(Above photo by the Washington Blade’s Michael Key.)
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GOP subtly seeks LGBT support through Orlando, gun rights
By Chris Johnson
CLEVELAND Amid attacks impugning Hillary Clinton’s character and calls for her incarceration, Republicans on the second night of the GOP national convention subtly sought to obtain LGBT support to further their goals.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who’s defending himself against a challenge from progressive champion and former Sen. Russ Feingold, invoked the Orlando shooting when he recalled provoking Clinton to say, “What difference does it make?” during a Senate hearing on Benghazi.
“It made a difference to the young men and women dancing on a summer night at a club in Orlando,” Johnson said. “And it made a difference to the families watching fireworks at the celebration of freedom in by asking a simple question, why did you not just pick up the phone and call the survivors?”
Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for legislative action, invoked the protection for gay people when he called his organization “the largest and oldest civil rights organization in America.”
“We fight for the rights of all Americans, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation because the right to protect your life is the most precious right you have,” Cox said.
The remarks stand in contrast to speeches from individuals at Republican National Conventions in years past seeking to build support by demonizing gay people and railing against LGBT rights as opposed to making subtle outreach.
Jason Lindsay, executive director of the Pride Fund to End Gun Violence, said in response to Cox’s remarks the 49 people left dead after the Orlando shooting “no longer have Second Amendment rights, nor do the five Dallas officers gunned down by a weapon of war or the three officers murdered in Baton Rouge.”
“The NRA only protects the bottom line of gun manufacturers, ignoring the majority of Americans who support commonsense gun reforms,” Lindsay said. “Pride Fund to End Gun Violence is standing up to the NRA by supporting candidates committed to reforming our gun laws to make all Americans safer. It is time to take back our public and private places from the threat of gun violence that has proliferated under the NRA’s watch.”
High-profile speakers of the second night of the convention, included Donald Trump, Jr., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and conservative commentator and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
In the wake of the U.S. Justice Department declining to prosecute Clinton for using a personal email server during her tenure as a secretary of state, Christie’s remarks consisted of recalling Clinton’s actions, and asking delegates if she’s guilty or not guilty. Predictably, each time the audience replied, “Guilty!”
“I am going to be specific so you can render your verdict tonight on the basis of the facts,” Christie said. “Let’s go to North Africa. She was the chief engineer of the disastrous overthrow in Libya. Libya today after Hillary Clinton’s grand strategy, their economy is in ruins, there is death and violence in the streets, and ISIS is dominating that country. Hillary Clinton as a failure for ruining Libya and creating a nest for terrorist activity, answer me now, is she guilty or not guilty?”
Coming off remarks during a breakfast earlier in the day in which he called transgender people an “absurdity,” Carson decried what he called “secular progressivism” changing America.
“The secular progressive agenda is antithetical to the principles of the founding of this nation,” Carson said. “If we continue to allow them to take God out of our lives, God will remove himself from us. We will not be blessed and our nation will go down the tubes.”
Also during the second day of the convention, delegates formally anointed Donald Trump as Republican presidential nominee through a roll-call vote from each of the state’s delegates. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was also formally nominated as the Republican Party’s choice for vice president.
Putting Trump over the top to reach the 1,237 votes needed to claim the nomination was the declaration of votes from the delegation from New York, Trump’s home state. Donald Trump, Jr., read the declaration of 89 votes pledged to the Republican presidential nominee from the state.
Representing the delegates on behalf of D.C. was Jose Cunningham, who’s openly gay and chair of the D.C. Republican Party. In accordance with the results of the primary, Cunningham called 10 votes for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and nine votes for Ohio Gov. John Kasich. However, the chair presiding over the count under party rules called each of the 19 votes for Trump.
‘Gays for Trump’ make case for anti-Islamic policies, Milo Yiannopoulos appears at event after being banned from Twitter
By Chris Johnson
CLEVELAND Rallying attendees before posters of scantily clad young men in “Make America Great Again” hats, speakers at a “Gays for Trump” party on Tuesday night urged LGBT people to look to defeating radical Islamic extremism as its next goal.
