Last week, Donald Trump spoke at a hate group conference. Tonight Donald Trump will be speaking at a Heritage Foundation event about his plan to cut taxes for the wealthy.
Heritage is a far-right think tank that produces logical-esque arguments for conservatives to repeat to the media. While they oppose equal rights for LGBTQ people entirely, their affinity for conversion therapy is particularly troubling.
Here is Heritage senior research fellow Ryan Anderson tweeting his opposition to Leelah’s Law, which was proposed in 2015 and would have banned conversion therapy for minors.
Leelah’s law, named after a transgender teen who committed suicide, would censor people and hurt children. https://t.co/H3BczgYplb @FDRLST
— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) January 9, 2015
Anderson wrote a 2007 column about his “friend” who “suffered” from “same-sex attractions,” and in 2012 praised an article about ex-gays and mentioned his “friend” again.
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And Heritage published this column on their site from an “ex-transgender” activist about why trans people should be banned from the military.
The think tank is opposed to marriage equality, saying that it would “abandon the meaning of marriage.”
In 2013, the Heritage Foundation released a position paper entitled “Gay Marriage, Then Group Marriage?” It argued that the purpose of marriage is procreation (which, oddly, would still allow “group marriage”), and that “marital consummation by conjugal intercourse” “explains and justifies the government’s involvement in marriage.”
In 2015, Heritage published an article on their web platform The Daily Signal that said that allowing same-sex couples to marry would lead to more abortions. The article pointed to Spain as an example of how when women were finally allowed to marry both men and women, they decided to marry no one at all and have abortions instead.
Heritage also opposes any other recognition of same-sex relationships, saying that states with domestic partnership registries are “enablers of the full same-sex marriage agenda.”
It goes without saying that Heritage opposes anti-discrimination laws, arguing that they are a threat to “religious freedom” and “special rights,” as well as same-sex couples parenting, arguing that the science just isn’t there, despite the American Psychological Association’s position since 2005 that kids raised by gay couples are doing just fine.
This is not the first sign of the close relationship between Heritage and Trump. The New Republic in February called them “D.C. Think Tank Behind Donald Trump,” saying that they have been setting his agenda on everything from Supreme Court nominees to foreign policy. A least eleven former Heritage employees now work in the White House. Trump even sent several Heritage employees to a UN conference on women’s rights, despite the organization’s opposition to women’s equality.
But I imagine there are still folks out there who think that, deep down inside, Trump loves LGBTQ people, it’s just the people he surrounds himself with that are inexplicably anti-LGBTQ.
