Since President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding win on election night, we’ve seen nothing short of a full-blown, fear-driven meltdown from LGBT influencers about the very future of our community.
Videos of LGBT Americans sobbing or screaming about their rights about to be taken away have gone viral over social media. One graphic provocatively states, “If you don’t know why your gay friend is worried right now, you don’t have a gay friend,” presumptuously assuming that unless straight Americans share in the LGBT panic, they can’t claim to support them. Trump-supporting friends or family have been declared canceled. A recent CBS story quoted LGBT voters who view Trump’s election as a “tangible affront to their basic human rights.”
As a gay American who leads an organization of LGBT conservatives that supported Donald Trump and his campaign, let me assure you: this rhetoric is nonsense. The fear campaign stirring LGBT voters into a panic around Trump’s second term is absolutely unjustified. No one’s “basic human rights” are being taken away, nor is anyone at risk of physical danger.
Where are they getting this stuff? It’s being peddled by well-funded, Democrat-connected LGBT interest groups who most effectively fundraise and mobilize voters in a climate of LGBT terror. Many LGBT influencers on the front line are all too eager to take part in the campaign. Others have blindly bought into and internalized the alarmist talking points.
Attempts to explain or reason are responded to with further emotional outrage or accusations of anti-LGBT hate, but let’s set the record straight for those genuinely looking to understand.
President Trump is the most pro-gay Republican president in history. He has supported marriage equality since his first campaign. In 2024, he proactively and successfully removed language from the Republican Party platform opposing gay marriage that had been there for thirty years.
LGBT couples’ right to marry is not being taken away under Trump. In fact, LGBT couples’ ability to grow families will be expanded in Trump’s second term. Trump has pledged to support universal IVF access, an expansion that he confirmed would include LGBT couples looking to have children of their own. He also campaigned to expand the child tax credit, which Vice President-elect JD Vance said in a CBS interview would include LGBT families.
Look at who he is selecting to help run his Administration. His nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is openly gay, married, and has two children with his partner. Many of his other nominees, such as Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and Matthew Whitaker, have been strong allies with LGBT conservatives and the Log Cabin Republicans for years
All of this marks a stunning and encouraging turnaround for a Republican Party that just twenty years ago was campaigning to ban gay marriage (and it’s hardly the “most anti-LGBT administration in history.”)
There are no signs the Trump administration will try to strip away LGBT rights in the courts. In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump to the Supreme Court during his first term, authored the majority opinion in the 2020 case Bostock v. Clayton, which held that the Civil Rights Act protects employees from discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Moreover, in the court’s 2022 decision reversing Roe v. Wade, the conservative justices made clear in writing that nothing in that ruling should be applied to other issues like marriage equality, nor does the court have much interest in revisiting it. Even if they did, the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act passed in 2022 codified marriage equality into federal law, meaning that a marriage performed in one state must be legally recognized everywhere.
So what is the basis for this fear? Critics use President Trump’s commitment to keeping biological men out of women’s sports as proof of his supposedly anti-LGBT agenda. Yet we have long believed, like most Americans, that real LGBT equality and protecting fairness in women’s sports are not mutually exclusive. They also alarmingly point to President Trump’s first-term decision to bar transgender individuals undergoing medical or mental health treatment from serving in the U.S. military while ignoring the fact that such prohibitions have long been standard protocol for all military personnel, regardless of their identity. That policy is rooted in military readiness, not an “anti-trans” agenda.
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LGBT Americans have much to look forward to in President Trump’s second term. Our rights will be protected, our economy will return to prosperity, our border will be secure, and our communities will be safer. The world will be a less dangerous place, and the United States of America will be a better place for everyone, including LGBT Americans, to live and prosper.
LGBT voters on the Left may not agree with everything President Trump does, to be sure. But to blindly parrot that President Trump will be the most “anti-LGBT” president in history or that our community’s rights will be under assault is pure, uninformed nonsense that does a disservice to LGBT Americans, particularly young and impressionable ones, everywhere.
Charles Moran is president of the Log Cabin Republicans.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