The featured speaker at the event, which was called “Wake Up” and took place at Wolstein Center Ballroom at Cleveland State University, was Milo Yiannopoulos, a provocative gay conservative activist and journalist.
Wearing a white tank top with the image of a firearm in rainbow colors and “We Shoot Back,” Yiannopoulos said the time has come has come for the LGBT community to separate itself from the progressive movement to take on Islamic extremism.
In the aftermath of a shooting in Orlando at a gay nightclub perpetuated by a follower of Islamic extremism, Yiannopoulos said while the left once had the backs of gay people, that’s “no longer the case.”
“Growing up gay wasn’t that fucking bad, let’s be honest,” Yiannopoulos said. “But I still don’t see the reason why the left-wing press mollycoddles and panders to an ideology that wants me dead.”
Yiannopoulos announced at the event he would travel to Sweden next week to lead a Pride parade in what he called a “Muslim ghetto” in Stockholm. Yiannopoulos said he draws no distinction between Islam as a whole and Islamic extremism, although he acknowledged those in the audience may disagree with him.
Known as a provocateur, Yiannopoulos has made comments on social media saying it should legal to hunt any man over 20-percent body fat, compared feminism to cancer and set up a scholarship with funds available only to white males. A Trump supporter, Yiannopoulos said during the event that Trump is “the most pro-gay candidate in American electoral history.”
Yiannopoulos spoke at the event just minutes before he was reportedly banned permanently from Twitter for a series of tweets against Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones were deemed abusive. As a result, Yiannopoulos said he intends to make the lives of people working for the media a “hell.”
“You have done nothing for gays,” Yiannopoulos said. “While you were busy hectoring and bullying and nannying us about transgender pronouns, you completely forgot that politicians in this country, Democrat politicians who are welcoming in a religion that wants us dead. They were welcoming in movements and belief systems that are completely incompatible with the Western way of life, with modern, Western, capitalist, liberal democracies, the only systems under which gay people are happy and successful and have rights.”
The estimated 500 attendees at the event, billed as the “most fab party at the RNC,” were predominately young white men, many of whom were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats in support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. A line of attendees seeking to take photos with Yiannopoulos spanned a room adjoining the ballroom where the event took place.
David Griffin, a gay 24-year-old and Georgia resident, came to the event wearing a Trump campaign hat and three buttons in support of the presidential candidate.
“I like Trump because he’s going to secure our borders, he’s going to put America first and, more importantly, he’s the most pro-gay candidate in the race,” Griffin said. “Hillary Clinton wants to bring people in from cultures that are very hostile to gays. The countries that she wants to bring people in from are countries that throw gays off buildings, stone them. It is not very good. I want people who believe in our values to come here.”
The increase in Syrian refugees into the United States proposed by President Obama and supported by Clinton are in many cases fleeing anti-LGBT persecution at the hands of the Islamic State. The White House has said LGBT refugees would be one of the priority groups of refugees seeking asylum in the United States.
Devin Conway, a 21-year-old student at Georgia Southern University, said he came because he wanted to surround himself “with like-minded people and to celebrate not only Trump winning the nomination, but hopefully winning the presidency.”
“There are people from all walks of life here, gay, straight, reporters, non-reporters,” Conway said. “I think it’s beautiful that we can all come together for one cause, and think that’s what Trump’s message is really all about, and I really hope that we can spread it to the rest of the country.”
Other speakers at the event warned against the dangers of Islamic extremism and urged LGBT people to pay heed to the threat.
Chris Barron, a gay political consultant and former board chair of the now defunct gay conservative group GOProud, said Trump is making the Republican Party “more accepting for LGBT people all across this country.”
“The left wants us to believe that this an election that’s going to be about bathrooms or who’s going to pay for our wedding cakes, but LGBT people and our allies know that this is a question of life or death,” Barron said. “We saw what happened in Orlando. We have a radical Islamic ideology out there that is dedicated toward exterminating LGBT people all across this globe.”
Also speaking at the event was Pamela Geller, an anti-Islamic conservative activist who came to the event wearing a rainbow-colored shirt with the message “Love Will Win.”
