Hillary would ban reparative therapy for minors, says top LGBT group in endorsement
The nation's foremost homosexual and transgender political group
has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, saying she has made banning
reparative therapy and allowing transgender military service "a
pillar" of her presidential campaign.
“All the progress we have made as a nation on LGBT equality --
and all the progress we have yet to make -- is at stake in November," said
Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin.
The HRC said that Clinton has made homosexual and transgender
political advocacy "a pillar of her campaign and recently unveiled the
most robust and ambitious LGBT plan any candidate for president has ever laid
out."
Her campaign's platform "specifically calls for dropping
the ban on open transgender military service [and] outlawing dangerous 'conversion
therapy' for minors...among other proposals that would advance equality and support
the LGBT community."
Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State also helped convince HRC
to tap Hillary over Democratic rivals Bernie Sanders - who leads her by 27
percent in New Hampshire - and Martin O'Malley.
HRC referenced a December 2011 speech Clinton delivered to a
United Nations forum in Geneva, in which Clinton said that "religious
or cultural values" that reject homosexuality are “not
unlike...honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation.”
Earlier that year she boasted that the State Department had been "instrumental"
in getting Lady Gaga to perform at a gay
pride event in Rome.
Griffin said that LGBT activists' political gains are threatened
by an "onslaught of state and local anti-LGBT measures," presumably
like the referendum in Houston that repealed an unpopular transgender
discrimination ordinance that would have allowed biological males to use the
restrooms and shower facilities of the opposite sex. In November, citizens of
the overwhelmingly Democratic city voted by a
nearly two-to-one margin to strike
the law.
Clinton will formally accept HRC's endorsement at a public event
this weekend in Des Moines, Iowa.
Meanwhile, Sanders dismissed the endorsement, saying the HRC is
part of "the political establishment" that he is challenging.
HRC, which has been a favored cause of George Soros'
philanthropies, reported more than
$40 million in gross
receipts in 2014.
HRC has made 97 percent of its PAC contributions to Democrats,
according to the campaign finance website Open Secrets.
