to its residents. Every day we delay, lives remain at risk.

Beyond safety, this bill represents a real chance to make autonomous transit an accessible and affordable option for residents and help close the gap for communities long underserved. To better meet this goal, the Council should consider expanding the bill to offer transportation support programs, drawing on models in other cities like Los Angeles’ Mobility Wallet.

The next stop? Safer, fairer, transportation for D.C. that is built for the city’s evolving needs. The Council’s decision to hold a hearing is a step in the right direction. Residents East of the River, and across the District, deserve a real public forum. And it’s on the Council to turn that momentum into meaningful, lasting progress. It must act now. 

Cesar Toledo is a first-generation queer Latino and an Out magazine Out100 honoree. He led the largest LGBTQ+ mobilization program in presidential campaign history for Harris-Walz.