After Saturday’s horrific mass shooting at an Orlando, Florida gay bar left 50 dead, an array of prominent Republican politicians rushed to condemn the attacks. However, they spun the massacre not as an anti-LGBT hate crime but as an example of terrorism inspired by “radical Islamic” ideology — and ignored the threat their own political ideology poses to the LGBT community.
Last November, for example, anti-LGBT pastor Kevin Swanson convened a “National Religious Liberties Conference” and reiterated his longstanding belief that both the Old and New Testaments mandate that homosexuals be put to death. Present at the event were anti-LGBT stalwarts and then-Republican presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz. Though Cruz’s campaign would months later called his attendance “a mistake,” his harsh anti-LGBT rhetoric continued as he criticized “New York values” like LGBT equality.
Here are some examples of prominent politicians who were quick to denounce hard-line Islamic rhetoric in the wake of the Orlando shootings, but whose own records of anti-LGBT rhetoric have helped to fuel a climate of violence and discrimination against LGBT people.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR)
Huckabee on Fox News on Monday blamed the Orlando attacks and others on those whose “goal is to take us back to the seventh century and kill everybody who doesn’t want to go with them.” (Huckabee has previously supported the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal organization with a stated goal to return to the “Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.”)
“At some point,” he said, “we have to face the realities that we are at war with ISIS and with all of Islamicism [sic]. The attack comes from the same source, that is radical Islam.”
But Huckabee has made a career on anti-LGBT ideology of his own. Last September, he denounced the nomination of Eric Fanning, who is openly gay, to be Army Secretary, saying “President Obama is more interested in appeasing America’s homosexuals than honoring America’s heroes,” and that “homosexuality is not a job qualification.” Before that, Huckabee likened same-sex marriage to Nazism and called homosexuality an “aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
On Fox News on Sunday, Newt Gingrich characterized Islam as a religion that targets LGBT people. “You could say this was a hate crime, and it was, but then you have to recognize that Sharia calls for killing people who engage in homosexual acts,” he said, adding, “we’re gonna ultimately declare war on Islamic supremacists.”
However, Gingrich has long demonized LGBT people, claiming in 1995 that inclusion of gay-affirming books and counseling in public schools amounted to homosexual “recruitment” and promising in 2008 that if elected president he would “slow down the homosexual agenda.” He also endorsed the restoration of a ban on open service by gay and lesbian service members, saying coming out “would be a career-ending conversation, [as] I don’t think that in the military you would particularly want sexual behavior to be an overt issue.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
While Rubio was one of just a handful of Congressional Republicans to even acknowledge that the Orlando attacks targeted LGBT people, he specifically pointed to the source of those anti-gay views being the “the radical Islamic community.”
“Confronting the threat of violent homegrown radicalization is one of the greatest counterterrorism challenges our law enforcement and intelligence community faces. We must do more at every level of government and within our own communities to identify and mitigate this cancer on our free society and prevent further loss of innocent life,” he said Sunday. He added that if “this is something inspired by radical ideology, then I think common sense tells you that he targeted the gay community because of the views that exist in the radical Islamic community about the gay community.”
But Rubio’s concern for the LGBT community seems to be a new development. He told ThinkProgress in 2013 that he opposed “any special protections based on orientation,” and voted against a bill to ban anti-LGBT employment discrimination. He denounced marriage equality as “a ridiculous and absurd reading of the U.S. Constitution to reach the conclusion that people have a right to marry someone of the same sex,” dismissed LGBT adoption as “a social experiment,” and even recorded robo-calls on election day in 2012 in support of the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)
In a press release on Sunday, Cruz suggested that anti-LGBT Republicans, rather than pro-equality Democrats, were the true supporters of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. “For all the Democrats who are loud champions of the gay and lesbian community whenever there is a culture battle waging, now is the opportunity to speak out against an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians. ISIS and the theocracy in Iran (supported with American taxpayer dollars) regularly murder homosexuals, throwing them from buildings and burying them under rocks,” he wrote. “This is wrong, it is evil, and we must all stand against it. Every human being has a right to live according to his or her faith and conscience, and nobody has a right to murder someone who doesn’t share their faith or sexual orientation. If you’re a Democratic politician and you really want to stand for LGBT, show real courage and stand up against the vicious ideology that has targeted our fellow Americans for murder.”
Though Cruz did attempt to raise money for his unsuccessful presidential campaign from wealthy gay donors, his record has been consistently and vocally anti-LGBT. He called same-sex marriage a national crisis. He denounced the White House supporting the LGBT community by displaying rainbow lights. He opposed employment non-discrimination as a “one-size-fits-all federal statutory right, which would invite abusive lawsuits and which contains insufficient protections for religious liberties.” He even proposed a 15-point plan to allow discrimination against LGBT Americans, under the guise of “religious liberty.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA)
Hours after the Pulse shootings, King tweeted:
Orlando shooter pledged allegiance 2 ISIS before he slaughtered dozens shouting "Allahu Akbar!" We must defeat the ideology & pray4our dead.
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) June 12, 2016
King’s desire to “defeat the ideology” clearly indicates his opposition to Islam, not to anti-LGBT discrimination. He announced in 2014, “I don’t expect to meet [gay or lesbian people] should I make it to heaven.” He railed against those gay and lesbian individuals who “wear their sexuality on their sleeve,” and opposed employment protections for LGBT people as “affirmation for their lifestyle.”
King also did not show much sympathy for another gay American who was murdered in an act of anti-LGBT terrorism, suggesting that hate crimes laws create “sacred cows” and repeating a widely debunked claim that Matthew Shepard’s death was not a hate crime.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX)
Just hours after the Orlando shootings, Patrick tweeted a biblical verse, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.” Hours later, his staff deleted the tweet and claimed that the post had been prescheduled, unrelated and unfortunately timed. Their statement included a link to his campaign website with an anti-transgender petition splash page.
Patrick posted a new statement later on Sunday, objecting to the “hateful comments” he had received over the the tweet. “If some insist on hate speech as a response, that is their decision, not mine,” he wrote. “The enemy is ISIS, not each other. We must come together to fight them. ISIS believes in the killing of gays. America does not and Christians do not. Let’s focus on the real enemy.”
Patrick has led the charge against transgender protections in Texas, instructing schools to discriminate against trans students. His website also contains a petition supporting anti-LGBT activist Phil Robertson’s “right to free speech and Christian values,” after the Duck Dynasty star was suspended by A&E; for what Patrick called “remarks about homosexuality based on biblical morality.”