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The Power of our Pride Town Hall, an LGBTQ-focused forum that took place in Los Angeles, was organized by CNN and the LGBTQ rights advocacy group, Human Rights Campaign. Nine 2020 Democratic presidential candidates participated in this forum and the only top-tier candidate who missed the event was Bernie Sanders who declined the invitation after suffering a heart attack. Their participation was a clear sign that LGBTQ rights are taken seriously. The candidates were trying to explain their view on LGBTQ rights by contrasting their liberal approaches with that which oppose same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay presidential candidate, was asked to point to any verses in the Bible that support refusing services to LGBTQ people. The question was a reference to so-called religious refusal laws that allow organizations and businesses to invoke religion as a reason to deny services. According to The Religion News Service, Buttigieg argued he was raised with a different kind of Christian faith. “Without telling others how to worship, the Christian tradition that I belong to instructs me to identify with the marginalized, and to recognize that the greatest thing that any of us have to offer is love,” said Buttigieg, who is Episcopalian. He went on to contend that the right to religious freedom “ends where religion is being used as an excuse to harm other people,” and that “it makes God smaller” when faith is used to disparage another.
The forum and its participants are trying to show that religion is not an enemy of LGBTQ people and that there are religious people who are gay/lesbian or who care about LGBTQ rights. Majorities of United States religious groups, with the exception of white evangelic Protestants and Mormons, oppose religiously based service refusals of gay and lesbian people. According to a 2018 poll from the Public Religion Institute majorities of religious groups now support same-sex marriage, also with the exception of white evangelic Protestants.
The idea of religious support for LGBTQ rights that was presented by Democratic candidates at the forum now tracks with growing public support for LGBTQ rights. As The Religion News Service reports, former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Julián Castro — who has invoked his Catholicism several times on the campaign trail — rejected what he saw as a false dichotomy between religious Americans and LGBTQ people. “As a Catholic — and I’m sure we have many people of faith (in the audience) — I think we need to end this myth that these two things are separate,” he said. “There are a lot of people in the LGBTQ community that are also people of faith. They’re religious. They believe.”
