MILWAUKEE — Log Cabin Republicans, the conservative LGBTQ group, hosted a Big Tent Event on Wednesday offsite from the Republican National Convention, atop the Discovery World Science and Technology Museum with panoramic views of Lake Michigan.
Before the luncheon began — with remarks from GOP members of Congress and the organization’s leadership, along with former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence — the Washington Blade spoke with a Republican delegate, Weymouth, Mass., Mayor Bob Hedlund.
“I bumped into, this morning, a former colleague of mine,” he said, referring to LCR Board Chair Richard Tisei, who served in the Massachusetts Senate with Hedlund and invited him to the event.
Several of the speakers would later tout the 2024 Republican party platform’s omission of references to same-sex marriage, a departure from the party’s longstanding position. And Hedlund recalled how heated the debates were in 2004 when Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize marriage equality.
“I was in the Senate when that debate went on and the court decision and multiple votes, so we were kind of at the forefront of that at the time,” he said. “It was a vote I struggled with. I probably received more pressure on that issue than anything else in my 21 years in the legislature. I had neighbors that never talked politics with me grabbing me and stopping my car one morning on the week of the vote and voicing their opinion. That was a difficult time.”
Hedlund explained that while his hometown of Weymouth was the bluest in his Senate district, the community is, and was, blue collar with a heavy Irish-Italian-Catholic bent. Twenty years ago, the town had five Catholic parishes, he said, “so there was a lot of opposition to [same-sex marriage] at the time.”
More than the volte-face on gay marriage, what stood out to the mayor about the GOP platform — the party’s first since 2016 — was how “quiet” the fight was, in contrast with the heated battles through which previous iterations were produced.
As LCR President Charles Moran previously told the Blade, Hedlund said the language of the new document, concise as it is, is a clear reflection of the values and priorities of the party’s 2024 nominee, former President Donald Trump.
“I think they can smell victory and they want to just get across the finish line,” Hedlund said, referring to the officials involved in drafting the platform.
While the document does not take a position against same-sex marriage, it does call for banning transgender girls and women from competing in girls and women’s sports, as well as a proposal to cut federal funding for “any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
Addressing the proposed sports ban, Hedlund said “I think you don’t have any consensus in the populace over how you handle that issue. I mean, I think that’s a jump ball.”
He added that if residents in Weymouth were polled on the issue, or if it came up in a referendum, he imagines they would favor a ban. Neighboring towns have experienced controversies involving trans athletes, he said.
Personally, Hedlund said he believes there should be rules for participation in athletics that are drawn based on “some defining line as to when someone may be transitioning” and in the meantime “it’s hard to pigeonhole a party or an entity on that [issue] because people are still grappling with it.”
“I don’t know how you deal with it if someone’s fully transitioned,” the mayor said, because in that case “I think that’s a different story” and a ban might not be necessary or appropriate.
Compared to the platform, Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s governing agenda for a second Trump administration, contains far more policies sought by the conservative Christian wing of the Republican Party, including restrictions on abortion and pornography as well as LGBTQ rights.
“I didn’t know anything about Project 2025 until about a week before Trump said he didn’t know anything about it,” Hedlund said. “Honestly.”
“I’ve been aware of the Heritage Foundation for 40 years and read some of the newsletters in the past,” he said. “And I’m way more informed than the average citizen. And I’m probably way more informed than most delegates.”
While the former president has sought to distance himself from the document as it has increasingly earned blowback, CNN notes that “six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the 900-page playbook” while “four individuals Trump nominated as ambassadors were also involved, along with several enforcers of his controversial immigration crackdown. And about 20 pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff.”
“At least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” according to a CNN review, “including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors, and contributors to ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.”
Asked whether he expects Project 2025 or the party platform would be a more accurate guide to a second Trump term, Hedlund said he was not sure — but added the focus on Project 2025 is misguided because “you’ve got organizations, advocacy groups, think tanks on the left, same thing on the right, that publish policy papers.”
“When those on the left complain about Project 2025, I’d like to see the media ask the same questions, ‘what are the policy papers coming out of the Council on Foreign Relations? Or out of George Soros’s foundation? And how much of the Democratic Party is adopting those policy papers or initiatives?”
Hedlund added, “I don’t know if Trump knew about it or didn’t know about it, but it’s not the Republican Party platform. It’s a separate entity.”
“Are they going to have people involved in the Trump administration that are going to be influential?” he asked. “Yes. But if you look at some of the things in Project 2025, [many require] legislative action” and looking at Trump’s “first term, I mean, what did he do, really, administratively or through executive action or by fiat that was so radical?”
