WASHINGTON, D.C., January 20, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The nation's foremost homosexual and transgender political group has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, saying she has made banning reparative therapy and allowing transgender military service “a pillar” of her presidential campaign.
“All the progress we have made as a nation on LGBT equality — and all the progress we have yet to make — is at stake in November,” said Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin.
The HRC said that Clinton has made homosexual and transgender political advocacy “a pillar of her campaign and recently unveiled the most robust and ambitious LGBT plan any candidate for president has ever laid out.”
Her campaign's platform “specifically calls for dropping the ban on open transgender military service [and] outlawing dangerous 'conversion therapy' for minors…among other proposals that would advance equality and support the LGBT community.”
Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State also helped convince HRC to tap Hillary over Democratic rivals Bernie Sanders – who leads her by 27 percent in New Hampshire – and Martin O'Malley.
HRC referenced a December 2011 speech Clinton delivered to a United Nations forum in Geneva, in which Clinton said that “religious or cultural values” that reject homosexuality are “not unlike…honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation.”
Earlier that year she boasted that the State Department had been “instrumental” in getting Lady Gaga to perform at a gay pride event in Rome.
Griffin said that LGBT activists' political gains are threatened by an “onslaught of state and local anti-LGBT measures,” presumably like the referendum in Houston that repealed an unpopular transgender discrimination ordinance that would have allowed biological males to use the restrooms and shower facilities of the opposite sex. In November, citizens of the overwhelmingly Democratic city voted by a nearly two-to-one margin to strike the law.
Clinton will formally accept HRC's endorsement at a public event this weekend in Des Moines, Iowa.
Meanwhile, Sanders dismissed the endorsement, saying the HRC is part of “the political establishment” that he is challenging.
HRC, which has been a favored cause of George Soros' philanthropies, reported more than $40 million in gross receipts in 2014.
HRC has made 97 percent of its PAC contributions to Democrats, according to the campaign finance website Open Secrets.
