MILWAUKEE (LifeSiteNews) – Homosexual “conservative” group Log Cabin Republicans celebrated the Republican National Convention’s adoption of a new party platform that abandons the GOP’s longstanding opposition to same-sex “marriage,” crediting the development to the “visionary, inclusive, and consistent leadership” of socially-centrist former president and 2024 GOP nominee Donald Trump.

While most of the controversy over the party’s new and dramatically shortened platform has focused on its weakening of the GOP’s commitments to fighting abortion at the federal level, it also dropped the old platform’s declaration that “(t)raditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society” and call for that understanding to be reflected in law, including with the “reversal” of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that forces all 50 states to recognize homosexual “marriage.”

On Monday, Log Cabin Republicans issued a statement celebrating the change as a “historic moment” in the group’s decades-long work toward a “more inclusive GOP” without the old platform’s “outdated and out-of-step language opposing marriage equality.”

“It also makes clear to voters that the Republican Party welcomes all, and is looking optimistically to the future instead of cynically rehashing old debates of the past.” 

After a conventionally pro-life first term, Trump has spent the past year working to stake out a middle ground on abortion that would largely relegate the issue for the states to fight out among themselves, but his positions on LGBT issues have always been more mixed during his time in Republican politics.

In 2012, as the owner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant, Trump repeatedly endorsed the inclusion of “transgender women,” i.e. men, in competition with actual women, in the name of what the Trump organization called “modernized” rules at the time, eliciting praise from LGBT pressure group GLAAD.

While running for president in 2016, Trump criticized a North Carolina law banning male students from female restrooms and said anyone should be allowed to “use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate.” By the time he was in office, he flipped on the issue, rejecting Obama-era guidelines on the subject and announcing that the Department of Education would no longer indulge bathroom-related “discrimination” complaints.

A consistent supporter of same-sex “marriage,” Trump nominated a variety of pro-LGBT officials to government posts and judicial vacancies and continued an Obama-era executive order on “gender identity nondiscrimination” and U.S. support for international recognition of homosexual relations at the United Nations Human Rights Council. His campaign actively courted LGBT-identifying voters with rainbow merchandise.

At the same time, Trump prioritized religious liberty and was generally aligned with social conservatives against the gender-fluidity movement, from banning gender-confused soldiers from the military to protecting women from having to share close quarters such as homeless shelters with men claiming to be transgendered. His White House also opposed the so-called “Equality Act” and maintained a biological definition of sex in its implementation of federal laws and regulations.

While running for office this time around, Trump has pledged to “protect children from left-wing gender insanity,” including banning federal funding, approval, and promotion of “gender transition” practices. At the same time, he has opened his Mar-a-Lago residence for several pro-LGBT uses, including a Log Cabin Republicans gala in 2022, a same-sex “wedding” in February 2024, and a LCR fundraiser in April.

While such trends raise grave questions for the long-term fate of pro-life and pro-family causes in the Republican Party, they are not expected to change the outcome this fall between Trump and incumbent Democrat President Joe Biden, whose positions on all the aforementioned issues are much farther to the left.

Polling aggregations by RealClearPolitics and RaceToTheWH indicate a slim popular-vote lead for Trump in the November election, and, more important, leads in swing states translating to an Electoral College advantage over Biden.