It's a strange time to be one of the roughly 25 percent of LGBT Americans who lean Republican. Liberal media and Democratic politicians are making apocalyptic pronouncements about the supposed fascist dystopia that awaits America under a potential second term for Donald Trump, like the Biden campaign tweeting images from The Handmaid's Tale. Yet at the same time that all this hysteria is going on, the Republican Party's latest platform includes a massive win for gay rights.
For years, a key goal of gay Republicans and their allies has been the removal of the GOP's anti-gay-marriage plank from its official platform. While Trump made history as the first president to take office accepting gay marriage, the Republican platform he formally ran on in 2016 explicitly endorsed "traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman" and specifically denounced the Supreme Court cases enshrining gay marriage as the law of the land. And in 2020, Republicans essentially recycled the 2016 platform and ran on it again, rather than produce a new one, citing the pandemic's disruptions.
In the new 2024 platform Republicans just released, this language is nowhere to be found. The document says nothing about gay marriage at all. There is no endorsement of "traditional marriage," no call to overturn the Supreme Court's decisions, or anything else. The absence of a formal position implies that Republican candidates are officially free to adopt their own position on the issue, a tacit statement that the GOP has no problem with candidates and politicians who, like Trump, have embraced gay marriage.
It's hard to overstate the significance of this development. Overnight, with almost no fanfare, the single biggest objective of gay Republicans was achieved—and no one really noticed! So far, there's been only a minor outcry in niche socially conservative circles, with nowhere near the level of backlash you'd have expected had the GOP taken this step in years past.
This news completely neuters the Democratic scaremongering about how gay marriage is in jeopardy if Trump is reelected. Why? Well, even if the Supreme Court were to overturn its 2015 decision mandating gay marriage nationwide, which is unlikely, the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act, signed by President Biden, protects gay marriage federally anyway even in that case—and Republicans officially have no stated intention to change that.
Even on transgender issues, which are more controversial, the Republican platform strikes a more limited tone than many expected.
It says Republicans will "end left-wing gender insanity." How? Well, by promising to "keep men out of women's sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden's radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls."
More important than what this plank says is what it omits.
It does not include calls to "eradicate transgenderism." It does not include calls to legally prohibit adults from transitioning their gender or restrict their access to hormones, surgeries, and other medical transition care. It does not include calls to repeal anti-discrimination protections for transgender individuals. It does not include calls to reinstate the prohibitions on transgender people serving in the military. Most surprisingly, the platform doesn't even endorse restrictions on children receiving medical transition treatments.
The trans-related positions articulated in the platform are, admittedly, crudely and offensively worded. (What else would one expect from the party of Donald Trump?) But on their substance, positions like segregating sports by biological sex and ending taxpayer funding for controversial surgeries are not radical, inherently hateful, or unduly discriminatory. Yes, it's hardly a document that welcomes transgender Americans with open arms, but it could've been much, much worse.
None of this changes the fact that we are living through a pendulum swing, a time of backlash against the LGBT community and the progress that has been made.
There's indisputably been a modest decline in public support for LGBT acceptance and a rise in genuinely hateful rhetoric from prominent conservative voices. Yet that none of this is reflected in the 2024 Republican platform is a good omen for the future of the party.
Yes, the platform is still a far cry from the pluralistic and tolerant perspective that social moderates like me would like to see the GOP ultimately embrace. But no matter how one otherwise feels about the former (and likely future) president, there's no objective way for LGBT Americans to look at the evolution of the party's platform on LGBT issues under Trump as anything other than a massive step in the right direction.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
