James Inhofe, anti-LGBTQ+ former Republican senator, dead at 89

James Inhofe, a former U.S. senator known for his anti-LGBTQ+ stances and other ultraconservative positions, including denial of climate change, has died at age 89.

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Inhofe died Tuesday after having suffered a stroke five days earlier, according to multiple media outlets.

The Republican represented Oklahoma in the U.S. House from 1987 to 1994 and in the Senate from 1994 to 2023. He was previously an Oklahoma state legislator and mayor of Tulsa.

Inhofe said in the 1990s that he would not hire gay staffers, and he was one of the chief opponents of gay philanthropist James Hormel’s appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg. President Bill Clinton placed Hormel in the position through a recess appointment in 1999 after the Senate denied Hormel a confirmation vote. Hormel later told The Advocate that he took some pleasure in the fact that Inhofe’s office had a computer crash due to an overload of pornography downloaded by staff members.

Inhofe was a member of the Family, sometimes called the Fellowship, an evangelical group that included many conservative members of Congress. He, like others in the group, was friendly with dictatorial Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, even as Uganda considered its “kill the gays” bill in the 2000s.

In 2010, Inhofe supported an unsuccessful effort to overturn the Washington, D.C., City Council’s enactment of marriage equality. The same year, as Congress considered the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” he said straight soldiers would be unwilling to serve with lesbian, gay, and bisexual troops. On an American Family Association radio show, he even called LGB soldiers a “third group” separate from men and women. Two years later, he said military members shouldn’t march in Pride parades in uniform because the parades are political in nature. At the time, he accused President Barack Obama of “promoting the homosexual agenda.”

In 2013, Inhofe cosponsored a “license to discriminate” bill and voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Neither measure passed. In 2015, as Obama prepared to lift the military’s ban on transgender troops, Inhofe wondered aloud which restrooms they would use. He had a string of low scores, mostly zeroes, on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard.

Inhofe was also deeply opposed to environmental regulations and abortion rights. He famously called climate change a hoax and once brought a snowball into the Senate chamber and threw it to a fellow member, claiming it was evidence against global warming. “Inhofe’s rejection of climate science was based on his religious belief that God controls the climate and that it was hubristic to claim that burning fossil fuels could alter that,” Politiconotes. He played a key role in the appointment of Environmental Protection Agency administrators under Donald Trump.

Survivors include his wife, Kay; three children; 12 grandchildren; and a sister.