January 15, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Several Democrats have formally announced their intentions to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency in 2020, including one lawmaker who is coming under fire for her conservative past on LGBT issues.
Over the weekend, Barack Obama’s former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii announced their intentions to run next year, Ballotpedia reports. They join declared candidates John Delaney, a former representative from Maryland and West Virginia state Sen. Richard Ojeda, as well as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has launched an exploratory committee.
Sen. Kamala Harris of California said Friday she would be deciding “soon” whether to run, as well.
All of the above official and potential candidates are social liberals who support abortion-on-demand and so-called LGBT “rights,” though Gabbard, who is also a Major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, is currently taking heat for her long-since-disavowed positions and remarks against same-sex “marriage,” CNN reports.
Gabbard’s father Mike Gabbard led the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, which successfully fought in 1998 to enact a state constitutional amendment against same-sex “marriage” in Hawaii. The group called homosexuality “unhealthy, abnormal behavior that should not be promoted or accepted in society” and supported reparative or “conversion” therapy for people with unwanted same-sex attraction – all stances deeply out of favor with the 2019 Democrat Party.
Tulsi embraced her work for that campaign while running for state legislature in 2002, framing her goal as “protect[ing] traditional marriage.” Two years earlier she had declared that “homosexual activists” opposed her mother Carol’s run for the state education board because they knew “she will not allow them to force their values down the throats of the children in our schools.”
In 2004, she testified against same-sex civil unions on the grounds that it was “dishonest, cowardly and extremely disrespectful” to “try to act as if there is a difference between 'civil unions' and same-sex marriage […] as Democrats we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”
The Democrat Party moved decidedly to the left on LGBT issues since then, and when Gabbard ran for Congress in 2012, she apologized for past comments that “have been very divisive and even disrespectful to those within the LGBT community.”
CNN notes that since 2013 Gabbard has introduced a variety of pro-LGBT legislation, including a bill that would force employers to recognize individuals’ claimed “gender identity,” forbid employers from “discriminating” based on “sexual orientation” or “gender identity,” and mandate transgender “access” to opposite-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms. Since 2013, the left-wing Human Rights Campaign has given her between 88% and 100% on LGBT issues.
Despite several years of marching in lockstep with Democrats’ LGBT orthodoxy, however, and despite her “conversion” occurring the same year as former President Obama’s on the issue, left-wing media outlets have been teeming with headlines about the congresswoman’s supposed “homophobia.”
“Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 Campaign May Be Over Before It Starts,” Rolling Stone declared. “Democratic Hopeful Tulsi Gabbard's LGBTQ+ Record Is…Not Great,” Out tells its readers. Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono, also from Hawaii, suggested Gabbard didn’t qualify as “someone who has a long record of supporting progressive goals.”
Breitbart notes that Gabbard was to the left of her party in 2016 when she backed socialist Bernie Sanders for president instead of Hillary Clinton, but also chastised members of her own party for “fomenting religious bigotry” this month when they negatively questioned Trump judicial nominee Brian Buescher’s membership in the Knights of Columbus.