Gay Republicans: LGBTQ+ People ‘Better Off’ Under Trump

The Log Cabin Republicans are standing by their man.

After a whirlwind week that saw prominent members leave over its endorsement of President Trump, Charles Moran, a spokesperson for the gay GOP group, told Fox News that the LGBTQ+ community is "better off" now than it was under Obama.

"[L]ike so many disaffected Republicans who have not been comfortable with President Trump and with his record, I look at the question of, 'Is America better off now than it was four years ago and is the LGBT community better off now than it was four years ago?'" he told the conservative news network. "And under President Trump, the answer is inarguably, yes."

Moran went onto say that the Commander-in-Chief is the "first person elected president of the United States who supported gay marriage and also has a background supporting equality issues both as a businessman and as a philanthropist."

"But now also as a president of the United States," he added, saying that Trump advanced the big causes... important to the LGBTQ community" in office.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post which ran last week, the organization announced its support of the president's reelection campaign, crediting Trump with calls to end HIV/AIDS and to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. But as Out has previously reported, his proposed budget would decimate funding for international HIV/AIDS prevention, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, and there's no sign he even knows the decriminalization campaign is happening.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has consistently sought to roll back LGBTQ+ rights since the president took office. In less than a month, the White House filed a brief to the Supreme Court urging them to legalize firing workers for being trans and attempted to strongarm the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into reversing its stance on LGBTQ+ workplace discrimination.

Board member Jennifer Horn and Washington, D.C. chapter president Robert Turner both announced their resignations from the Log Cabin Republicans after the op-ed was published. Horn discussed her departure in a Tuesday interview with MSNBC.

"It's not just the LGBTQ community this president targets," she said. "When we look at immigrants, people -- anyone that he thinks he can somehow use to anger his base -- he doesn't care if he has to divide on racial lines, on ethnic lines, on educational lines. He will divide and damage and destroy this country in any manner he thinks he needs to advance his own political power."

Even as longtime members leave the Log Cabin Republicans for endorsing him, Trump doesn't smell anything rotten in Denmark. When asked about his administration's rollbacks of LGBTQ+ rights earlier this week, the president used the organization as proof he'd "done very well" with the community.

"Some of my biggest supporters are of that community, and I talk to them a lot about it," he claimed.

Trump went onto say that the Log Cabin Republicans had given him an award, but when contacted about the claim, the organization previously told Out it does not exist.

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