Bigotry is the organizing principle of the modern Republican Party:
Before J.D. Vance became Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, he was known in the most powerful offices of the State Department as the single biggest obstacle to confirming career ambassadors in the Senate.
Armed with a questionnaire on hot-button social issues about gay and lesbian rights, gender transition care and hiring practices related to diversity, equity and inclusion, Vance (R-Ohio) held up for more than a year the nominations of dozens of diplomats assigned to serve in posts across the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
A copy of Vance’s questionnaire, obtained by The Washington Post and published here for the first time, asked would-be ambassadors if they would increase the number of “gender-neutral bathrooms” in U.S. embassies, boost resources for “gender dysphoria and gender transition care” and raise the “Progress flag” during “regional Pride celebrations.”
No surprise:
Both the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights organization, and GLAAD, a national LGBTQ media advocacy group, released lists of comments Vance had made and policies he had supported relevant to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
HRC and GLAAD noted that Vance introduced a bill last year called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would have banned transition-related medical care, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and operations, for minors nationally. The bill, which was never taken up in committee, would have charged health care providers who violated it with a class C felony, which is punishable by up to 15 years in prison, and also would have banned institutions of higher education and accrediting entities from providing instruction about gender-affirming care.
In October, a few months after he introduced the transition-related health care bill, Vance introduced the Passport Sanity Act, a bill to ban “X” gender markers on U.S. passports, an option that the State Department rolled out in April 2022. The bill was also never taken up in committee.
There's more:
Before assuming office, Vance opposed the federal protection for gay and interracial marriages, stating that the efforts were a “bizarre distraction” from other issues.
Vance has also defended his use of the word “groomer,” often used as a slur by conservatives to describe LGBTQ people and their allies. “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children,” Vance said on X, formerly Twitter, in April 2022.
There is so much more to say about Vance's extremism, from his zealotry to deny women bodily autonomy to his Trumpist idolization of dictators Putin and Orban, but this alone should be a screaming siren.
