When I first heard the Democrats planned to hold a presidential forum exclusively focused on LGBT issues, I wasn’t exactly enthused. Writing for National Review at the time, I predicted such an event would “devolve into a revolving cycle of virtue-signaling agreement, with each candidate competing to sound more sympathetic to the gay plight than the others.”
I was right.
The event was hosted by gay rights group GLAAD, the Advocate, the Cedar-Rapids Gazette, and One Iowa. It took place in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and 10 presidential candidates attended: Marianne Williamson, Joe Sestak, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Julian Castro.
Notable absentees included Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang.
Hopefully, you didn’t spend your Friday night suffering through the nearly three-hour event. But I watched it so you didn’t have to. Here are the five most memorable, insane moments.
1. GLAAD president says opposing liberal healthcare policies, favoring border security is bigoted
In her opening remarks, GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis basically said anyone who isn’t a left-wing progressive is an anti-LGBT bigot.
She said “when you try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, you hurt LGBTQ people” and that “when you try to build a wall, you hurt LGBTQ immigrants and asylum seekers.” Ellis even went so far as to say that being pro-life makes you homophobic: “When you try to take away reproductive freedom, you take it away from LGBTQ people.”
This is insane and reductive. By Ellis’ twisted logic, conservative gay people like me hate ourselves because we’re pro-life and pro-markets. Apparently, the head of a major gay rights organization doesn’t think gay people have the right to think for themselves.
2. Biden calls for unisex, free-for-all prisons
When Gazette columnist and moderator Lyz Lenz confronted Biden over his past support for tough-on-crime laws that “disproportionately affected LGBTQ people of color” in her view, he came up with a rather… interesting answer.
Biden pivoted and rambled on in typical fashion, but he eventually said “In prison … the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is… not what the prison says it is.”
Joe Biden – Male convicts that identify as female will be housed with women.
“In prison the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is not what in fact the prison says it is.” pic.twitter.com/587Hn9ssvf— TrumpSoldier (@DaveNYviii) September 21, 2019
This is bizarre, frankly. Obviously, the inclusion of transgender people poses a problem for our prison system and is an issue that should be approached with nuance and compassion. But just turning our prisons into a unisex free-for-all, as Biden seems to suggest doing, is madness. It would undoubtedly lead to violence against women from men who aren’t actually transgender but simply say they are to get sent to womens’ prisons.
3. Williamson invokes Adolf Hitler when asked about employment discrimination
Moderator Zack Stafford asked Williamson a question about anti-LGBT employment discrimination and what she would do to combat it as president. Williamson said she would add legal protections and fire any cabinet member who made anti-LGBT comments.
Then she continued, “This stuff is very dangerous … Hitler didn’t just come after the Jews [on the first night of the Holocaust]. It was the Jewish people and the gay people.”
That’s right: Williamson invoked the Holocaust in her condemnation of anti-LGBT discrimination. It was bizarre and outlandish … and entirely on-brand for her campaign.
4. Booker opposes laws that make non-disclosure of HIV status a crime
Stafford asked Booker about state laws that criminalize the act of knowingly not telling a sexual partner about your positive HIV status. Stafford said that these laws have “no scientific basis” and lead to “draconian” outcomes; he asked Booker if he supports their repeal.
His answer: “Yes, absolutely.”
The insanity of this answer speaks for itself. Booker apparently thinks it should not be illegal to fail to tell a potential sexual partner you have HIV.
5. Biden gets feisty with snowflake moderator
When Lenz confronted Biden over his past votes for the anti-gay policy “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” that barred gays in the military and the Defense of Marriage Act, he sarcastically replied, “You’re a lovely person.”
In another question about healthcare, he tells her “maybe if you’d take a look” at Obamacare, she’d have known that it covered transgender healthcare. After the contentious time on stage, which was peppered with hostility between Lenz and Biden from the get-go, Biden called her “a real sweetheart” backstage, which evidently she found triggering.
Biden called the moderator of an LGBTQ forum “a lovely person” while onstage, and she says he called her “a real sweetheart” backstage.
She called the comments “a little condescending,” and said, “It’s 2019, you shouldn’t be calling women sweethearts.” https://t.co/8f7BSxoClt
— Vox (@voxdotcom) September 21, 2019
All in all, I expected the debate would be full of left-wing virtue signaling and pandering. But I never quite expected this many Democratic candidates to say openly crazy things — and be proud of it.
