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Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick hasn't been a senator long — but he's been in the public eye long enough to accrue a strongly anti-LGBTQ+ record.
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for his vice-presidential running mate, has been a U.S. senator for just a year and a half, but that’s been long enough for him to compile an extensive anti-LGBTQ+ record.
Vance, from Ohio, was elected to the Senate in 2022 and was sworn in last year. He is best known as the author of the best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of growing up in a Rust Belt town that was made into a Netflix movie. He has been a lawyer and venture capitalist. He was once a fierce critic of Trump, privately likening him to Adolf Hitler, but eventually became an ally.
Vance’s record is one of homophobia and transphobia. Here are some of the highlights — or lowlights — compiled with the help of GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and others.
Before Vance took office, he said he would have voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which wrote marriage equality into federal law to protect it against future negative Supreme Court decisions. “The religious liberty piece of this is very bad,” he told anti-LGBTQ+ group Mission: America in July 2022, even though the legislation didn’t directly address religion, and no church or clergy member in the U.S. is forced to officiate or recognize a marriage that conflicts with their beliefs. Both houses of Congress passed the bill in 2022, and President Joe Biden signed it into law in December of that year.
In the Senate, Vance introduced a ban on gender-affirming care for minors called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act. “The act includes an array of far-right, anti-transgender buzzwords and ‘bans’ a variety of medical procedures, none of which are a part of transgender healthcare for minors,” GLAAD notes. Violation would be a Class C felony, and conviction would come with a prison term of 3.5 to 15 years. The bill has not passed. He also infamously said Democrats want to bring immigrants into the U.S. to turn them transgender.
In 2022, he tweeted, “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.” He has also “repeated false rhetoric to inaccurately claim that bills censoring classroom conversation about LGBTQ people are about ‘parents’ rights,’” GLAAD reports.
He has stated that he does not believe antidiscrimination laws should cover sexual orientation and gender identity. When running for Senate, he criticized his Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, for voting for the Equality Act, a national ban on anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, as a member of the U.S. House. The act has yet to pass into law.
Vance has opposed protections for other marginalized people as well. Last month, he introduced a bill to dismantle all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government. “The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division. It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society,” he said in a press release. The bill has so far gone nowhere.
He opposes abortion in all circumstances except when the life of the pregnant person is threatened. He has promised to support a national ban on abortion. He voted against a bill to codify access to in vitro fertilization in federal law.
He has criticized certain Democrats as childless, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, even though Harris has two stepchildren and Buttigieg is the adoptive father of twins. “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” he told Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, in 2021. The 19thhas an extensive article on Vance's anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynist record.
He opposes gun control, calling gun violence “fake problems.” Saturday, just after Trump was attacked by a man with a semiautomatic weapon during a campaign rally, Vance blamed Democrats, especially Biden and his reelection campaign.
“Donald Trump has been a bully for years — and his pick of MAGA clone J.D. Vance is a reminder that nothing has changed. This is anything but a unity ticket,” said a statement from HRC President Kelley Robinson. “We are not simply choosing between two campaigns. We are choosing between two fundamentally different visions of America. One, with Trump and MAGA ‘yes man’ J.D. 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, and send Joe Biden and Kamala Harris back to the White House.”