“The Republican Party is the party of individual rights and equality for all before the law, all,” Geller said. “No special rights or special classes. Democrats exploit the gay cause for their own ends. We’re the real deal. We oppose jihad terror. What greater threat to the gay community is there than Islamic law.”
Geert Wilders, a leader of the conservative Dutch Party for Freedom, warned about allowing Muslim immigration in United States, saying that practice has led Europe down a dismal path and violence on the continent.
“There is only one Islam, and that Islam has no place in a free society because it goes against freedom,” Wilders said. “So we should close our borders for immigrants from Islamic countries. We should not let any jihadists return to our free countries. We should expel criminals with a double-nationality after we have stripped them of the nationality of our country. We should stop the ‘Islamization,’ as a matter of fact, we should de-Islamize our societies.”
To a smattering of applause among attendees, Wilders said he doesn’t want any more mosques in the Netherlands or Islamic schools for “young children that we want to integrate into society who learn hate and violence.”
Outside the event, a group of a dozen protesters joined together and carried a banner reading, “Queers Against Racism.” Although no individual among the protesters was willing to speak with the Washington Blade, they handed the press a slip of paper explaining their views.
“There’s nothing fabulous about racism,” the paper says. “Our grief is not a catalyst for xenophobia. We will not be opportunistically used to promote Trump’s rhetoric of hate. What happened in Orlando is a result of a homegrown culture of homophobia promoted by Trump, Pence and conservatives for decades.”
Rachel Hoff won’t ‘leave’ GOP over anti-LGBT platform
By Michael K. Lavers
CLEVELAND The first openly gay member of the Republican Party’s platform committee on Tuesday said she does not “plan to leave” the GOP.
Rachel Hoff, a defense analyst for the American Action Forum in D.C., made the comment as she spoke about her party’s anti-LGBT platform at a panel that Equality Ohio, a statewide advocacy group, held at the New West Theatre in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood.
She acknowledged there is “some bad stuff on bathrooms” and “hurtful language on gay parenting and adoption” in the platform. Hoff also noted there is a “veiled reference” to so-called conversion therapy.
“It no longer says conversion,” she said. “We’re supposed to thank them that it only says therapy, but we’ll take small signs of progress as mini-victories.”
Draft platform ‘much better’ on LGBT issues
The panel took place a day after delegates to the Republican National Convention approved their party’s platform that Log Cabin Republicans described as the most anti-LGBT in the GOP’s history.
Hoff said the draft platform that the committee received from the Republican National Committee was “much better on LGBT issues.”
“It then went into a sort of family values subcommittee and came out worse,” she said.
Hoff said the full committee debated three proposed amendments.
One would have removed what she described as “traditional marriage language” from the platform and replaced it “with a message of inclusion, to basically respect and acknowledge a diversity of opinion within the Republican Party on this issue.”
Another proposed amendment would have acknowledged “the LGBT community around the world as victims of violence and extremism.” The third proposed amendment would have “specifically” named and called “the LGBT community as the victims” of the June 12 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
Hoff said the debate took place a month to the day after a gunman killed 49 people inside the gay nightclub.
“I’m dismayed to report that that amendment along with the other two were defeated pretty soundly by the committee,” she said.
Hoff said that 23 members of the committee supported the marriage amendment.
“[It was] clearly not enough for a win, but it is . . . almost a quarter of the committee,” she said. “So that one was actually an encouraging sign to me.”
Hoff spoke shortly before she introduced Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court case that extended marriage rights to same-sex couples throughout the country in June 2015.
“It was somewhat awkward to talk about marriage because we’re way past that as a country, as an LGBT community,” she said.
Hoff added that the platform committee is “the last stronghold of traditional marriage advocates” within the Republican Party.
“They know that and that’s why they fight there so strongly,” she said. “They know that they’ve lost this issue. They know that the country has moved on. They know that the party is ready to move on and they sort of staked out that ground for that reason.”
Hoff said her primary goal on the platform committee was to “simply start a conversation about being a more inclusive party.” She described Obergefell as a “personal hero” and thanked the other panelists for their efforts in support of LGBT rights.
“I’m sorry that we’re lagging so far behind in the Republican Party,” said Hoff.
Photos by the Washington Blade’s Michael Key.
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