Fresh from her tour of New Hampshire hoping to help her friend Joyce Craig become that state’s next governor, Gov. Maura Healey (D-Mass.) is now speaking out against fellow Bay State Democrat U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton over his comments about ‘woke’ politics.
Massachusetts’ first openly gay governor also accused Moulton of “pick(ing) on vulnerable children” and “playing politics with people,” according to reporters covering an unrelated event Healey attended in the embattled congressman’s district.
And the chair of the Tufts University Political Science department called Moulton’s office to tell the congressman he wasn’t interested in working with him on internships in the future.
Both incidents are part of the ongoing backlash against the moderate Massachusetts Democrat for challenging how his party talks about issues of gender and other priorities of far-left politics.
Reflecting on the Democrats’ disastrous election results last week — in which the party lost the White House, control of the U.S. Senate, and failed to take back control of the U.S. House of Representatives — Moulton theorized that too much attention was being paid to far-left fringe topics, including transgender issues, and not enough to the needs of average Americans.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton said at the time. “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.”
Massachusetts Democrats at the local, state, and federal level accused Moulton of scapegoating the LGBTQ community for last Tuesday’s disastrous election results. But Moulton has signaled he will not be walking back his comments any time soon.
“If you dismiss everything as scapegoating because you don’t like the topic, then how are we ever going to start winning again?” he told reporters Monday in Marblehead following a Veterans Day town hall event that attracted five protesters. According to Moulton, the attempt to silence him by members of his own party proves his point.
Polls show American voters overwhelmingly support protecting girls sports from biological male athletes, and most Americans want males kept out of girls bathrooms and locker rooms, too. Vice President Kamala Harris’ call for taxpayer-funded sex change operations for incarcerated illegal immigrants is widely viewed as having contributed to her loss to former President Donald Trump.
Tuesday afternoon, CNN reported the story of Tuft’s political science department pushing back on Moulton’s comments.
According to call logs obtained from Moulton’s office, David Art — who heads the department — phoned the congressman’s office on Friday and “said he consulted with his colleagues and doesn’t want our office to contact Tufts about internships and they won’t facilitate internship opportunities for students with us.”
Art told The Boston Globe — which characterized his comments as “evasive” — he “definitely said other things in addition to that.” Art declined to respond to NHJournal’s requests for comment.
After reports of Tufts canceling its intern program with Moulton first began surfacing on social media, the school responded via its X account.
“We have reached out to Congressman Moulton’s office to clarify that we have not–and will not–limit internship opportunities with his office,” Tufts posted in a direct response to an NHJournal post sharing the initial report. “We remain committed to fostering an inclusive environment that values diverse perspectives, and our Career Center will continue to provide students with a wide range of employment opportunities across the political and ideological spectrum.”
Tufts’ rebuttal came hours after Moulton appeared on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” to discuss the school reportedly ending its internship program with the congressman’s office.
“Imagine if one of these students wants to intern in a Republican office? What would these political science professors do then?” Moulton asked.
“This is just everything that’s wrong with this cancel culture,” Moulton added. “This really hurts the Tufts students, who want to just be able to have debates, who want to be able to have different views.
“When people like this (Art) and our party try to cancel me, or whoever else, they’re also talking down, they’re canceling the views of a vast majority of Americans, so how on earth are we going to win elections if that’s our approach?”
Healey appears unmoved by Moulton’s argument.
“A discussion about transgender athletes is a different discussion, as somebody who was a college athlete, right?” said Healey, who played women’s college basketball at Harvard.
“But, there’s too much conflating of things right now, and what I see — and what I saw in that comment — was playing politics with people. We shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t do that. We should have real conversations and not play politics with people, particularly young people and folks who are vulnerable.”
In New Hampshire, every elected Democrat supports allowing biological males who identify as “trans” to participate in girls’ sports and opposes banning males from female locker rooms and bathrooms. That stance is believed to have contributed to the party’s losses in the state legislature.
As of the end of the day Tuesday, no “Seth Moulton” has emerged among Granite State Democrats.
“They are not going to change their position,” one House Republican told NHJournal regarding the Democrats’ stance on gender issues. “It doesn’t matter how many seats they lose. Democrats will go down with the ship.”
