A recent Gallup Poll found that for the first time a majority of Republicans (55%) said they supported same-sex marriage. Four years ago, only 40% backed it. So what changed over that period?
“Obviously, change happens rapidly in society,” said Charles Moran, managing director of the Log Cabin Republicans, an LGBTQ GOP organization with 51 chapters in 33 states. “But I do give a good amount of credit to the leader of the Republican Party during those times.”
Wait a minute. Donald Trump was good for the LGBTQ community?
“Donald Trump defied conventional wisdom and was one of the most unorthodox candidates that our country has ever seen,” Moran, a part-time Los Angeles resident and member of the California Republican Party’s executive committee, said on my “It’s All Political” podcast. “One of the best things about him is he really helped get the Republican Party beyond the hang-up around LGBT equality issues.”
Moran conceded that the party still has some hang-ups: The Texas Republican Party, for instance, still won’t let Log Cabin have a booth at its state party convention.
It’s not as if an LGBTQ mecca like California always welcomed the organization with open arms. The state’s Republican Party didn’t formally recognize Log Cabin — which was founded here 44 years ago — until 2015. It was begun by gay conservatives who were opposed to the Briggs Initiative, the unsuccessful 1978 ballot measure that attempted to ban gay teachers from schools.
The GOP still has some pretty big hang-ups when it comes to anything LGBTQ. Despite recognizing the organization, the California Republican Party still opposes same-sex marriage. Its platform says, “We support the two-parent family as the best environment for raising children, and therefore believe that it is important to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.”
The national GOP platform also considers marriage to be heterosexual-only turf. Well, it did in 2016. The party did not adopt a platform last year, instead renewing the one it passed four years earlier. Trump — who wanted to shrink the platform into a brief list that people could carry in their pocket — instead released a list of 50 “core priorities” for his second term, none of which mentioned LGBTQ issues.
Moran, who was a delegate to the 2020 convention, said the lack of a platform was a “missed opportunity.”
“We really had an opportunity to radically change the platform of the party, to make it modern, in a way that it had never been done before,” Moran said. “And the only person who could have made that happen was Donald Trump.”
To some LGBTQ conservatives, Trump started his presidency with a promise that he wouldn’t, unlike the GOP nominees before him, stoke fears about the community for political reasons. President George W. Bush had used state ballot measures opposing same-sex marriage to rally religious conservatives to help him win re-election in 2004.
When Trump accepted the nomination at the party convention in Cleveland, he said, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” Trump said. “Believe me.” (Some saw that as an attempt by Trump to gain support among the LGBTQ community for his effort to ban Muslims from coming to the U.S.)
It was a big deal then that Trump, unlike most Republicans, voiced the “Q” (which stands variously for “queer” or “questioning”) in “LGBTQ.”
But less than a year later, the president proved to be less than a protector.
He ordered — via tweet, without consulting top advisers — that the “United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.” Trump said that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”
“Tremendous medical costs” were overstated. A 2016 study by the nonpartisan Rand Corp. found that extending “gender transition-related health care” would increase military costs between “$2.4 million and $8.4 million annually, representing a 0.04% to 0.13% increase in the annual health care costs.”
Many saw the move as a transparent appeal to the GOP’s base at a time when many were still suspicious of Trump’s conservative beliefs and were showing signs of turning on him because of his criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
But Moran argued that it wasn’t a “ban,” as often described. “Nobody was kicked out.”
Bree Fram, the president of Sparta, a transgender military service advocacy, support, and education organization, said there’s a reason transgender service members weren’t kicked out: It would have taken a lot of time, “and the policy that could have led to discharge was only in place for 21 months.”
Getting Republicans to a place of acceptance on transgender issues similar to their position on same-sex marriage will be a challenge. The GOP has backed more than 100 pieces of anti-transgender legislation across 33 states.
Log Cabin does not support the federal Equality Act, which was passed by the House in February. It would broaden legal protections to include sexual orientation and gender identification, because 31 states still don’t have laws to protect gays and lesbians against job discrimination. But Moran dismissed it as “a solution in search of a problem.”
“Conservatives can agree that you shouldn’t be fired for being trans, you shouldn’t lose your access to public accommodations because you’re transgender, you shouldn’t be fired from your job,” he said. But federal legislation is going too far.
Being a gay Republican often means having to answer questions that gay Democrats don’t. Moran came out when he was 19. Now, he’s 40.
“The easy answer” he gives when people ask him why he’s a Republican is, “I really do believe in individual responsibility, personal freedoms, small governments and a strong national defense. I am very proudly gay. I have been living my truth.
“I was physically attracted to men, I was emotionally attracted to men, I was gay,” Moran said. “But that didn’t really change anything when it came down to my conservative principles. There’s nothing about my sexual orientation that has anything to do with those issues.”
Moran said he tells conservatives, “If you believe in having the ability to control your money, and to raise your kids the way you want to and to be able to defend yourself the way you want to, it also includes letting you have your family be the way that is best suited for your life.
“And be it two men or two women, at the end of the day, if you really believe in you making those personal choices on how to best live your life and keeping the government out of it, you’re going to support equality issues for the LGBTQ community,” he said.
The new Gallup poll shows that gaining support among Republicans can happen. It just takes a lot longer. And even more so for the party to catch up to its members.
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
