From the annals of useless advocacy, the Log Cabin Republicans jumped into the 2016 race over the weekend with an ad impugning Hillary Clinton's record on LGBT rights. It's a predictable montage of Clinton voicing her opposition to marriage equality over the last dozen or so years, and concluding that she was "wrong on gay rights when it mattered."
All I can say is, shame on them for being as absolutely useless a pro-LGBT advocacy group during this election cycle as their liberal counterpart the Human Rights Campaign has already proven to be.
LCR president Gregory T. Angelo, whom I know and generally like, told the Washington Blade's Chris Johnson that they hoped the ad would influence the votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other states.
"I personally think and Log Cabin Republicans thinks that voters should be aware of Hillary Clinton’s past, specifically on marriage equality. We felt that urgency to do so now, obviously, with the Iowa caucuses looming, but also because other LGBT organizations have not done due diligence regarding Hillary Clinton’s past, and we felt we were in a unique position to step up in that regard.”
Good lord—have they looked at their side of the aisle?! Forget about the past, let's just look at what the three GOP candidates left standing after Iowa (Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio) are saying now. Not in 2002. Not in 2004. Right NOW.
Ted Cruz has been pandering to bigoted social conservatives since the first day of his campaign—announcing his candidacy from the world's largest Christian college, Liberty University. The whole premise of his campaign is that Christians will unite behind him to take their country back. From his Liberty speech:
"I want to ask each of you to imagine, imagine millions of courageous conservatives, all across America, rising up together to say in unison 'we demand our liberty.'
And by demanding their "liberty," he means snuff out the liberties afforded to anyone with whom evangelicals disagree—LGBT Americans and same-sex marriage supporters, in particular. Cruz has been nothing if not explicit about his desire to overturn marriage equality.
But frankly, the same goes for Rubio and Trump. Perhaps inspired by the spirit of the holidays, Rubio made a December promise to appoint judges who would roll back the freedom to marry.
“Any future Supreme Court can change it. And ultimately, I will appoint Supreme Court justices that will interpret the Constitution as originally constructed," Rubio said.
And just last weekend, Trump made a similar pledge, saying he disliked the court's marriage equality ruling and would "strongly consider" appointing judges who would reverse the decision.
“If I’m elected I would be very strong on putting certain judges on the bench that I think maybe could change things..."
So it's amid this field of Republican candidates that Log Cabin has chosen to focus its energy on Clinton's past—using clips from more than decade ago, I would add.
Log Cabin is obviously trying to curry favor with the Republican Party by boosting the candidate the GOP would prefer to run against: Bernie Sanders. That may or may not be a good bet for Republicans since some polls have shown Sanders performing better against certain Republican candidates than Clinton does.
But any way you slice it, it's craven advocacy—that is, assuming LCR wants to further the cause of LGBT equality. Essentially, they're working to defeat a candidate who is both pro-gay marriage and pro-Equality Act, among other things, in favor of a slate of candidates who don’t have a single nice thing to say about LGBT Americans or the liberties they are guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.
Log Cabin—if it wants to retain any credibility as an advocacy group working to secure more freedoms for LGBT Americans—should take a look in the mirror and work on cleaning up their little corner of the world, because it has been overrun by raging homophobes.
If they want a historical reference point for changing the political dynamic, they need look no further than Barack Obama's presidency. He came into office opposing same-sex marriage in 2008 and will leave behind the greatest pro-LGBT legacy of any president to date. That did not happen because conservatives pressured him: It happened because progressive activists across the country demanded that their president make good on the strong pro-equality pledges he made on the '08 campaign trail.
Right now, Log Cabin is batting zero in that regard. The only pledges GOP candidates are making involve trampling all over the individual liberties of LGBT Americans by stripping them of marriage rights and turning a blind eye to discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations. And far from improving on LGBT rights over the course of the 2016 election cycle, Republican hopefuls have gotten consistently worse. Just last month, Angelo was praising Trump and proposing that he would do no harm to marriage.
Given the circumstances, I cannot imagine a single solitary justification for wading into the 2016 campaign on the Democratic side. Unless a) an organization that promotes "limited government" alongside LGBT equality is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president, or b) all they are is a stooge of the Republican Party.
Personally, I have generally supported the efforts of Log Cabin because the sooner we can convince Republicans that it's in their best interests electorally to be pro-LGBT, the sooner we can secure the legal protections necessary to insulate LGBT Americans from the rampant discrimination they still face in many regions of the country. But this is pathetic.
The Human Rights Campaign should be thanking LCR for making it look good by comparison. I was no fan of their early endorsement of Hillary Clinton because history proves that it's not smart advocacy, even if it is good for the organization's bottom line.
But at least they put their thumb on the scale for an equality candidate. LCR weighed in with a bid to help one of several pro-religious liberty, anti-LGBT, anti-marriage equality candidates win the presidency. There's no world in which that passes for LGBT advocacy.