Have gay rights stalled with Trump back in power?
When President Trump attended a production of 'Les Misérables' in Washington last week, there were four men dressed in women's clothes seated in the audience. Yes, they put on a daring show of drag queen power at the Kennedy Center, knowing that Trump was coming to the play.
The drama before the play led to applause for the drag performers. Trump got none of the traditional standing ovation for a president.
That 'in-your-face' moment for the gay rights movement comes after Trump fired the Kennedy Center's board earlier this year, having condemned them for allowing drag performers on stage in the past. 'No more drag shows or other anti-American propaganda' Trump wrote on social media in February.
And it comes as the Southern Baptist Convention voted last week to lobby for the return of laws banning gay marriage. Also, it comes after right-wing-inspired bans on library books dealing with homosexuality. And there is no forgetting Trump's 2024 campaign advertising positioning former Vice President Kamala Harris as standing for transgender people: 'Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.'
As the Kennedy Center protest showed, public acts of resistance to Trump are rising, especially calls to fight for and assert gay and transgender rights.
A new Gallup poll shows only 38 percent of Republicans now agree that 'gay or lesbian relations' are morally acceptable. That is a steep drop from 2022, when 56 percent of Republicans said homosexuality was acceptable.
Similarly, Republican support for same-sex marriage has dropped to 41 percent, according to Gallup, down sharply from a high of 55 percent in 2021. In contrast, 88 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of independents continue to support marriage equality.
That 47-point gap in opinion between Democrats and Republicans is the widest Gallup has recorded since it began tracking public opinion on this issue 29 years ago.
And with Trump in the White House, the poll finds only 38 percent of Republicans agree that gay behavior is moral. That is a different galaxy from the one where 86 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of independents see no moral sin in same-sex relations.
Open opposition to gay rights among Trump-friendly Republicans picked up in 2022 after Justice Clarence Thomas, writing in opposition to abortion rights, argued that the court should revisit the 2015 ruling that the Constitution gives gay people the right to marry.
Nervous gay rights supporters responded by pressing Congress to pass, in 2022, the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act. It requires every state, no matter its state laws on gays, to recognize same-sex marriages licensed in other states as legal.
But the fight has since become more intense as activists face the reality that Trump's attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs include reversing acceptance of gay rights.
Senate Democrats last week pressed to finish work on a bill to stop the Trump administration from kicking transgender people out of the military. That action, based on an executive order signed by Trump on his first day in office, has already led to more than 1,000 servicemembers choosing to leave the military before they are expelled. In May, the Supreme Court ruled that the ban could take effect while courts determine if it is constitutional.
'If you are willing to risk your life for our country and you can do the job, it shouldn't matter if you are gay, straight, transgender, Black, White, or anything else,' said one of the bill's cosponsors, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.).
But there is a twist to this political story.
As resistance to Trump rises among Democrats on tariffs, mass deportations and belittling gays, splits remain among MAGA opponents. Several old-school Black, white and Latino politicians in Washington are uneasy that the public will accept a movement that highlights gay rights to go along with Black, Latino and women's rights.
'Being gay is not the same as being Black' is a refrain I heard again and again while working on my new book on race relations. Their message is that older, socially conservative, church-going Democratic voters can be lost by aggressively backing gay rights.
Thirty years ago, a conservative Republican friend told me a joke: 'What's the difference between being Black and being gay? If you're Black, you don't have to tell your mom.'
Democrats split in 1994 when President Bill Clinton signed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' a policy designed to allow gay Americans to serve in the armed forces if they kept their sexuality private.
Those arguments from old-school Democrats faded in 2011 as gay Americans won the legal right to serve openly in the military without fear of discharge or discrimination. Just four years later, the Supreme Court upheld the right of gay couples to marry in a 5-to-4 decision.
It is curious that despite Trump's distaste for gay rights, he appointed Scott Bessent, an openly gay billionaire, to serve as Treasury secretary. President Biden appointed an openly gay veteran, Pete Buttigieg, as Transportation secretary. Both men are married with children. Their sexual orientation was neither a qualification nor a disqualifier. That, in itself, is a milestone.
Roughly 9 percent of Americans now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to polls. Wouldn't it be something if, in 2028, the presidential contest is between two gay men?
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book 'New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America's Second Civil Rights Movement.'
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