Tulsi Gabbard’s Culture Wars

Tulsi Gabbard’s public career began with opposition to same-sex marriage. It’s a fact about the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii (who recently endorsed Donald Trump and joined his transition team) that is sometimes noted by her critics. But her history of opposition to LGBT causes is generally overlooked by her admirers on the dissident left and heterodox right, who treat it as a youthful mistake with no bearing on her later career. They may admire Gabbard’s foreign policy, which combines hawkishness toward militant Islamism with an aversion to “regime-change wars.” They may applaud her criticism of the U.S. security state. They may be glad that she opposes gender surgeries for minors. But they do not connect these dissident stances for which Gabbard is now known to the one she first took.

The failure to see a throughline in Gabbard’s career is understandable. After all, like many others, she has changed her mind on same-sex marriage. But examining her later career in light of its beginning reveals some surprising continuities, not just in her own stances, but also in the cultural progressivism and foreign policy interventionism she has opposed. Years after their apparent resolution, the issues involved in the gay marriage debate continue to roil American politics.

In 1993, Hawaii became the first state to consider a question that would soon consume the nation: whether same-sex couples had a right to marry. In that year, the state’s supreme court issued a ruling suggesting that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples might be unconstitutional. Mike Gabbard, Tulsi’s father, was the leader of the opposition, as founder of the Alliance for Traditional Marriage and Values and a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii. He also hosted a radio show on these themes, “Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii.” He became, in the words of Honolulu Magazine, “the face and voice” of resistance to same-sex marriage. His work culminated in 1998 with the passage of an amendment that allowed the state legislature to prohibit same-sex marriage.

Though the household in which Tulsi was raised was socially conservative, it was influenced by the new religious trends of the 1960s. Tulsi’s parents were involved with the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of Hare Krishna. More recently, however, her father has described himself as a Catholic, and Tulsi writes in her recent book, For Love of Country, that he is a Knight of Columbus and lector at his parish church.

Her family’s activism gave Tulsi her start in politics. She appeared with her father in an ad opposing same-sex marriage. She criticized “homosexual activists” who sought to “force their values down the throats of the children in our schools.” When she ran for the state legislature in 2002, at age twenty-one, she touted her work with the Alliance for Traditional Marriage. In the statehouse, she carried on the family legacy. In 2004, she testified against a civil-unions bill before the house judiciary committee. “To try to act as if there is a difference between ‘civil unions’ and same-sex marriage is dishonest, cowardly, and extremely disrespectful to the people of Hawaii,” she said. “As Democrats we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”

By the time Gabbard ran for Congress in 2012, however, something had changed. She apologized to activists for the “very divisive and even disrespectful” things she had once said. In 2013, she signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In Congress, she was a reliable vote for LGBT causes, supporting the Equality Act, the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, and repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Gabbard attributed her about-face to what she had seen after deploying to the Middle East with the Hawaii Army National Guard. “The contrast between our society and those in the Middle East made me realize that the difference—the reason those societies are so oppressive—is that they are essentially theocracies where the government and government leaders wield the power to both define and then enforce ‘morality,’” Gabbard wrote in 2011.

Yet at times, Gabbard’s support for same-sex marriage has seemed a bit like the candidate Barack Obama’s avowed opposition to it—a matter more of political expedience than of personal belief. In 2013, Gabbard was the only member of Hawaii’s congressional delegation who failed to send a representative to a special legislative session on same-sex marriage. In 2015, she told Ozy magazine that though she had come to a different understanding of the government’s role in upholding morality, her personal views hadn’t changed. These and other slights caused the Hawaii LGBT Caucus to back her primary challenger in 2016. Suspicion lingered, with one progressive writer describing her in 2019 as “barely interested in meeting the standards of not being an anti-gay politician.”

