Election News

Gay Republican leader shocked to find his fellow conservatives calling him a pedophile

The president of the Log Cabin Republicans said the new GOP platform wasn't anti-LGBTQ+. He didn't expect the blowback he got.
By · Updated on July 23, 2024
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Gay Trump supporters Juan Hernandez and Charles Moran at the 2016 RNC. Photo: ABC News, Screenshot

“It’s official! The national GOP platform has been stripped of all anti-LGBT language! Inclusion won! Thank you @realDonaldTrump!”

This untrue statement was published July 15th on X (formerly Twitter) by Charles Moran, president of The Log Cabin Republicans (LCR), the nation’s largest group for “LGBT conservatives.” Moments later, his fellow conservative commenters started calling him a pedophile.

Related:

Log Cabin Republicans: The intersection of LGBTQ+ advocacy and conservatism

Learn about the history, beliefs, and key figures of the Log Cabin Republicans, a leading voice for LGBTQ+ inclusion within the Republican party.

Moran’s post on X included an image of himself standing in a Fox News-branded area of the Republican National Convention and holding up a booklet-sized version of the newly revised Republican Party platform.

While the platform removed Republicans’ decades-long opposition to same-sex marriage, Chapter 8, Section 1 of the platform says, “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents. We will end policies that punish families.”

The “sanctity of marriage” is a phrase that has sometimes been used as a dog whistle for heterosexual marriage (that is, marriages that are sanctified and sanctioned by evangelical churches). Trump discriminated against married same-sex couples and their families during his presidency.

The GOP platform also contains numerous sections dedicated to banning LGBTQ+ content from schools and rolling back legal protections for transgender people of all ages. It also promises “religious liberty” protections for Christians who discriminate against queer people as well as a pledge to keep “Christian-hating” individuals out of the country.

Barely 34 minutes after Moran published his post on X, another commenter named @itchy wrote, “You are a disgusting pedophile.” He wasn’t alone. Other commenters referred to Moran as “disgusting” and offensive to the Christian God. Several called him a “fa**ot” and one commenter wished him good luck in recovering from MPOX, a painful skin disease that spread amongst queer men from 2022 to 2023.

Republicans and religious conservatives have long accused LGBTQ+ people of molesting kids. Current right-wing rhetoric regularly vilifies LGBTQ+ people and their allies as “groomers” who seek to “indoctrinate” and “sexualize” kids. Such conservatives never mention the thousands of instances of child sexual abuse that have occurred in Christian churches or have been committed by cisgender heterosexuals elsewhere.

Others mocked Moran for aligning himself with Republicans and thinking they would accept him after attacking gay individuals and their civil rights for decades. Another pointed out that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s Christian Nationalist blueprint for a second Trump presidency, has plenty of anti-LGBTQ+ aims.

Trump claims to have never heard of Project 2025, but it was written with the participation of least 240 former Trump administration officials, associates, and acolytes under the guidance of his “good friend” Kevin Roberts, head of the far-right Heritage Foundation.

The Log Cabin Republicans’ love affair with Trump is anti-LGBTQ+

While the national board of LCR chose not to endorse Trump in 2016, numerous state chapters of LCR did. The national LCR endorsed Trump in 2020, with board members writing an op-ed in The Washington Post proclaiming that “Trump met his commitments to LGBTQ Americans.” The Trump Administration regularly defended anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — including international laws allowing for the torture and imprisonment of queer people — as a form of “religious freedom.”

LCR opposes the rolling back of transgender public accommodations in public schools and has suggested policies that would accommodate trans students while giving school districts flexibility on how to do so. LCR opposes gender-affirming care for minors. The group’s Out Spoken website pushes the right-wing falsehood that mental illness causes trans individuals to “snap” and become mass shooters.

The group has defended Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill by comparing its opponents to pedophiles who have “wet dreams of gender fluid, indoctrinated, and groomed children.” The group’s president, Moran, has written op-eds opposing transgender civil rights and also the Equality Act, legislation that would enshrine LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination protections into federal law. Earlier this year, the group named a straight self-described homophobe as one of its ambassadors — she proudly proclaimed “Heil Hitler” and openly wished for a more homophobic society.

The group’s current executive director, Jerri Ann Henry, called Trump’s numerous anti-LGBTQ+ policies “hiccups.” The organization also endorsed 14 anti-LGBTQ+ Republicans during the 2018 midterm elections and 12 anti-LGBTQ+ extremists in 2020, including Trump, Mike Pence, and a woman who thinks pedophiles are part of the LGBTQ+ community.

More recently, Texas LCR members joined armed extremists to protest a drag show. The national organization continues to praise Trump and never condemned his incitement of the January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. Other LCR chapters have compared President Joe Biden to Adolf Hitler and called for Biden’s death.

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