Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard sought to clarify her record on, and explain how she evolved to become a supporter of marriage equality, nondiscrimination legislation, and other protections for LGBTQ people during a CNN town hall Sunday night.
During the town hall, which was held at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, a prospective voter asked Gabbard about her record on LGBTQ rights and specifically about claims that she supported conversion therapy.
CNN previously reported that, in the early 2000s, Gabbard touted working for The Alliance for Traditional Marriage, the political action committee of the nonprofit Stop Promoting Homosexuality America, which was founded by her father, Mike Gabbard, which successfully pushed for a 1998 amendment to Hawaii’s state constitution to give the state legislature “the power to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples.” The organization also advocated for conversion therapy.
Gabbard has since apologized for her past anti-LGBTQ views, but during Sunday’s town hall, maintained that she had never personally been involved with any of the nonprofit’s campaigns to promote conversion therapy, saying she “she “personally never supported any kind of conversion therapy. I never advocated for conversion therapy. And frankly, I didn’t even know what conversion therapy was until just the last few years.”
With respect to her views on LGBTQ rights, Gabbard said her views were largely shaped by her upbringing, but that when she deployed to Iraq, and later, to Kuwait, as a member of the Hawaii National Guard, she met and served alongside LGBTQ soldiers, and began to reevaluate her views after going through “some soul-searching.”
“I was raised in a very socially conservative home. My father is Catholic, he was a leading voice against gay marriage in Hawaii at that time. Again, I was very young, but these are the values and beliefs that I grew up around,” Gabbard said.
“My own personal journey, as I went out in different experiences in my life, especially going and deploying to the Middle East, where I saw first-hand the negative impact of a government attempting to act as a moral arbiter for their people, dictating in the most personal ways how they must live their lives,” she added. “And so it caused me to confront that contradiction, where, as a soldier standing for freedom for all people, here in this country, but also how that contradicted with some of those values and beliefs that I grew up with.”
She also touted her record in Congress, and particularly her 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign, as evidence that her shift on LGBTQ rights is genuine, saying her record “is a reflection of what is in my heart, and it is a reflection of my commitment to fight for equality for all people.” She promised to continue that commitment to equality should she be elected president.
The last local authority in Poland with an "LGBT-free zone" resolution has repealed the measure.
Advocates are hailing the move as a significant victory.
The repeal marks a reversal from just a few years ago, when nearly 100 localities, representing one-third of the country's area, passed laws either directly or indirectly encouraging the exclusion of LGBTQ people from society.
Some of those localities passed "family charters" emphasizing that marriage is restricted for opposite-sex couples.
Other cities or voivodeships (provinces) declared themselves "free from LGBT ideology," seeking to prohibit the dissemination of information that depicts LGBTQ identity or relationships as normal or promotes LGBTQ rights, legal protections, or visibility.
A new study claims that being subjected to conversion therapy may damage a young person's long-term heart health.
According to the study, published in the online medical journal JAMA Network Open, young adults who were assigned male at birth were three times as likely to be diagnosed with high blood pressure if they had been exposed to conversion therapy.
The study also found that those same young adults who were exposed to conversion therapy also had higher levels of inflammation and elevated blood pressure levels, both of which can contribute to poor heart health, reports UPI.
U.S. House and Senate Democrats have reintroduced their respective versions of the Equality Act, a landmark civil rights bill prohibiting discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The act, which passed the House of Representatives in previous years under Democratic-led leadership, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enshrine protections for LGBTQ people.
But it has never been able to gain the 60 votes needed to start debate on the bill or overcome a potential filibuster in the Senate.
It stands little chance of currently passing either chamber as long as Republicans control Congress.
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