National
Jackson wants GOP to focus on marriage
CPAC panel emphasizes opposition to same-sex nuptials
Bishop Harry Jackson (Blade photo by Michael Key)
Two black conservatives are urging the Republican Party to emphasize social issues — such as opposition to same-sex marriage — to build appeal for the GOP among racial minority groups.
Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church, known for leading efforts against legalizing same-sex marriage in D.C., and Rev. Michael Faulkner, author of “Restoring the American Dream,” called for greater attention to social issues at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C.
During a panel titled “Traditional Marriage and Society,” Jackson said the conservative movement has “an opportunity to engage a multi-racial, multi-cultural group of people,” but only if the Republican Party doesn’t throw social issues “under the bus.”
“Whether I like the GOP or not, whether I like Republicans or not, there is no other party now that really is advocating any of the social issues that are consistent with my faith,” Jackson said.
Faulkner, who campaigned against Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), said conservatives need to develop their message to racial minorities because they are ready to support the conservative movement.
“As I campaigned, especially in Latino churches, I was required before the pastor would allow me to speak to give my position on same-sex marriage and on abortion,” Faulkner said. “So they are staunch conservatives, probably more conservative than we are.”
Jackson spoke out against the advancement of marriage rights for gay couples and said it would interfere with parents’ rights in children’s education.
“If you change marriage, you redefine the family; if you redefine the family, you redefine parenting; if you redefine parenting, you must of necessity, redefine education, and in that redefinition, that’s where we get ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’ and a generation of kids as young as five-years-old are told that they are to be gay allies in the State of California,” Jackson said.
Faulker also railed against the advancement of gay nuptials and said pressure to be politically correct can’t change marriage.
“We need to stand for traditional marriage,” Faulkner said. “Not just stand against anyone else, but to stand for our society, stand for our culture, stand for our nation, stand for the children and the families in our nation. If we do not, we will indeed destroy ourselves.”
One LGBT rights group, on the other hand, says that Republicans must continue emphasizing fiscal issues as opposed to social issues to win support among the American public.
R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, said the focus of most conservatives is the economy as some within the movement continue to rail against same-sex marriage.
“There are going to be members of the conservative movement who are still going to hold social issues as their No. 1 focus, but what we saw at CPAC this last year was that was not the primary focus,” Cooper said.
Cooper pointed to the results of CPAC straw poll, which showed that same-sex marriage wasn’t a major concern among attendees.
Support for “protecting tradional marriage” was a priority for 3 percent of straw poll responders. Meanwhile, 53 percent of attendees said reducing the size of the federal government was a priority and 38 percent said reducing government spending was a priority.
Also during the panel discussion, Tom Minnery, senior president of government and public policy for CitizenLink, offered statistics that he said demonstrate countries with same-sex marriage are worse off than places that deny marriage rights to gay couples. LGBT advocates have long disputed the statistical accuracy of Minnery’s work.
Minnery said responders to a survey were asked whether married people were happier in countries with varying levels of relationship recognition for same-sex couples.
According to Minnery, in countries with same-sex marriage, 21 percent of responders said married people were happier; in countries with civil unions; 36 percent say married people are happier; in countries with only regional recognition, 42 percent of people said married people were happier; and in countries with no same-sex marriage, the respect for marriage “goes high.”
For another question on whether children need both a mother and a father to be happy, Minnery said 76 percent of responders said “yes” in countries with same-sex marriage; 80 percent of responders said “yes” in nations with regional recognition; and 93.8 percent of responders said “yes” in countries with no same-sex marriage.
“As the marriage culture in a country declines, the respect for marriage and the belief in its power also declines,” Minnery said. “That’s why our organization continues to believe if this country loses our marriage culture, we’re headed for a lot of trouble.”
In response, Gary Gates, a scholar at the Williams Institute, a think tank on sexual orientation law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that in the United States, divorce rates are lower in places where same-sex marriage is legal.
“That doesn’t directly say people are quote, happier, but heterosexual relationships are more stable in places where same-sex couples can get married,” Gates said.
According to data last year from U.S. Census Bureau, in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2003, the divorce rate is 1.8 percent — the lowest in the nation.
With regard to statistics on having a mother and father being important for children, Gates said just because people have that belief doesn’t make it true.
“I just saw a report today: 50 percent of Republicans believe that Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen,” Gates said. “Because people believe it, doesn’t make it true.”
The White House
EXCLUSIVE: Garcia, Markey reintroduce bill to require US promotes LGBTQ rights abroad
International Human Rights Defense Act also calls for permanent special envoy
Two lawmakers on Monday have reintroduced a bill that would require the State Department to promote LGBTQ rights abroad.
A press release notes the International Human Rights Defense Act that U.S. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) introduced would “direct” the State Department “to monitor and respond to violence against LGBTQ+ people worldwide, while creating a comprehensive plan to combat discrimination, criminalization, and hate-motivated attacks against LGBTQ+ communities” and “formally establish a special envoy to coordinate LGBTQ+ policies across the State Department.”
