Marco Rubio Won’t Admit To Talking With Gay Republicans

Marco Rubio is talking a very thin tightrope, trying to balance is hate and homophobia with needing to expand his base, so he’s using gays to do it.

Despite his recent claim he would attend a same-sex wedding, Senator Marco Rubio has a long and ugly history with the LGBT community. He supports a federal amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex marriage, but claims that does not demean gay people. He voted against ENDA – a bill the vast majority of Americans already believe is and should be the law – which would provide basic workplace protections for LGBT people. He voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) because of its added LGBT protections. 

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of DOMA in 2013, Rubio classified the ruling as “a serious mistake.” That same year, less than 18 months ago, the Florida Republican Senator helped raise money for and delivered the keynote address at an annual fundraiser for the Florida Family Policy Council. Mother Jones reported that the FFPC is “a prominent social conservative organization that promotes so-called ‘conversion therapy’ to help LGBT individuals become straight.”

That fundraising dinner honored Mat Staver, the dean of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law and the founder of Liberty Counsel, an anti-gay law firm that focuses on cases in which it tries to push back against LGBT civil rights advances.

So it’s surprising today that Reuters published an article with the grossly misleading title, “Presidential hopeful Rubio reaches out to gay Republicans,” in which it claims that Rubio, “the youthful Republican presidential hopeful who touts himself as the candidate of his party’s future, has been making moves to court a socially liberal faction of his party that represents gay conservatives.”

The Florida senator’s staff have held quarterly meetings with the Log Cabin Republicans “going back some time”, their executive director, Gregory Angelo, told Reuters. The meetings with the advocacy group were to discuss legislation, issues and opportunities to “partner on,” Angelo said. Rubio’s office declined to comment on the meetings.

Assuming the meetings have taken place, why would Rubio or his staff refuse to acknowledge them? That’s not “reaching out,” that’s staffing out a meeting.

The Log Cabin Republicans in 2012 endorsed Mitt Romney – the man who told a group of gay parents standing in his office he didn’t know gay people had families, and who said gay couples’ hospital visitation rights are not rights, but “benefits.”

Responses on Twitter were as expected:

 

UPDATE – 10:36 AM EDT:
Just received this tweet with links to two important stories:

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license