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Garcia and Log Cabin Republicans president react to new GOP party platform

RNC had not issued a new position manifesto since 2016

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Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Committee at National Harbor, Md., on March 4, 2023. (Screen capture via Vimeo)

Following the issuance of the Republican Party’s first new policy platform since 2016, U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Charles Moran, president of the conservative LGBTQ group Log Cabin Republicans, shared their reactions this week with the Washington Blade.

Unlike previous iterations, including in 2016 and 2012, the 2024 version contains no mention of same-sex marriage and very little discussion about abortion, issues long championed by the religious right factions of the party.

Still, the document calls for banning transgender girls and women from competing in girls and women’s sports, as well as a proposal to cut federal funding for “any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

“We will keep men out of womenā€™s sports, ban taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop taxpayer-funded schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Bidenā€™s radical rewrite of Title IX education regulations, and restore protections for women and girls,” the platform says.

“Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like reading, history, science, and math, not leftwing propaganda,” according to the document. “We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using federal taxpayer dollars.”

Garcia, an openly gay co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, told the Blade by phone on Tuesday that the language is of a piece of the party’s efforts across the board to restrict rights, freedoms, and protections from many of America’s most vulnerable.

“The platform is the platform,” he said. “It’s reactionary. It moves us backwards. It does not support diverse communities.”

What is more important, however, than “the Republican platform, Project 2025, all of these ideas and proposals,” Garcia said, is the question of “who’s going to implement these.”

“Look at what Donald Trump is actually saying,” Garcia said. “That should scare us. He’s saying he’s going to deport undocumented people across the country. He’s saying he’s going to empower fossil fuel and oil companies in public. He’s saying that he doesn’t support unions. He’s saying all of these horrible things. I think we should take him for his word.”

“We should already know that he’s going to do what he says. He’s saying he’s going to jail his political opponents,” the congressman added. “This is insane. So, I think that is much more instructive than any party platform or other conversation happening right now.”

Project 2025, the exhaustively detailed governing blueprint for a second Trump term that was published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank, “is finally starting to get more attention,” Garcia said.

Unlike the party platform, the 900-page document reads like a wishlist for the most right-wing conservative Christian flanks of the GOP ā€” with proposals to criminalize all pornography, for instance, and to revoke LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination protections for federal government employees.

“I wish that over the last two days we were talking about Project 2025,” said Garcia.

House Democrats, who had just returned from the July 4 break, had been inundated with questions about whether President Joe Biden should continue leading the party’s 2024 ticket after a shaky debate performance last month exacerbated concerns about his age.

“Moving forward,” he said, Project 2025 “needs to get more attention, and I’m hopeful that it will.”

Also speaking with the Blade on Tuesday was Moran, who had attended a Log Cabin Republicans fundraiser on Monday that former first lady Melania Trump hosted and netted $1.4 million. The event was the first to be held in the Trump Tower residence since her husband launched his 2024 campaign.

“Project 2025 is like a kid’s Christmas wish list ā€” and it has just as much chance of coming to fruition as Santa Claus coming down that chimney,” he said. “It’s just not reality.”

“On July 5, President Trump posted on Truth Social disavowing Project 2025 and officials on the campaign had been saying the same for months,” Moran added. “Those who continue to conflate that private think-tank manifesto with the official RNC Platform or the President’s own policy portfolio, Agenda 47, are knowingly deceiving voters which shows a level of desperation leading them to lie rather than dealing with the reality at hand.”

By contrast, the platform has Trump written all over it, Moran said.

“Even though I was not on the platform committee, it was clear those in leadership understood that the process had been commandeered in the past by special interests and those trying to use intimidation and fear to bully their influence into the final document,” he said. “The RNC took steps to ensure a clean, orderly and accessible drafting process.”

As a result of influence peddling by special interest groups, “the platform continued to be an albatross around the necks of common-sense Republicans,” providing opportunities for Democrats to portray their political opponents as anti-gay, for example, since the document historically took a position against same-sex marriage.

“The 2016 platform was crafted under the influence of Ted Cruz’s delegates, veering it in a much more conservative direction on gay issues,” Moran said. “President Trump made it clear that he wasn’t aligned with the 2016 platform, and if the full RNC convention would have been held in 2020, it would have been changed then.”

Moran added that while “the platform process has historically been influenced by paid lobbyists representing special interests trying to game the system for their client’s pet projects and desires,” this year “presented President Trump with his first opportunity to genuinely make the GOP platform represent the modern Republican Party, and make it represent an inclusive, America-First context.”

Moran said the new platform is a reflection of the campaign’s strategy and approach to this election.

“I believe the president knew that the old platform made the GOP uncompetitive in major geographic and critical demographic areas,” he said. “The platform was definitely worth fighting over, because we know that the presidential nominee needs to get the party in the best position possible to appeal to the broadest number of people.”

“This is a platform that is inclusive of many communities, including LGBT Americans,” Moran said. “It promotes the sanctity of marriage, but doesn’t exclude our marriages. It supports IVF, which is the principle way same-sex couples build families.”

“This is a pro-family platform,” he added, “but it provides a place for our families too.”

