LGBTQ: What's at stake for us in a Harris–Trump election
LGBTQ: What's at stake for us in a Harris–Trump election
Gay marriage! Trans existence! No-fault divorce for straight people! The Republicans want to end it all. ☑️ Harris is the correct choice.
Do you care about same-sex marriage? Would you vote in favor of it?
Republicans oppose gay marriage
Project 2025 — a 900-page Republican agenda — discusses the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). One HHS division is the Administration for Children and Families, which has an Office of Family Assistance (you may recognize its TANF public assistance). This office also grants money to organizations through Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education. Most recipients have been secular.
Project 2025 demands that “faith-based programs should be protected and prioritized” so those organizations won’t have to “conform to nonreligious definitions of marriage and family.” Project 2025, in other words, is working to empower American churches that want to refuse to recognize gay people’s civil marriages.
“The whole point is to erase any deviation from gender binary from American society."
They cite the Biden administration’s Respect for Marriage Act as an example of such “nonreligious definitions.” The Respect for Marriage Act repealed an obsolete 1990s federal law against same-sex marriage, and it declares that same-sex and interracial marriages must be recognized. Same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide by a 2015 ruling of the Supreme Court; the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act simply offers extra support to same-sex marriage by taking the route of congressional approval.
What Project 2025 is telling us is that they oppose same-sex marriage.
They want kids to be raised in a “heterosexual, intact marriage.”
They claim that “all other family forms” have “financial stress or poverty.” (Hmm. The 2022 U.S. census data show that gay married couples are slightly less likely than straight married couples to be low-income.)
They assert that “the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages.” Well, of course you can’t find a U.S. same-gender couple legally married more than 20 years, given that those marriages were first performed in Massachusetts in 2004.
They claim that families that aren’t headed by a man–woman marriage have “poorer behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes,” whatever that means.
They’re saying that faith-based organizations that teach, marriage is limited to “one man and one unrelated woman” — i.e., that exclude gay spouses and gay parents from their programs — should be able to apply for federal grant money for family education programs.
The concern is bigger than the federal grant money. It’s about what they’re signaling.
Given that the Supreme Court recently overturned its own 49-year-old decision on the basic guarantee of abortion rights, it’s easy to imagine it’s ready to overturn its decade-old decision on same-sex marriage. This will become more likely if Republicans win the election. If Trump is president, he could appoint more Supreme Court Justices. If more Republicans are elected to Congress, they could do away with the Respect for Marriage Act.
Republicans oppose straight divorce too
The Republicans would like to get rid of no-fault divorce, just to make it hard for anyone to divorce. As I wrote previously: “The Project 2025 document contains the word ‘marriage’ 45 times. It contains the word ‘divorce’ only once — and then, only as a verb meaning ‘to separate,’ in a context unrelated to marriage. It does not use a word for ending a marriage.”
That’s a curious erasure.
See the agenda made explicit in the current Texas Republican Party platform (“rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws”), the Nebraska Republican Party platform (“no-fault divorce should be limited” to childless couples), and an Oklahoma bill this year (to remove simple “incompatibility” as a valid reason for divorce).
Their Project 2025 opposes trans people
Imara Jones, founder and creator of TransLash Media, writes in “What's at Stake for Trans People in This Election” (Newsweek, October 15):
“Project 2025 attacks the validity of trans identity on page one. It aims to confine expressions of gender and bodily autonomy to those necessary for procreation. All other manifestations of this would find Americans on the losing end of bureaucratic regulations and American law.
Project 2025 would rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics; rescind Biden-era Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students; eliminate transgender health care in Medicare and Medicaid; reverse policy allowing transgender people in the military; rename the Department of Health and Human Services to the 'Department of Life' and repeal and replace policies that support LGBTQ+ families, with a direct incentive to "put an end" to "woke transgender activism;" and abolish the White House Gender Policy Council.
The whole point is to erase any deviation from gender binary from American society."
Have you seen the MAGA anti-trans ads?
In the September 10 presidential debate, Trump said that Harris supports “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
Well — so what if she does?
Try this rebuttal: Healthcare is a human right
Incarcerated people — whether in criminal or civil detention, citizen or not, transgender or not — are entitled to medical care. Healthcare is a constitutional right. In fact, withholding medical care from someone who’s incarcerated is legally considered “cruel or unusual punishment” or “punishment without due process.”
Courts have ruled that “medical treatment related to gender dysphoria” is a type of care that can’t be withheld, as pointed out by ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, interviewed by Adam Rhodes.
They’ve spent $65 million (and counting!) to sour you on an issue of body autonomy and gender identity
A week after the debate, the Trump campaign unveiled an anti-trans ad on Instagram. It warns: “Kamala is for They/Them.”
