Who Is Jeff Landry, the Newly Elected, Antigay Louisiana Governor?

Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s newly elected Republican governor, has an intensely anti-LGBTQ+ record, having opposed antidiscrimination protections even though he has a gay brother and pushed the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth.

Landry, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, was elected governor Saturday. Under the state’s election system, all candidates run against each other in a primary, regardless of party, and if no candidate wins a majority, the top two advance to a runoff. However, Landry received 52 percent of the vote Saturday, so there is no need for a further vote. Democrat Shawn Wilson, a former Louisiana transportation secretary, was his closest competitor among 10 other candidates, with 26 percent of the vote.

Landry, who will take office January 8, will succeed Democrat John Bel Edwards, who is term-limited. Edwards, although conservative by Democratic standards, has fought against the state’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, vetoing some bills and letting others become law without his signature.

Landry has been Louisiana attorney general since 2016 and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2011 to 2013, having been elected in the Tea Party wave. He received a zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard for his single term.

When Edwards took office in 2016, he issued an executive order banning anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in state employment and by state contractors. However, Landry, as attorney general, sued to overturn the order, and he eventually won in the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Landry’s gay brother, Nicholas Landry, has criticized his actions. “It’s that kind of hatred and that kind of bigotry and that kind of discrimination that is just uncalled for,” Nicholas Landry said in a video posted to YouTube in 2016.

In 2018, Attorney General Landry asked the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to rescind its newly offered minor in LGBTQ+ studies. Nicholas Landry posted an open letter on Facebook in response, saying, “I want to state my opposition publicly. Ignorance is not education. Your constituents, heterosexual and homosexual alike, have made huge inroads in working towards equality in our community. By embracing diversity and acknowledging our differences, we gain understanding. Understanding is education.”

In 2019, as the U.S. Supreme Court considered the LGBTQ+ rights case Bostock v. Clayton County, Jeff Landry joined several other Republican state attorneys general in signing on to a brief urging the high court to rule that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans sex discrimination, did not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. However, the Supreme Court ended up ruling that the law did ban such discrimination.

This year, Landry joined fellow Republican AGs in an anti-transgender and anti-abortion rights action. They signed on to a letter calling on the Biden administration to let states access information about residents who have obtained gender-affirming care or abortions in other states. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a rule that would keep this data confidential under federal privacy law.

Landry also played a major role in this year’s passage of Louisiana’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. The bill appeared dead in a Senate committee after one Republican senator, Fred Mills, voted against it. But Landry and other leading Republicans pressured the Senate to revive the bill, and it was sent to a different committee, which ended up approving it. It then went to the full Senate, which passed it, as did the Louisiana House of Representatives. Edwards vetoed it, but legislators overrode his veto, and the bill became law.

The legislature failed to override Edwards’s veto of two other anti-LGBTQ+ bills, one restricting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools and another requiring the students to be addressed by pronouns aligning with their gender assigned at birth unless their parents approved different pronouns. In 2021, Edwards vetoed a bill restricting trans students’ participation in school sports, but after lawmakers passed a similar bill in 2022, he let it become law without his signature, saying his veto would have been overridden.