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Politics

Heritage Foundation praises effort to ban transgender healthcare for military families

House GOP signals eagerness to implement Project 2025’s anti-LGBTQ policies

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Donald Trump, gay news, Washington Blade
President-elect Donald Trump addresses the anti-LGBT Heritage Foundation in 2017. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

In a statement released Tuesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation praised House Republicans’ military spending bill, including the provision added by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that would ban gender-affirming healthcare interventions for the children of U.S. service members.

Victoria Coates, vice president of the organization’s Kathyrn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said the National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed by the U.S. House Rules Committee along party lines on Monday, marks an “important step toward a defense budget that flows from strategy and directs DOD to become as lethal as possible to protect the national security of Americans.”

ā€œThe bill authorizes resources for DOD at the border, retains the Houseā€™s ban on corrosive race-based policies, eliminates the Senate’s provision to draft our daughters, prohibits transgender surgeries for minors under TRICARE, supports military construction in the Indo-Pacific and shipbuilding, including a third Arleigh Burkeā€“class destroyer, and incremental funding for a second Virginia-class submarine,” Coates said. “These policies in this bill, combined with new military leadership, will make America stronger.ā€ 

In April 2022, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a comprehensive 920-page governing blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term that proposes radical reforms to imbue the federal government with ā€œbiblical principlesā€Ā and advance a Christian nationalist agenda, including by stripping rights away from LGBTQ Americans while abandoning efforts to promote equality for sexual and gender minorities abroad.

“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” the authors explain on page four, beginning “with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (ā€œSOGIā€), diversity, equity, and inclusion (ā€œDEIā€), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document also lays the groundwork for the incoming administration to revive the ban on military service by transgender troops that Trump implemented during his first term, arguing that “gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.”

Leading up to the election, when Project 2025 became a political liability for Trump, he tried to distance himself from the document and its policy proposals, but as the New York Times documented, an “analysis of the Project 2025 playbook and its 307 authors and contributors revealed that well over half of them had been in Mr. Trumpā€™s administration or on his campaign or transition teams.”

The Times also noted that Trump has held meetings with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and a co-founder, Edwin Feulner.

In October, the Congressional Equality Caucus published a report entitled, ā€œRipping Away Our Freedoms: How House Republicans are Working to Implement Project 2025ā€™s Assault on LGBTQI+ Americansā€™ Rights.ā€

The group’s openly gay chair, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), noted that ā€œWhen Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last year, we saw an avalanche of attacks against the LGBTQI+ community.ā€

The congressman added, ā€œDuring the past two years, they forced more than 70 anti-LGBTQI+ votes on the House floor. And nearly every bill and amendment idea was ripped out of the pages of Project 2025ā€™s ā€˜Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise.’ā€

The NDAA filed by House Republicans is unlikely to pass through the U.S. Senate while the chamber remains under Democratic control, and President Joe Biden has vowed to veto legislation that discriminates against transgender and LGBQ communities, but the spending package will face far fewer obstacles after the new Congress is seated on Jan. 3 and Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Objecting to the spending bill’s inclusion of language prohibiting military families from accessing gender affirming care are congressional Democrats like U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), who serves as the ranking member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, and advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.

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House moves to block gender-affirming care for children of service members

Rules Committee approved NDAA on Monday

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U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

House Republicans added a provision to the annual must-pass military spending bill, filed over the weekend, that would prohibit the children of U.S. service members from accessing gender-affirming healthcare interventions.

President Joe Biden has promised to veto legislation that discriminates against the trans community, and the likelihood that the bill would pass through the U.S. Senate is uncertain with Democrats controlling the upper chamber until the 119th Congress is convened on Jan. 3.

Nevertheless, the GOP’s National Defense Authorization Act was passed along party lines by the U.S. House Rules Committee on Monday night, and a floor vote could come as early as Tuesday.

During the hearing yesterday, the committee’s top Democrat, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) said the NDAA negotiated by the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees did not include this provision barring gender-affirming care and it was House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) who insisted that it be added after the fact.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is urging House Republicans to attach the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which is aimed at college campuses, to the NDAA, but Johnson reportedly wants the Democratic leader to put the bill to a floor vote on its own ā€” a move that would inhibit his party’s ability to confirm as many judicial nominees as possible before control of the upper chamber changes hands.

Smith’s office published a statement objecting to the anti-transgender language added by the Republican leader:

ā€œFor the 64th consecutive year, House and Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats and Republicans worked across the aisle to craft a defense bill that invests in the greatest sources of Americaā€™s strength: Service members and their families, science and technology, modernization, and a commitment to allies and partners.  

Rooted in the work of the bipartisan Quality of Life Panel, the bill delivers a 14.5 percent pay raise for junior enlisted service members and 4.5 percent pay raise for all other service members. It includes improvements for housing, health care, childcare, and spousal support.

House Armed Services Democrats were successful in blocking many harmful provisions that attacked DEI programs, the LGBTQ community, and womenā€™s access to reproductive health care. It also included provisions that required bipartisan compromise. And had it remained as such, it would easily pass both chambers in a bipartisan vote.

