Trump’s running mate JD Vance is sadly but predictably anti-LGBTQ+
Donald Trump has announced that JD Vance will be his running mate in November’s presidential election – but what has the Republican senator for Ohio said about LGBTQ+ issues? (Spoiler, it’s not good).
Trump, the target of an assassination attempt on Saturday (13 July), announced that the former venture capitalist, who turns 40 next month, was his pick for vice-president if he wins a second presidential term.
Vance, the state’s junior senator, wrote the New York Times best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of growing up in poverty that was later turned into a Netflix movie.
While he now supports Trump, Vance once described himself as a “never Trumper”. He also called the former president an “idiot” and was harshly critical of him in 2016 and during the opening stages of his presidency, calling him “dangerous” and “unfit” for office.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a*shole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016.
When the “Hitler” comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer represented Vance’s views, Sky News reported.
But where does Vance stand when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community? Here’s what he’s said about key issues.
JD Vance’s views on gay marriage
Vance, born James Donald Bowman, has stated that he would have voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which added further protections for same-sex marriage.
The act was passed in 2022 to protect existing marriages if gay marriage was struck down by the Supreme Court in the future, which LGBTQ+ Americans feared after the landmark abortion ruling, Roe v Wade, was over-turned. Vance only entered the senate in 2023.
“The religious liberty piece of this is very bad,” Vance told anti-LGBTQ+ group Mission: America, in 2022, despite the legislation not directly addressing religion.
What has he said about gender-affirming care for trans people?
During his short time in the senate, Vance has proposed a complete ban on all gender-affirming care for minors throughout the US, including reversible puberty blockers.
The legislation also seeks to ban all taxpayer funding for gender-affirming care, and would “prohibit institutions of higher education from providing instruction on gender-affirming care”.
It also states that doctors from other countries who have provided gender-affirming care to a young person would be ineligible to receive a US visa. Vance’s bill, known as the Protect Children’s Innocence Act was introduced last year but has not yet passed into law.
“Under no circumstances should doctors be allowed to perform these gruesome, irreversible operations on underage children,” Vance said after announcing the proposed legislation.
Vance has used the ‘groomer’ slur
Vance has used the “groomer” slur previously, a word often weaponised by the far-right to smear drag queens and the LGBTQ+ community by comparing them to paedophiles.
Speaking about bills in the US that aimed to limit gender-affirming care and potentially ban drag performances, Vance labelled as groomers anyone who opposed them.
“I’ll stop calling people groomers when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualisation of my children,” he wrote on Twitter/X in 2022.
He repeated the claim to broadcaster Tucker Carlson, saying: “If you don’t want to be called a groomer, don’t sexualise six and seven-year-old children… this is about parental rights. What kind of a country do we want to live in? Where families control what values their children grow up in or where Joe Biden and the pharmaceutical companies do that?”
He’s opposed LGBTQ+ discrimination protection
Vance has hit out at attempts to protect the queer community from discrimination. After the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that LGBTQ+ employees should be protected from job discrimination, he claimed the court had betrayed conservatives.
In a now-deleted tweet, he wrote: “The conservative legal movement has accomplished two things: libertarian political economy (enforced by judges) and betrayal of social conservatives and traditionalists.
“The next (and perhaps most important) step is for social conservatives to realise that donor economics is not merely incidental. It flows from, and reinforces, principles that degrade family, community, industrial bases and nations.”
LGBTQ+ campaigners have come out against the Republican ticket, with Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson saying: “We are not simply choosing between two campaigns. We are choosing between two fundamentally different visions of America.
One, with Trump and MAGA [Trump supporter’s slogan Make America Great Again] yes man JD Vance at the helm, where our rights and freedoms are under siege, and the other, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris leading the way, where we are advancing toward freedom and equality for all.
“Everything is at stake and the contrast could not be clearer. We must defeat Trump, Vance, and their brand of chaos and division.”
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