It's a strange time to be one of the roughly 25 percent of LGBT Americans who lean Republican. Liberal media and Democratic politicians are making apocalyptic pronouncements about the supposed fascist dystopia that awaits America under a potential second term for Donald Trump, like the Biden campaign tweeting images from The Handmaid's Tale. Yet at the same time that all this hysteria is going on, the Republican Party's latest platform includes a massive win for gay rights.
For years, a key goal of gay Republicans and their allies has been the removal of the GOP's anti-gay-marriage plank from its official platform. While Trump made history as the first president to take office accepting gay marriage, the Republican platform he formally ran on in 2016 explicitly endorsed "traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman" and specifically denounced the Supreme Court cases enshrining gay marriage as the law of the land. And in 2020, Republicans essentially recycled the 2016 platform and ran on it again, rather than produce a new one, citing the pandemic's disruptions.
In the new 2024 platform Republicans just released, this language is nowhere to be found. The document says nothing about gay marriage at all. There is no endorsement of "traditional marriage," no call to overturn the Supreme Court's decisions, or anything else. The absence of a formal position implies that Republican candidates are officially free to adopt their own position on the issue, a tacit statement that the GOP has no problem with candidates and politicians who, like Trump, have embraced gay marriage.
It's hard to overstate the significance of this development.