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Maura Healey has the LGBTQ agenda on the brain.
It’s all the governor talks about, or so it seems.
Which is great for that community, of which she has recently become a leader, but not so great for the heterosexual majority of the population.
They expect Healey to be governor of all the people, straight and gay.
The gay community was thrilled to watch Healey posing for pictures with drag queens in front of the State House prior to the recent Boston Pride parade, which she marched in.
The Pride flag was raised on the State House flagpole.
It was a first.
“We will go forward and lead the country,” she said. “Love is love.”
Keep in mind that Healey, the state’s first openly gay governor, was not always so open about her sexuality, but only recently “came out” in a fawning Boston Globe story that ran in January after she had been elected governor.
The article was about how happy Healey, 52, was with her new partner Joanna Lydgate 42, the mother of two, who separated from her husband to partner with Healey. Lydgate worked for Healey when Healey was attorney general.
While people knew that Healey was gay during her eight years as attorney general, when she was quietly circumspect about it, they did not care.
They do not care now, but only quietly express concern when it seems to dominate her early administration or is thrown in their face with television images of her laughing it up with drag queens.
It’s time she could have spent helping Michelle Wu, the struggling mayor of Boston, deal with the drugged-out denizens of Mass and Cass, or address the reason why thousands of people are leaving Massachusetts for better lives elsewhere, or taxes or crime or housing.
Healey, who arrived on the political scene in 2014 when she was elected attorney general, played no prior role in the advancement of gay rights in Massachusetts or the legalization of gay marriage.
She did not march in any gay parades.
She was, for instance, no crusading Elaine Noble, the outspoken Boston lesbian who broke down a lot of barriers when she became the first openly gay person elected to the Massachusetts House of representatives in 1975.
Nor was she an Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus who for years led the long lobbying campaign to legalize same sex marriage in Massachusetts which become a reality in 2004.
Healey, suddenly out front, appears to almost be a captive of the LGBTQ rights movement, working those issues into various aspects of government and policy.
In her trip to Ireland last week, Healey not only commemorated the 30th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Ireland but worked LGBTQ issues into her economic development speech to the Irish Senate.
Hardly had the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Christian graphic artist’s refusal to design a website for a same sex couple was constitutional, Healey attacked the court for disregarding “the well-being of the very communities that need protecting.”
Healey has championed the “right” of biological men to compete in women’s sports, even though she did not have to do the same when she played basketball in high school and at Harvard.
She is also supports having eight-year-old school students be taught the nuances of being transgender in Massachusetts in a revision of the state’s health and physical education framework put forward by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary School Education.
Meanwhile in Worcester some 3,700 students have withdrawn from school lessons on sexual education, according to recent reports.
Undaunted, Healey has put up billboards in Texas and Florida inviting members of the LGBTQ community to come to Massachusetts, a state “for all of us.”
Not that there is anything wrong with it, as Seinfeld would say.
Maybe people fleeing Massachusetts will see the billboards and turn around.
But we in Massachusetts get it. So enough already.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.