Doubts that Gabbard was fully committed to the LGBT cause now seem well placed. Though she has not returned to the full-spectrum social conservatism of her youth, she has become an outspoken critic of transgender causes and a frequent defender of social conservatives targeted for their beliefs. In 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill that would prevent transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. In 2022, she spoke at a rally against gender surgeries for minors in Nashville.

Gabbard may have been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but on gender issues she has turned out to be more conservative than most Democrats—and some Republicans. She defended Ron DeSantis’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill—while suggesting that it didn’t go far enough. “When I first heard about Florida’s Parental Rights bill, I was shocked it only protects children K-3,” she wrote in 2022. “Third grade? How about 12th grade—or not at all.”

Gabbard has criticized transgender causes in some of the same terms she once employed against same-sex marriage. Whereas once she warned that the Democratic Party was catering to “a small number of homosexual extremists,” now she worries that it is succumbing to a “small but very vocal trans community.” More than two decades after she first warned that gay activists were attempting to “force their values down the throats of the children in our schools,” she came out in support of a bill prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity.

These parallels suggest that opposition to transgender causes is more closely connected to opposition to same-sex marriage than some would like to admit. Social conservatives may have suffered a decisive defeat with Obergefell v. Hodges, but the concerns they raised—regarding the sexualization of children and the overturning of established institutional and political processes—continue to roil public debate. Indeed, one theory of why support for same-sex marriage has recently declined, especially among Republicans, is that opposition to the demands of T has made people more skeptical of L, G, and B.

Despite her involvement with socially conservative causes, Gabbard is best known for her stances on foreign policy and national security. There are reasons to think that these two elements of her career are connected. In her recent book, Gabbard criticizes U.S. policymakers for regarding other countries as adversaries simply because they resist the “radical LGBTQ+ woke agenda.” She warns that the same logic of enmity is being used to smear some Americans as “domestic enemies.”

Her comments indicate a broader change in American politics. Social conservatives who once cheered the Iraq War and the Patriot Act have become increasingly skeptical of the U.S. security state, which they see as fighting for the rainbow flag, not the stars and stripes.

Gabbard, a longstanding opponent of wireless surveillance and critic of the Patriot Act, is alert to the way government power can violate civil liberties—including those enjoyed by religious believers. Her suspicion of national security agencies has become more common on the right, fueled in part by concerns over the FBI’s targeting of so-called “radical traditionalist” Catholics and the pro-life activist Mark Houck, who was subject to a dawn raid from the FBI over accusations that he had violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

Likewise, social conservatives appear to have become more skeptical of foreign wars that are justified by progressive ideology. In 2022, Richard Moore, the head of the British intelligence agency MI6, wrote: “With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard-won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights.” This framing has been echoed by American officials such as Rep. Jamie Raskin, who stated: “Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny [and] a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export.” By justifying war in these terms, Western officials articulate a casus belli that applies to a significant portion of their own citizens.

Gabbard’s trajectory testifies to the resiliency of social conservatism after the victory of same-sex marriage. It also suggests some of the risks that social conservatives face. Even those who share her skepticism of regime change may wonder whether she went too far by meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Likewise, one need not embrace a woke LGBTQ agenda to object to the Hindu nationalist politics pursued by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, a man Gabbard has said “should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere.”

Recognition of same-sex couples has entailed rewiring the most fundamental element of society: the norms and expectations surrounding the relation of men and women. Even Andrew Sullivan, a relatively conservative advocate of same-sex marriage, has spoken against the “stifling model of heterosexual normality.” More radical advocates propose “queering society” as the endpoint of LGBT rights. This project of social transformation has affinities with the post-9/11 national security state: Both have employed professional and legal penalties to silence dissent and encourage conformity. Social conservatives are beginning to recognize these commonalities, as indicated by growing criticism of our “rainbow regime” and “queering the Donbass.” If Gabbard’s activism against same-sex marriage is a reminder of a previous chapter of social conservatism, her opposition to the national security state may be a glimpse of its future.

Matthew Schmitz is a founder and editor of Compact.

Image by Gage Skidmore, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.