Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was the only top tier candidate who missed the event, having declined the invitation after suffering a heart attack last week, though he addressed the group by video before the forum began.
The CNN LGBTQ town hall featured questions from the audience, which was filled with activists and many health and social work professionals who work in the gay community. The questions included topics such as family leave for gay couples, violence against transgender individuals and the conflicts between religious freedom and LGBTQ rights.
“There has to be consequences for discrimination,” said Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Booker, who was the first candidate at the forum, declined to directly answer a question about whether he would withhold money from private schools that discriminate against students based on gender identity or sexuality.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and the first openly gay major presidential candidate, released an 18-page plan hours before the forum, saying he would rescind the policy that blocks military veterans from receiving insurance coverage for gender reassignment surgery, and add non-binary gender options on federal documents, including passports.
Protesters calling for more attention on violence against the transgender community interrupted Buttigieg almost immediately after he began speaking.
Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor who was interviewing Buttigieg, said that the protesters should be applauded, noting that there was a long history of protest in the community. Buttigieg echoed the sentiment when he began speaking again.
“There is no right or wrong way to be gay, to be queer, to be trans,” he said. “I hope that our own community, even as we struggle to define what our identity means, defines it in a way that lets everybody know that they belong among us.”
Buttigieg also talked about his own process of coming out.
“What it was like was a civil war, because I knew I was different long before I knew I was gay,” he said. He also spoke in personal terms about donating blood, which is prohibited for men who have sex with men. “I can’t lead by example on this one, because my blood is not welcome in this country.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts also released plans Thursday, saying that she would restore many Obama-era policies that the Trump administration has eliminated and crack down on “overly broad religious exemptions to nondiscrimination.” Warren also said she would ban so-called conversion therapy.
Sen. Kamala Harris of California pledged Thursday to appoint transgender and gender-nonconforming people to her Cabinet and to the federal judiciary.
Julián Castro, the former housing secretary under President Barack Obama, has included transgender men in his reproductive health plan, saying that they too need access to abortions, a move that was welcomed by transgender advocates, who have said they were often left out of health care plans.
The candidates’ proposals make clear that they largely agree with one another on LGBTQ issues and are making considerable efforts to court voters from the community. And the plans also show just how far the party has moved in the last decade.
When Obama ran for president in 2008, he said he was opposed to same-sex marriage. That same year, California voters approved Proposition 8, a ballot measure that made same-sex marriage unconstitutional in the state. (In 2012, Vice President Joe Biden said that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage, a stance Obama did not adopt until later that year.)
“When I came out,” Biden began to say Thursday, referencing that decision. “Er, when I publicly stated,” he said, to roars of laughter from the audience. Biden then went on to talk about how dramatically attitudes toward the LGBTQ community had changed. “The idea is normal,” he said. “It’s normalized, it’s not strange.”
Alphonso David, the president of Human Rights Campaign, said that the candidates would differentiate themselves by explaining how they would implement their plans.
“It’s very nice to say that you support LGBT equality,” David said, speaking to reporters before the forum began. “How? How are you going to do that? How are you going to effectuate change? How will you effectuate change in a way that’s sustainable? How were you going to stop transgender violence?”
Today, 61% of voters say they support gay marriage, according to the Pew Research Center. But the support is somewhat split along party lines, with fewer than half of Republican voters supporting same-sex marriage, compared to three-quarters of Democrats, according to Pew. There are roughly 11 million LGBTQ voters, according to Human Rights Campaign, and 57 million voters who consider themselves allies.
And the overall shift in public opinion has not translated to across the board gains for the LGBTQ community. The Trump administration has banned transgender individuals from serving in the military, prohibited embassies from flying rainbow flags, and is fighting a case in the Supreme Court that could rule that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status is prohibited under the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Several Democratic candidates, including Booker and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, have said they would reverse the transgender military ban. Each of the participating candidates have also said they supported passing the Equality Act, federal legislation that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
During the previous LGBTQ forum this year, Biden was pointedly questioned about his previous votes backing the bill that instituted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military, as well as the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage in 1996.
The entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who will both participate in the debate next week, declined the forum, citing scheduling conflicts, according to the event organizers.
This article originally appeared in
.