However, the final text includes a provision prohibiting medical treatment for military dependents under the age of 18 who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Blanketly denying health care to people who clearly need it, just because of a biased notion against transgender people, is wrong. This provision injected a level of partisanship not traditionally seen in defense bills. Speaker Johnson is pandering to the most extreme elements of his party to ensure that he retains his speakership. In doing so, he has upended what had been a bipartisan process.

I urge the speaker to abandon this current effort and let the House bring forward a bill ā€” reflective of the traditional bipartisan process ā€” that supports our troops and their families, invests in innovation and modernization, and doesnā€™t attack the transgender community.ā€

The Congressional Equality Caucus spoke out against the Republican NDAA with a statement by the chair, openly-gay U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), who said “In the last 72 hours, brave Americans who serve our nation in uniform woke up to the news that Republicans in Congress are trying to ban healthcare for their transgender children.”

Pocan continued, ā€œFor a party whose members constantly decry ā€˜big government,ā€™ nothing is more hypocritical than hijacking the NDAA to override servicemembersā€™ decisions, in consultation with medical professionals and their children, about what medical care is best for their transgender kids. The Congressional Equality Caucus opposes passage of this bill, and I encourage my colleagues to vote no on it.ā€

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson also issued a statement, arguing that ā€œThis legislation has been hijacked by Speaker Mike Johnson and anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers, who have chosen to put our national security and military readiness at risk for no other reason than to harm the transgender kids of military families.ā€

ā€œThe decisions that families and doctors make for the wellbeing of their transgender kids are important and complex, especially so for military families, and the last thing they need is politicians stepping in and taking away their right to make those decisions,” she said.

“When this comes up in the full House, lawmakers need to vote down this damaging and dehumanizing legislation,” Robinson added.

ā€œThis is a dangerous affront to the dignity and well-being of young people whose parents have dedicated their lives to this countryā€™s armed forces,ā€ said Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union.

ā€œMedical care should stay between families and their doctors but this provision would baselessly and recklessly inject politics into the health care military families receive,” he said. “Nobody should have to choose between serving the country and ensuring their child has the health care they need to live and thrive. Members of Congress must vote against the defense bill because of the inclusion of this deeply harmful, unconstitutional provision.ā€

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Protests against anti-trans bathroom policy lead to more than a dozen arrests

Demonstrations were staged outside House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) office

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Protest outside House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) office in the Cannon House Office Building (Washington Blade photo by Christopher Kane)

About 15 protestors affiliated with the Gender Liberation Movement were arrested on Thursday for protesting the anti-trans bathroom policy that was introduced by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and enacted last month by U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning and social justice advocates Raquel Willis and Renee Bracey Sherman were among those who were arrested in the women’s bathroom and the hallway outside Johnson’s office in the Cannon House Office Building.

Demonstrators held banners reading ā€œFLUSH BATHROOM BIGOTRYā€ and ā€œCONGRESS: STOP PISSING ON OUR RIGHTS!ā€ They chanted, ā€œSPEAKER JOHNSON, NANCY MACE, OUR GENDERS ARE NO DEBATE!ā€ and “WHEN TRANS FOLKS ARE UNDER ATTACK WHAT DO WE DO? ACT UP, FIGHT BACK!”

Protests began around 12:10 p.m. ET. Within 30 minutes, Capitol Police arrived on the scene, began making arrests, and cleared the area. A spokesperson told Axios the demonstration was an illegal violation of the D.C. code against crowding, obstructing or incommoding.

Mace and her flame-throwing House GOP allies have said the bathroom policy was meant to target Sarah McBride, the Delaware state senator who will become the first transgender member of Congress after she is seated in January.

LGBTQ groups, elected Democrats, and others have denounced the move as a bigoted effort to bully and intimidate a new colleague, with many asking how the policy’s proponents would enforce the measure.

Outside her office in the Longworth House Office Building, the Washington Blade requested comment from Mace about the protests and arrests.

“Yeah, I went to the Capitol Police station where they were being processed, so I’ll be posting what I said shortly,” the congresswoman said.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) (Washington Blade photo by Christopher Kane)

Using an anti-trans slur, Mace posted a video to her X account in which she says, “alright, so some tranny protestors showed up at the Capitol today to protest my bathroom bill, but they got arrested ā€” poor things.”

“So I have a message for the protestors who got arrested,” the congresswoman continued, and then spoke into a megaphone as she read the Miranda warning. “If you cannot afford an attorney ā€” I doubt many of you can ā€” one will be provided to you at the government’s expense,” she said.

ā€œEveryone deserves to use the restroom without fear of discrimination or violence. Trans folks are no different. We deserve dignity and respect and we will fight until we get it,ā€ Gender Liberation Movement co-founder Raquel Willis said in a press release.

ā€œIn the 2024 election, trans folks were left to fend for ourselves after nearly $200 million of attack ads were disseminated across the United States,” she said. “Now, as Republican politicians, try to remove us from public life, Democratic leaders are silent as hell.”

Willis continued, “But we canā€™t transform bigotry and hate with inaction. We must confront it head on. Democrats must rise up, filibuster, and block this bill.ā€

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