Republican National Convention for the 2016 USA election kicked off on Monday with absence of high-profile party leaders as Donald Trump was scrambling to showcase his ability to unify the party. But that’s about it, for pro-LGBT news coming out of Cleveland this week.
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Mr. Trump, who speaks of making America great and is in the process of remaking the GOP, possesses all three, and he takes them into a race essential for the Republican Party, which has been shut out of the White House for eight years. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort told reporters that Thiel is a friend of Trump and that his being gay had nothing to do with his being given such a coveted spot. “I never said I was “#NeverMcCain” or “#NeverBush” even though they weren’t my first (or second) choice. He has spent almost three decades in GOP politics, working on behalf of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and the National Republican Congressional Committee. The platform draft approved by delegates last week also favors “conversion therapy” for gays (RNC chair Reince Priebus disputes that the platform explicitly calls for this, though the language seems meant to tacitly support parents who want to subject their kids to this “therapy”).
On July 12, Log Cabin Republicans railed against the revised platform announcement in a fundraising email that generated widespread interest on social media – and, as a result, money to finance the ad slamming the party.
This is what common-sense conservatives are saying about the most anti-LGBT platform the Republican Party has ever had.
Monday afternoon, a collection of supporters for Ted Cruz attempted to force a lengthy roll-call vote to change the convention rules for 2020 in order to help Cruz. In an online message, the organization said it is motivated by a desire to end “negative, hateful” messages “in the name of religious freedom”.
And what better way to greet someone who has done his very best to decimate the rights of LGBT people than to go in for a nice, intimate, same-sex kiss?
During the convention, LGBT-organized protests against Trump were staged outside Trump Tower in New York City. The RNC platform that was passed this week was incredibly anti-gay. Tuesday’s demonstration was called “Stop the Hate, Stop the Guns”. Some Southern Baptists and other evangelicals have supported Trump in the primaries or plan to vote for him in the general election as an alternative to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton; others have declared their opposition will continue through the general election.
Trump, on the other hand, is a completely different animal. As he declared that he is “proud to be gay”, a group of LGBT delegates from California assembled together directly in front of the stage. That effort failed, and the platform is still hostile to equal rights for LGBT people. There was a study done a couple of years ago on the party platform, looking at 30 years of the party platform, and Congress voted 89 percent of the time with the party platform when it came to policy issues.
Meanwhile, public opinion has trended upwards in support of marriage equality, with 40 per cent of Republicans now supporting the freedom for same-sex couples to Wednesday.
“I think that’s a “them” problem, not a “me” problem”, Tamir said. For some that will involve believing that being gay is intrinsically disordered, that traditional marriage is the only legitimate form of marriage, and that it’s uniquely suited to enable children to thrive. Albert Gore of Tennessee, prompted as much as a third of the public to say it was more likely to support a party ticket. “This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community”.
“If you are a gay conservative and you support Trump, I want to say to you that you are really f-king up”, Kysela said. “. This is about principle, it’s about core beliefs, and I hope our party will eventually evolve to catch up with the country, catch up with young people in our own party, and accept the reality that LGBT rights – marriage equality in particular – are squarely in line with Republican Party principles”. “I’m comfortable with where the party is”. “In Indiana, Pence supported, fought for, and signed into law the ability for businesses to discriminate against individual members of the LGBTQ community”.
Long before the GOP convention, lasting from July 18 to 21, four previous GOP presidential nominees, namely George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney had already announced that they would not attend the GOP national convention where Trump would be formally nominated as the party’s standard-bearer.
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Williams said she asked the minister if she could give him a hug and said “we hugged it out”.