The Republicans have somehow spent $65 million on anti-trans campaign ads in just the last couple months. In these ads, they used photos of “visibly gender-nonconforming people including Jonathan Van Ness and drag performer Pattie Gonia” without their consent, as Samantha Riedel reports.
The “2024 Trump 'Unbelievable' Ad” posted to YouTube two weeks ago lifts a still image from a 10-year-old video published by LA Weekly (as I figured this out when I searched for the image’s origin). Someone is wearing a white dress. When that video was taken, she was incarcerated at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Men’s Central Jail, where she was known as Yah Yah. One of her fellow inmates had made the dress for her, and she was dancing in her jail cell.
Let me know if the Trump campaign tells us they made a good faith attempt to find Yah Yah and to ask for her consent before mocking her in a political ad in which they superimposed incorrect pronouns over her image (LA Weekly had used “she/her”) and through which the Republicans continue to pursue their agenda of taking away one of the few basic rights someone has when they’re incarcerated.
Listen to what Kamala Harris has to say
Trans people are human. Incarcerated people are human. Healthcare is a human right.
Gender transition makes trans people happy. It doesn’t have to make us more human because we are already human. Constitutionally protected human rights already apply to humans who are transgender.
With that in mind, hear Kamala Harris explain her perspective in her own words.
As Attorney General for the State of California, she was generally required to defend in court whatever the California Legislature had passed as law. Once, she had to defend the state’s reasoning for withholding gender-affirming medical care from an incarcerated person. Nonetheless, she “worked behind the scenes” to ensure that the person received the care and “that they changed the policy in the State of California.”
Here’s the five-year-old video clip:
The alternative: We’ll get Trump
The Trump administration was so damaging for LGBTQ rights, it’s impossible to sum it up in just a few sentences.
One of the Trump administration’s first acts was to quietly delete existing mentions of LGBTQ rights from the White House, State Department, and Labor Department websites.
After lying about wanting to protect the rights of LGBTQ federal workers, the administration promptly removed a directive that federal contractors must comply with LGBTQ-related nondiscrimination laws. Trump didn’t spare workers in private employment either: his administration argued before the Supreme Court that LGBTQ people aren’t covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it gave a press briefing that business owners should have the “religious liberty” to discriminate against LGBTQ customers.
In 2017, Trump dissolved the Office of National AIDS Policy and the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, both of which had existed since the 1990s. And though he once promised to prioritize HIV funding, his administration went on to propose cuts to it.
The Trump administration attacked the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination provision that entitles LGBTQ people to equal access to healthcare.
Over four years in office, Trump appointed 234 federal judges (known as Article III judges). Only 2 (less than 1%) are openly gay.
These federal judges include 54 circuit court judges. He had nominated a few more (there had been 57 nominees in total), and 22 (39%) had “a demonstrated history of hostility towards the LGBTQ+ community,” according to Lambda Legal. They were mostly white (85%) and male (80%); none were Black.
He did nominate five openly gay men as ambassadors: Robert Gilchrist (to Lithuania), Richard Grenell (to Germany), Randy Berry (to Nepal), Eric Nelson (to Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Jeff Daigle (to Cabo Verde). None of them is still serving as ambassador. Richard Grenell once held a dinner party that Trump touted as a “global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality.” It was no such thing — that was Trump’s usual puffery.
Trump created a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division of Health and Human Services to enable discrimination against LGBTQ people, as well as a Commission on Unalienable Rights to establish Catholic-inspired philosophy to underpin those legal decisions.
The Trump administration impeded data collection about LGBTQ identity and relationships through the 2020 Census, the American Community Survey, the National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants, and the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System.
Trump strove to implement a definition of “biological sex” across all federal agencies, which would have broadly hindered people from living transgender lives. Meanwhile, he waged anti-trans battles piecemeal against homeless shelters, prisons, schools, and the military.
LGBTQ people want this election to go a certain way
Nine months ago, GLAAD found that 94% of LGBTQ people intended to vote in this election.
Advocates for Trans Equality endorsed Kamala Harris the day after her candidacy was announced.
The oldest U.S. national advocacy group for LGBTQ people, the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, had not endorsed a presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter — but it has endorsed Harris.
Bottom line: If you know someone who isn’t sure what the issues are, feel free to forward them this article. If you haven’t voted already, remember to make your plan to vote. And if you have a car, offer to drive someone to the polls on November 5.
How, when, and where to vote (USA.gov)
Tucker Lieberman, author of Most Famous Short Film of All Time, looks forward to waking up on November 6 with more confidence that his LGBTQ friends will continue to have basic rights. tuckerlieberman.com
Thank you so much for the great research and for putting the stakes of this election in such clear, unambiguous terms. Will share!
Excellent article!