The largest gay and transgender rights activist organizations in the United States are simply front groups for the Democratic Party. They get rich off fake outrage, hold Democrats and Republicans to different standards, and don’t actually care about gay and transgender rights anymore.
This might sound a bit extreme, but the Human Rights Campaign has yet again proven it all true. On Wednesday, the left-wing activist organization endorsed presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
.@JoeBiden has fought for the LGBTQ community throughout his career — which is why @HRC will fight with everything we have and mobilize Equality Voters to elect him as the next president of the United States. https://t.co/wAhu2IMjay pic.twitter.com/jGhfRZhxw2
— Human Rights Campaign (@HRC) May 6, 2020
“Vice President Joe Biden is the leader our community and our country need at this moment,” HRC President Alphonso David said. “His dedication to advancing LGBTQ equality, even when it was unpopular to do so, has pushed our country and our movement forward.”
There are big problems with this stance. One is that HRC’s glowing endorsement overlooks positions Biden has taken over the years that would clearly be noted as anti-gay if he were a Republican. Biden voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act and ran vocally against gay marriage as vice president in 2008. HRC also simply assumes that Biden is the most pro-gay rights candidate in the race when this is hardly clear. President Trump has been the most pro-gay Republican president in history, and Libertarian Party presidential front-runner Justin Amash vocally supports gay and transgender rights as well.
To understand why HRC overlooked the non-Democratic candidates, one simply needs to remember its history of putting partisan activism over gay and transgender rights. HRC’s ridiculous congressional scorecards smear Republicans as “anti-LGBT” if they do not agree with unrelated left-wing positions on immigration, healthcare policy, and abortion. For these activists, the “gay agenda” and the Democratic Party platform have long been synonymous.
The organization foments outrage against Republicans, regularly spinning outright falsehoods or misleading narratives to paint the Trump administration’s policies as anti-gay. For example, HRC has ridiculously claimed Trump is the “most anti-LGBT president ever.” Why does it do this? Because constant outrage is what keeps the donor checks rolling in, paying the groups president’s roughly $500,000 salary and six-figure salaries for many of its employees.
So, no, HRC lining up behind Biden isn’t exactly surprising. However, the total, open, and blatantly hypocritical nature of its endorsement, given the recent sexual assault accusation against its preferred candidate, sinks below even its basement-level standards.
When Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh faced an unproven accusation from liberal professor Christine Blasey Ford, HRC condemned him and demanded he step down even absent any contemporaneous corroboration and enormous holes in her account. The organization’s president at the time, Chad Griffin, said that by proceeding with Kavanaugh’s nomination, Republicans were “compounding the harms endured by these women and thousands of other survivors while undermining our democracy in the process.”
But now, HRC has just endorsed a Democratic candidate who faces an accusation of sexual assault with substantially more corroboration. In fact, Washington Blade reporter Chris Johnson even asked HRC about the accusation against Biden. Its response? The group mouthed the same old talking points about believing survivors, then did exactly the opposite, insisting that the most important thing is beating Trump.
There’s just no justifiable explanation for this blatant double standard.
