CampaignLive.com, a leading advertising and marketing trade journal – in a pro-LBGTQ opinion piece – noted that "since the Bud Light fiasco of 2023, when a vocal conservative minority sparked a revolt against the brand for a relatively small partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Pride Month, like much in this country, has gone from straightforward and celebratory to complex and polarizing."
However, it's not complex for the Biden campaign, which earlier this month announced its plan for an aggressive show of support for the LGBTQ+ community. The campaign plans to have a presence this month at more than 200 Pride events in 23 states, especially the battleground states.
The big push is not just social media videos and low-level campaign staffers. It's from the heavy hitters. For example, for the first weekend of June, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared at a Los Angeles event with more than 150 LGBTQ leaders and allies.
Days later, First Lady Jill Biden, on her way to her son Hunter Biden's trial in Delaware, made an unscheduled appearance at a gay pride event in Pittsburgh. "This community is under attack," she told her audience. "Donald Trump is a bully to the LGBTQ community, to our families, to our country. We cannot let him win."
"The campaign is really making an aggressive push, trying to tout all that they're doing for the LBGTQ activist community," David Closson, the Family Research Council's director of the Center for Biblical Worldview, said on Washington Watch Friday.
HRC antsy – thinks Biden needs LGBTQ help
It would seem that Biden's record of transgender visibility in the Navy and other armed forces, his emphasis on gender identity in the rewrite of Title IX – the 1972 landmark legislation aimed at women's rights – and so many other things would have long ago locked down the LGBTQ vote for Biden.
A poll conducted in January by the LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD found great support for Biden from the community's registered voters. Almost 70% of likely LGBTQ voters prefer Biden over Trump, the poll found.
But the Human Rights Campaign is nervous. The nation's largest LGBTQ rights group last month announced a $15 million marketing investment, mostly in the swing states.
Closson told show host Jody Hice the Biden campaign's push is predictable.
"President Biden has presided over the most aggressive pro-LGBTQ administration that we've ever seen, from championing legislation like The Equality Act, which would codify sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes. Thank goodness that legislation has not passed," he shared.
"But they were able to get across the finish line the so-called Respect for Marriage Act to codify gay marriage," Closson said.
How much Biden himself will attend these events remains to be seen, but he'll attend at least one, according to the FRC spokesman.
"They've announced that toward the end of the month they're going to culminate the so-called celebration of Pride with a huge fundraiser in New York City. The president has already stated that he plans to be the keynote speaker. It's not just Biden campaign surrogates. It's the first lady, the vice president – and you better believe it will be the president himself waving that rainbow flag," Closson said.
Trump's religious liberty record
That approach to the LGBTQ community offers one of the starkest contrasts between the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign, which will be a protector of religious liberty, Closson assured.
"The Biden campaign is all-in on the gamut of LGBTQ issues, but we don't have to guess at what a second Trump administration would look like. We have a four-year record on what the Trump administration did on issues relating to religious liberty," Closson noted.
The highlights for religious liberty during the first Trump administration, according to Closson, included but were not limited to:
- An annual meeting with dozens of nations represented to discuss ways to protect religious freedom.
- Trump's 2017 executive order to make sure that religious freedom was seen as something to be protected under American law.
- An amicus brief written by the Trump DOJ to the Supreme Court in support of Jack Phillips, the Christian baker in Colorado who was sued for refusing to create a custom cake for a gay wedding.
- The Trump Department of Health and Human services designation of clergy as essential support workers during COVID-19.
