POLITICS
The GOP’s Very Anti-LGBTQ Platform — From 2016!
Lazy Republicans, unable to cobble together a new agenda, stick to stale bigot
BY MATT TRACY
Are they trying to Keep
America Great? Or are
they still trying to Make
America Great Again?
We know one thing for sure:
They’re intending to keep America
homophobic and transphobic.
Four years after Donald Trump
narrowly eked out an Electoral
College victory despite losing the
popular vote by nearly three million
votes, the Republican Party
has opted to push the same platform
as 2016 rather than make an
attempt to rally new voters around
the incumbent president’s re-election
bid and vision for a second
term.
In fact, in advance of the convention’s
opening, the GOP stated
that any motion to amend the 2016
platform “will be ruled out of order”
and the party will wait to adopt a
new platform until 2024.
The party led by the man described
by Ric Grenell, the out gay
former acting director of National
Intelligence, as “most pro-gay president
in American history,” explicitly
maintains a bigoted platform.
“Traditional marriage and family,
based on marriage between
one man and one woman, is the
foundation for a free society and
has for millennia been entrusted
with rearing children and instilling
cultural values,” the GOP says
in its 2016-turned-2020 platform.
“We condemn the Supreme Court’s
ruling in United States v. Windsor,
which wrongly removed the ability
of Congress to defi ne marriage
policy in federal law. We also condemn
the Supreme Court’s lawless
ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges,
which in the words of the late Justice
Antonin Scalia, was a ‘judicial
Putsch’ — full of ‘silly extravagances’
— that reduced ‘the disciplined
legal reasoning of John Marshall
and Joseph Storey to the mystical
aphorisms of a fortune cookie.’ In
Obergefell, fi ve unelected lawyers
robbed 320 million Americans of
their legitimate constitutional authority
to defi ne marriage as the
union of one man and one woman.”
President Donald Trump in Charlotte, North Carolina, on August 24, at the opening of the Republican
National Convention.
To that end, the party platform
states that Republicans “urge” the
“reversal” of the Obergefell ruling
“whether through judicial reconsideration
or a constitutional
amendment returning control over
marriage to the states.”
The anti-LGBTQ themes of the
platform do not end there. In line
with the president’s actions so
far, the party is advocating for the
rights of adoption agencies to discriminate
against same-sex prospective
parents. The party is also
expressing its support for bigoted
business owners who wish to carry
out their business — which are
public accommodations, to which
nondiscrimination laws apply — in
accordance with their regressive
views on LGBTQ rights, which are
claimed to be religiously motivated.
“We endorse the First Amendment
Defense Act, Republican
legislation in the House and Senate
which will bar government discrimination
against individuals
and businesses for acting on the
belief that marriage is the union
of one man and one woman,” the
party noted in its platform.
Attempts by Republicans to push
that bill through Congress have, to
date, been unsuccessful.
The lack of changes to the platform
since 2016 also means that
REUTERS/ CHRIS CARLSON FOR THE PRESS POOL
the re-adopted initiatives are embarrassingly
outdated. One portion
of the platform says “bureaucrats”
and “the current president
of the United States” — meaning
former President Barack Obama
— are trying to “impose a social
and cultural revolution upon the
American people by wrongly redfi
ning sex discrimination to include
sexual orientation and other
categories.”
The Supreme Court, not Obama,
wound up making the fi nal determination
on that issue. In a lopsided
6-3 vote this past June, the
court affi rmed that sexual orientation
and gender identity are indeed
defi ned as sex discrimination
in employment under Title VII of
the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Trumpnominated
Supreme Court Justice
Neil Gorsuch wrote the court’s majority
opinion in that case.
The Trump team that controls
this year’s convention did not even
have the energy to amend the 2016
document to condemn the president’s
Supreme Court appointee
on that score.
Vague references in the old platform
also appear to invoke conversion
therapy and more explicitly
stand up for medical providers who
refuse to treat LGBTQ patients. The
section about “protecting individual
conscience in healthcare” states
that the party supports the ability
of “all organizations” to “provide”
healthcare coverage “consistent
with their religious, moral, or ethical
convictions without discrimination
or penalty” and further
states that “we support the right
of parents to determine the proper
medical treatment and therapy for
their minor children.”
The party also uses vague language
to blast Obama ending the
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.
“We reject the use of the military
as a platform for social experimentation
and will not accept
or continue attempts to undermine
military priorities and mission
readiness,” the GOP platform
stated. “We believe that our nation
is most secure when the president
and the administration prioritize
readiness, recruitment, and retention
rather than using the military
to advance a social or political
agenda. Military readiness should
not be sacrifi ced on the altar of political
correctness.”
By July of the following year,
President Trump announced a
ban on transgender troops from
serving in the military, reversing
a policy from the fi nal year of the
Obama administration.
The party platform is, unsurprisingly,
fi lled with rhetoric blasting
abortion rights and the use of taxpayer
dollars to support reproductive
health initiatives. Among the
goals of the platform include limiting
the timeframe under which an
individual can receive an abortion
and opposing school-based clinics
that provide contraception.
And while the platform is outdated,
Republicans provided one
small update: To express the GOP’s
ongoing support of a president who
has carried out an extensive anti-
LGBTQ agenda during the years
since the 2016 platform.
“The RNC enthusiastically supports
President Trump and continues
to reject the policy positions of
the Obama-Biden Administration,
as well as those espoused by the
Democratic National Committee
today,” the party said in a resolution
regarding its lack of a 2020
party platform.
August 27 - September 9,4 2020 | GayCityNews.com
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