The Advocate, the nation’s oldest and largest LGBTQ-focused publication, on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Harris for president.
“Harris, the Democratic nominee, is exponentially better on every issue than her Republican opponent, Donald Trump — issues including reproductive freedom, the economy, and climate change. But our endorsement focuses on her LGBTQ+ rights record, which is stellar, and what she promises to do in that realm as president,” the publication’s editors wrote in Tuesday’s editorial. “Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is a strong LGBTQ+ ally too, something that certainly cannot be said of Trump’s vice-presidential pick, U.S. Sen. JD Vance.”
Harris has lengthy advocated for LGBTQ rights. As San Francisco’s district lawyer, she officiated a few of the nation’s first same-sex marriage ceremonies in the course of the metropolis’s “Winter of Love” in 2004. Later, as California’s lawyer basic, Harris refused to defend Proposition 8, a state constitutional modification that banned same-sex marriage, in court docket. She advocated for the repeal of the modification in 2013.
Harris has, nevertheless, confronted some criticism for her report on transgender rights. In 2015, whereas serving as California’s lawyer basic, she labored to dam a trans lady in a state jail from receiving gender-affirming surgical procedure. Throughout her first presidential run in 2019, Harris stated she took “full responsibility” for her actions within the case and stated she later labored “behind the scenes” to get the state’s corrections division to vary its coverage denying transgender inmates gender-affirming care.
Walz has equally supported LGBTQ causes for many years. As a schoolteacher and soccer coach at a Minnesota highschool within the late Nineteen Nineties, he suggested the college’s first gay-straight alliance, a student-led membership supporting LGBTQ college students and households. As governor, Walz helped go laws defending seekers and suppliers of gender-affirming well being care from prosecution by states with bans in impact.
Former President Trump has pledged to enact a slate of insurance policies concentrating on members of the LGBTQ neighborhood if he’s reelected, together with a nationwide ban on gender-affirming take care of transgender minors and a federal regulation recognizing solely two genders. He has promised to reinstate a ban on transgender individuals serving overtly within the army.
A ballot from the Human Rights Marketing campaign in September discovered that Harris holds a virtually 67-point lead over Trump amongst LGBTQ voters.
The Advocate’s endorsement of Harris comes on the heels of comparable endorsements from The Atlantic and The New York Occasions, which wrote late final month that Harris is “the only patriotic choice for president.” Most main information shops endorsed Hillary Clinton and President Biden towards Trump throughout his White Home runs in 2016 and 2020.
