When it comes to LGBT people, the Republican Party’s reputation has never been particularly friendly. Charles Moran wants to change that.
Moran is the former California state chairperson of Log Cabin Republicans, America’s largest gay and lesbian GOP group. He’s also a delegate for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
I want to be able to tell the [LGBT] community, ‘You have a home in the Republican Party.’
For Moran, Trump’s rise to the top of his party means there’s actually a possibility this could be the year Republicans get rid of what he considers anti-gay language from the party’s official policy platform. The platform will be drafted in the weeks before the Republican National Convention in July, and the committee will be made up of mostly of Trump supporters.
“I think having Trump as the nominee gives us some unique opportunities,” he told ThinkProgress in a phone interview last week. “It’ll be the first time we haven’t had a self-identified evangelical running in 25 years. So this will not be a convention where social issues are going to be front and center, and I think that gives us an amazing opportunity.”
While neither Mitt Romney nor John McCain (the last two Republican presidential nominees) were self-identified evangelicals, there is some contrast between Trump’s language on LGBT individuals and the average Republican lawmaker’s. Take the recent mass murder of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida: Whereas most prominent conservatives failed to mention that LGBT people were specifically targeted by the gunman, Trump proclaimed “solidarity with the members of Orlando’s LGBT community.” He called the attack “an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want, and express their identity.”
Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2016
Still, many LGBT groups have pointed out reasons to pause. They note that Trump opposed marriage equality as recently as January, and has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn the court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage. And when it comes to controversial bills banning transgender people from using bathrooms that complement their gender identities, Trump’s position has toed the party line.
Moran, however, said he’s convinced of Trump’s support for LGBT people because of things Trump has said and done in the past.
“Because he’s never been elected to office, I have to look at his record,” he said. “The interview he did with The Advocate in 2000, talking about his support of equality … When he opened his club Mar-a-Lago in Florida, it was the first club that allowed openly gay people to be members.”
“It leads me to believe that he does care,” Moran said.
The Road Ahead For Pro-LGBT Language At The RNC
It’s hard to know how many openly LGBT delegates will be attending the RNC in July. The Republican Party, Moran said, just does not keep track of it. “It’s not like our delegate application form asks us which groups you identify with — religious, racial, sexual orientation,” he said. “We don’t ask those questions. That’s just a Republican party thing.”
It seems safe to say there won’t be many. A Washington Blade article published this month was only able to find three openly gay Trump delegates, out of the 1542 total: Moran, Peter Thiel (of PayPal and anti-Gawker fame), and former Bush administration official Richard Grenell. There will also be at least one openly lesbian at-large delegate at the RNC: Rachel Hoff, the director of external affairs at the Foreign Policy Initiative. Hoff will also be serving on the 2016 GOP platform committee.
There are going to be forces that want to keep [exclusionary] language in, or juice it up even more.
By contrast, the RNC will likely be chock-full of evangelical Christians — the same evangelicals that Trump has been courting in recent weeks. In addition, one of the platform committee members is Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, whose organization has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to its anti-LGBT positions.
“There are going to be forces that want to keep [exclusionary] language in, or juice it up even more,” Moran said.
Still, Moran said, he’s optimistic that Trump’s appeal to a wider range of voters than just evangelicals will put some pressure on the platform drafting committee to at least consider gutting language from the 2012 platform that outwardly condemns same-sex marriage. For example, the 2012 platform states that “traditional marriage is best for children.” It states that “marriage, the union of one man and one woman, must be upheld as the national standard.” It calls for enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act in the armed forces and on regular civilians.
“The Trump wave is about people who want to do things different than they’ve been done before,” Moran said. “I want to be able to tell the community, ‘You have a home in the Republican Party.’”
Not-So-Straight Priorities
Of course, not every LGBT-identifying Republican delegate is hoping for the same thing at the GOP convention. Richard Grenell, another openly gay Trump delegate, told ThinkProgress via email that he was uninterested in marriage as a topic of political importance. “Same sex marriage is the law of the land,” he wrote. “Anyone talking about it now is trying to raise money.”
Instead, Grenell said, political leaders should be working with religious leaders to develop workplace protection laws. In a majority of states, it currently is legal for employers to fire someone based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Same sex marriage is the law of the land. Anyone talking about it now is trying to raise money.
“Every gay person has or wants a job. This affects everyone in our community. Not every gay person wanted to join the military or get married,” Grenell wrote. “But those issues were Democrat [sic] issues designed to raise money and keep equality partisan.”
There is, however, a somewhat coordinated effort to bring the type of language Moran wants into the GOP platform this year. In April, a coalition of groups called Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry told the Washington Blade that it would form a $1 million initiative “to keep anti-gay marriage language out the 2016 Republican Party platform” and replace it with a new statement that acknowledges “diverse and sincerely held views on civil marriage.”
That initiative, however, is not fully supported by LGBT-friendly Republican groups — including Gregory Angelo, the current Log Cabin Republicans chairman. But it’s not necessarily because Angelo doesn’t agree with it — it’s just because he thinks it won’t work.
He has good reason to think it won’t. When Log Cabin Republicans tried to get nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people in the 2012 platform, the effort failed, and Republicans wound up adopting a platform that some considered one of the most explicitly anti-gay in its history.
“We support striking opposition to marriage equality from the Republican Party platform in 2016,” Angelo said. “Replacing it with this proposed language seems overly ambitious and very unlikely.”