Log Cabin Republicans announced this week that it is dropping the “T” from LGBT and will now describe itself as an “LGB advocacy organization.” President Ross Hemminger wrote that the shift returns the group to its original mission, writing that it is acting “as our founders envisioned and as our moral center calls us to be.” He described the move as a “recommitment to the disciplined advocacy that has gotten us this far,” arguing that the organization was “founded on principle” and that “conservative values, properly applied, protect the liberty of every American.”
Here’s the problem. Log Cabin Republicans cannot advocate for LGB priorities and adhere to the “moral center” of either the founders of our nation or the founders of their party. Not because gay Americans don’t belong in the GOP. They do. But because the LGB agenda is opposed to “conservative values.” Hemminger specifically mentioned that the Log Cabin leadership will be emphasizing issues of “sexual orientation–marriage, adoption.” By which he means gay marriage and the redefinition of parenthood it produces, one that extends well past adoption into third-party reproduction and surrogacy. Their platform asks conservatives to embrace the very kind of social reengineering the Republican Party was built to resist.
The Republican Party wasn’t founded on tax brackets or foreign policy doctrine. In 1856, its first national platform condemned “those twin relics of barbarism, Polygamy and Slavery,” and pledged to abolish both. Slavery treated human beings as property to be bought, sold, and traded. Polygamy distorted the one man, one woman union, and the children it produced – a definition the founding fathers agreed on so uniformly it never needed to be spelled out in the Constitution. The GOP rejected both distortions because they were two branches of the same lie: Human beings, and the family bonds that protect them, are negotiable.
That’s still the fight. It’s just happening within the party now, waving a rainbow flag.
The original GOP denounced polygamy because it rejected the monogamous core of marriage and, in doing so, endangered children by placing unrelated adults into the family structure, a factor associated with higher risks of abuse and neglect. Gay marriage rejects the complementary core of marriage, depriving children of either a mother or a father and likewise creating family structures in which at least one adult is not biologically related to the child. On the question of what best protects children, the original Republicans had it right, and the Log Cabin Republicans have it wrong.
Big Fertility has been manufacturing babies and severing them from one or both biological parents for decades. But redefining marriage gave that marketplace in children the imprimatur of constitutional legitimacy. While Hemminger makes a nod to adoption, by their own admission, most same sex couples do not want a foster child. Sixty-one percent want a biological connection to their child, which necessarily means severing that child from one biological parent. When sperm or eggs are purchased, or a surrogacy contract is signed, what exactly is the commissioning adult paying for? They are paying a genetic or birth parent to relinquish parental rights in exchange for money. In adoption, that kind of transaction would raise immediate concerns about baby selling and trafficking. Yet third party reproduction, the foundation on which an increasing number of same-sex families are built, has become inseparable from the logic of “marriage equality.”
Ironically, Hemminger framed dropping the T as protecting kids, criticizing transgender activism’s “unnecessary and discomfiting focus on America’s youth.” But gay marriage and third-party reproduction do their own damage to children. It isn’t the same violation as drag-queen story hour or cross-sex hormones. It doesn’t infringe on a child’s innocence or their bodily integrity. It violates something just as fundamental, though: a child’s right to be known and loved by the man and woman who made them. Strip away that right, and children become commodities to be cut, pasted, swapped, and traded into whatever household has the money and the contracts.
The GOP should be the party of holistic child defense: their right to life, innocence, bodily integrity, and their own mother and father. Log Cabin Republicans want child protection in name, so long as it doesn’t cost them anything.
None of this is about hating gay people. You can love the gay people in your life and still insist that children have a right to their mother and father. Log Cabin Republicans can call themselves LGB, LGBT, or anything else they choose. What they cannot do is call themselves conservatives or Republicans while advancing an agenda built on the same lie the GOP was founded to defeat.
The party that fought a war to end the buying and selling of people cannot, in 2026, make peace with an industry that does exactly that to children. Log Cabin Republicans dropped the T. They should drop the rest of the acronym too, and with it, the pretense that any of this was ever conservative.