“LGBTQ+ people here at home and around the world continue to face escalating violence, discrimination, and rollbacks of their rights, and we must act now,” said Garcia in the press release. “This bill will stand up for LGBTQ+ communities at home and abroad, and show the world that our nation can be a leader when it comes to protecting dignity and human rights once again.”
Markey, Garcia, and U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) in 2023 introduced the International Human Rights Defense Act. Markey and former California Congressman Alan Lowenthal in 2019 sponsored the same bill.
The promotion of LGBTQ and intersex rights was a cornerstone of the Biden-Harris administration’s overall foreign policy.
The global LGBTQ and intersex rights movement since the Trump-Vance administration froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has lost more than an estimated $50 million in funding.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded dozens of advocacy groups around the world, officially shut down on July 1. Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this year said the State Department would administer the remaining 17 percent of USAID contracts that had not been cancelled.
Then-President Joe Biden in 2021 named Jessica Stern — the former executive director of Outright International — as his administration’s special U.S. envoy for the promotion of LGBTQ and intersex rights.
The Trump-Vance White House has not named anyone to the position.
Stern, who co-founded the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice after she left the government, is among those who sharply criticized the removal of LGBTQ- and intersex-specific references from the State Department’s 2024 human rights report.
“It is deliberate erasure,” said Stern in August after the State Department released the report.
The Congressional Equality Caucus in a Sept. 9 letter to Rubio urged the State Department to once again include LGBTQ and intersex people in their annual human rights reports. Garcia, U.S. Reps. Julie Johnson (D-Texas), and Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who chair the group’s International LGBTQI+ Rights Task Force, spearheaded the letter.
“We must recommit the United States to the defense of human rights and the promotion of equality and justice around the world,” said Markey in response to the International Human Rights Defense Act that he and Garcia introduced. “It is as important as ever that we stand up and protect LGBTQ+ individuals from the Trump administration’s cruel attempts to further marginalize this community. I will continue to fight alongside LGBTQ+ individuals for a world that recognizes that LGBTQ+ rights are human rights.”
National
US bishops ban gender-affirming care at Catholic hospitals
Directive adopted during meeting in Baltimore.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops this week adopted a directive that bans Catholic hospitals from offering gender-affirming care to their patients.
Since ‘creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift,’ we have a duty ‘to protect our humanity,’ which means first of all, ‘accepting it and respecting it as it was created,’” reads the directive the USCCB adopted during their meeting that is taking place this week in Baltimore.
The Washington Blade obtained a copy of it on Thursday.
“In order to respect the nature of the human person as a unity of body and soul, Catholic health care services must not provide or permit medical interventions, whether surgical, hormonal, or genetic, that aim not to restore but rather to alter the fundamental order of the human body in its form or function,” reads the directive. “This includes, for example, some forms of genetic engineering whose purpose is not medical treatment, as well as interventions that aim to transform sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex (or to nullify sexual characteristics of a human body.)”
“In accord with the mission of Catholic health care, which includes serving those who are vulnerable, Catholic health care services and providers ‘must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who experience gender incongruence or gender dysphoria’ and to provide for the full range of their health care needs, employing only those means that respect the fundamental order of the human body,” it adds.
The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2024 condemned gender-affirming surgeries and “gender theory.” The USCCB directive comes against the backdrop of the Trump-Vance administration’s continued attacks against the trans community.
The U.S. Supreme Court in June upheld a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming medical interventions for minors.
Media reports earlier this month indicated the Trump-Vance administration will seek to prohibit Medicaid reimbursement for medical care to trans minors, and ban reimbursement through the Children’s Health Insurance Program for patients under 19. NPR also reported the White House is considering blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors.
“The directives adopted by the USCCB will harm, not benefit transgender persons,” said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based LGBTQ Catholic organization, in a statement. “In a church called to synodal listening and dialogue, it is embarrassing, even shameful, that the bishops failed to consult transgender people, who have found that gender-affirming medical care has enhanced their lives and their relationship with God.”
President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a bill that reopens the federal government.
Six Democrats — U.S. Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), Don Davis (D-N.C.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) — voted for the funding bill that passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. Two Republicans — Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Greg Steube (R-Fla.) — opposed it.
The 43-day shutdown is over after eight Democratic senators gave in to Republicans’ push to roll back parts of the Affordable Care Act. According to CNBC, the average ACA recipient could see premiums more than double in 2026, and about one in 10 enrollees could lose a premium tax credit altogether.
These eight senators — U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Angus King (I-Maine), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) — sided with Republicans to pass legislation reopening the government for a set number of days. They emphasized that their primary goal was to reopen the government, with discussions about ACA tax credits to continue afterward.
None of the senators who supported the deal are up for reelection.
King said on Sunday night that the Senate deal represents “a victory” because it gives Democrats “an opportunity” to extend ACA tax credits, now that Senate Republican leaders have agreed to hold a vote on the issue in December. (The House has not made any similar commitment.)
The government’s reopening also brought a win for Democrats’ other priorities: Arizona Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was sworn in after a record-breaking delay in swearing in, eventually becoming the 218th signer of a discharge petition to release the Epstein files.
This story is being updated as more information becomes available.
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