RNC Speeches Embrace Hate for the LGBTQ Community
Prominent Republican National Convention speakers continued their prolonged, vicious attacks on the LGBTQ community.
As expected, the Republican National Convention has featured a number of speakers seeking to elicit applause from the audience of delegates and convention attendees packed into Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum.
Part of that rhetoric includes criticisms of incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden, focusing on his physical health, mental acuity, ideology, and policies — all of which are typically considered acceptable attacks in a fiercely fought campaign.
But a significant number of speakers have attacked the LGBTQ community, especially when expressing their contempt for transgender rights.
While the party’s platform explicitly calls for keeping “men out of women’s sports” and ending “left-wing gender insanity,” several prominent speakers have harped on transgender issues in particular, and LGBTQ rights and visibility more broadly.
“For far too long, the establishment in Washington has sold us out,” U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said in her speech on Monday night.
“They promised unity, and delivered division. They promised peace, and brought war,” she continued, regurgitating an oft-used trope that Democrats in Washington are out-of-step with working-class and religious Americans. “They promised normalcy, and gave us Transgender Visibility Day on Easter Sunday. And let me state this clearly: There are only two genders. And we are made in God’s image. Amen. And we won’t shy away from speaking that simple truth, ever.”
U.S. Rep. John James (R-Mich.) used part of his speech to attack transgender participation in women’s sports, which has become a rallying cry in recent years as various Republican-led legislatures have passed laws barring trans participation, and as various sporting bodies have sought to adopt restrictions prohibiting transgender or intersex athletes from competing as women.
James accused Democrats of wanting “to take your dollars…take your voice…take your control, and give it back to D.C. bureaucrats to execute their woke and Green New Deal agenda.”
“Our daughters were sold on hope, and now they’re being forced on the playing fields and changing rooms of biological males,” James said, as part of a litany of grievances complaining about Democratic policy priorities and broken campaign promises.
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) accused Democrats of pursuing radical policies, decrying transgender participation in sport and the teaching of LGBTQ-related topics in schools.
“Today’s Democrat party is not the party of our parents and grandparents,” Johnson said. “That party cared about workers and people struggling to get by. Now they are the party of open borders, reckless spending, and weakness on the world stage. Their fringe agenda includes biological males competing against girls, and the sexualization and indoctrination of our children.”
Johnson later claimed that he had mistakenly delivered an earlier version of his speech, which was more divisive than a revised speech embracing the Republican Party’s preferred theme of promoting “unity” among Americans.
The speech had been changed after the recent attempted assassination of Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump on Saturday, but Johnson later told CBS News that someone had loaded the earlier version into the teleprompter.
On the convention’s second night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis returned to some of the rhetoric he had used while running for the Republican presidential nomination last year. At the time, DeSantis sought to position himself as a cultural warrior willing to push back on the excesses of the Left.
“[Democrats] want to ban gas automobiles, eliminate sacramental rites, and impose gender ideology on everyone from our infantrymen to kindergarteners,” said DeSantis. “They stand for DEI, which really means division, exclusion, and indoctrination, and it is wrong.”
Later in the speech, the governor took a swipe at the idea that transgender identity can be real. “They can’t even define what a woman is,” he said.
Republicans’ attacks on LGBTQ identity take place against the backdrop of a larger backlash against LGBTQ visibility nationwide.
In June, there were several dozen incidents including the theft or vandalism of Pride flags in various places throughout the country. The Colorado Republican Party even sent out an email to supporters encouraging them to “burn all the Pride flags.”
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