Mondaire Jones: “We are dishonest with ourselves if we think that the lack of judicial diversity in this country does not impact judicial…”

It's probably a little bit of that, too, but I think it's more about making sure that anything that this administration identifies as woke is utterly removed from the pages of history.

Growing up, like many people in this room, I suspect, I watched as mostly--as straight politicians, many of them White, many of them men, used my basic human rights as a political football to further their careers.

I mean, I think we're probably going to be the closest we'll ever -- we will have ever gotten, to a default, in the history of this country. And that's unfortunate, and it is a direct function of how extreme the Republican Party is.

I am one of only nine openly gay members of this body. For me, this is personal. I still remember where I was on June 24, 2011. The day the New York State Legislature passed marriage equality.