When the Trump administration announced in March 2019 the launch of an international initiative to support the decriminalization of homosexuality, it laid down a landmark. For a Republican administration to take a stand for gay rights on the world stage was simply unprecedented, a sign of just how quickly the country had shifted toward gay acceptance during the early 21st century. But in what might seem like a paradoxical twist, the largest gay rights organization in the country, the Human Rights Campaign, came out swinging against President Trump in response, criticizing his record and casting doubt on the administration’s “intentions and commitments.”
For those familiar with the group, though, such partisanship won’t come as a surprise. The once-venerable nonprofit organization fought on the front lines of the struggle for gay rights, but the inevitable ideological corruption that comes with partisan prestige, demanding donors, and lush expense accounts has left the Human Rights Campaign a shell of what it once was.
The organization was founded by gay-rights advocate Steven Endean in 1980 and was then called the Human Rights Campaign Fund. It started out as a political action committee supporting pro-gay legislation and candidates, but within a decade transitioned and became a nonprofit organization dedicated to a more holistic advancement of gay rights.
At first, the group did exactly what it sought to do. The early decades of its work were characterized by large-scale events and campaigns raising awareness of anti-gay hate crimes and fundraising for victims’ families. So, too, the organization successfully lobbied to have an archaic ban repealed that barred people with HIV from entering the country. It fought against this policy for two decades, culminating in its 2010 repeal. The group’s president at the time, Joe Solmonese, remarked that “a sad chapter in our nation’s response to people with HIV and AIDS has finally come to a close, and we are a better nation for it.”
In the 2010s, the Human Rights Campaign fought for same-sex marriage rights by sponsoring state-level ballot initiatives and filing an influential “friend of the court” brief in the 2015 Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage nationally. The plaintiff in that case, Jim Obergefell, was a long-time member and activist.
For the first several decades of its work, the organization certainly leaned left, but there was nonetheless a bipartisan element to its work.
The group worked with Republicans initially to advance the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, an early piece of legislation that would have added sexual orientation as a protected class under federal anti-discrimination employment laws. The Human Rights Campaign even endorsed a few Republicans, such as Senate candidate Al D’Amato in 1998 (endorsing him over Chuck Schumer). The group backed centrist Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins as recently as 2014.
That spirit of cooperation changed with the election of Trump. His ascendency threatened the organization’s vested interest because Trump’s tenure had the potential to make gay rights a backburner, consensus issue, meaning the checks written to the group by nervous pro-gay donors could dry up.
After all, Trump made history as the first president to take office supporting same-sex marriage. Even President Barack Obama opposed gay marriage rights for the first four years of his presidency. Obama only announced his shift in 2012, conveniently coming out in support of gay marriage just as public opinion polls began to shift to majority support (and prompted by a purportedly stray pro-gay-marriage statement from his vice president, Joe Biden). Meanwhile, Trump waved the rainbow flag on the Republican campaign trail, and at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump supporter Peter Thiel proudly endorsed Trump as a gay American, receiving robust applause from the audience in a display that would have been unthinkable even four years earlier.
Once in office, Trump’s record, while still positive, was more complicated than his on-the-trail enthusiasm for gay rights. There was the president’s decision, opposed by gay-rights advocates, to bar transgender troops from serving in the military. But it’s worth noting that this same policy barring transgender inclusion was in place for years under both Obama and President Bill Clinton, both of whom were heralded as gay rights heroes (and endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign).
Trump has nominated gay Americans to top posts in his administration, including U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell and U.S. Circuit Court Judge Patrick Bumatay. Trump also became the first Republican president to acknowledge gay pride month. It wasn’t exactly a shock to see Trump earn the endorsement of the conservative gay rights organization Log Cabin Republicans for his reelection campaign.
Observers might have thought that groups such as the Human Rights Campaign would relish the chance for an at least somewhat hospitable Republican administration and try to work with it. The opposite has proven true.
The organization’s president, Alphonso David, said in a recent interview that Trump is the “worst president on LGBTQ issues ever,” claiming that “we are living in an uncharted territory where LGBT people are being attacked every single day by the Trump administration.”
The group’s claims about the president’s policies aren’t always fabricated entirely but are often twisted, distorted, hyperbolic, or made in bad faith. For instance, the organization cried wolf about the Trump administration denying citizenship to the children of gay parents. Turns out, it was an obscure Obama-era policy in question. So, too, it maliciously misrepresented the Trump Department of Justice’s stand on anti-discrimination statutes to transform what was a legal disagreement about the proper interpretation of federal law into a normative position that gay and transgender people don’t deserve anti-discrimination protections.
Beyond Trump, the Human Rights Campaign in recent years has shredded any hope of bipartisanship by using its annual “LGBT rights” legislator scorecards as left-wing, catch-all grades. In practice, this means the group now brands GOP lawmakers “anti-gay” for unrelated positions on issues such as immigration, Obamacare, and abortion, making it clear that the organization has become an extension of the Democratic National Committee. Worse, the group put out a statement blasting as “deeply dangerous” Republican congressman Chris Stewart, who introduced a gay and transgender rights bill, because it disagreed with some of the exceptions his bill contained.
Why has the organization strayed so far from its original mission and become hyperpartisan? The answer is sadly simple. Famed economist Thomas Sowell explained the corrupting financial phenomenon that can affect nonprofit organizations in his book Basic Economics. He wrote (emphasis mine):
“Those individuals who happen to be in charge of a non-profit institution at a given time can substitute their own goals for the institution’s ostensible goals or the goals of their founders … Much money can be dissipated in creating luxurious surroundings in the organization’s workplace or arranging showy conferences in posh hotels and resorts, held in upscale locations around the country or overseas. Non-profit organizations that are financially dependent on current contributions … have similar incentives to alarm their respective constituencies over various social, political, or other issues, and few constraints to confine themselves to accurate or valid bases for those alarms.”
Sowell wrote these lines decades ago, but they describe the Human Rights Campaign of 2020 to a T.
In 2018, according to publicly available financial documents, the group’s then-president, Chad Griffin, earned nearly $550,000 annually from the organization for his work. Both its vice presidents earned north of $325,000, and the top 17 highest-paid employees split almost $5 million in compensation. The organization boasts a roughly $25 million office complex in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., a sprawling edifice that includes a “state-of-the-art multimedia production facility” and “the stunning Equality Center, a meeting and event space.”
The Human Rights Campaign bought first-class airfare for its employees and a club membership for its president. Plus, its annual awards gala features celebrities, professional athletes, and top Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The organization is at the cool kids’ table in liberal politics, rubbing elbows with Meryl Streep and Christina Aguilera.
The glitz, glam, and sheer profitability of the group’s “gay rights” crusade are astounding. It’s not hard to see why it has chosen to, as Sowell wrote, “alarm its constituency” rather than acknowledge reality and work across the aisle. If the organization ever acknowledged that the crisis it was founded to address no longer exists, well, then no longer would there be any reason for its donors to keep writing checks.
None of this is to suggest the fight for full gay rights is over and won. But the Human Rights Campaign’s apocalyptic rhetoric has only increased as the gay and transgender community has made unprecedented gains, including under a Republican president, all but guaranteeing the biggest victories are permanent. In the nonprofit world, however, fake outrage is better for the bottom line.
Brad Polumbo is deputy opinion contributors editor for the Washington Examiner.
