Derrick Van Orden was asked a simple question outside the Capitol on Thursday, September 17: Is America ready to elect a gay president?

The western Wisconsin Republican could have said yes or no. Instead, he told TMZ that the problem was Black people.

"Traditionally, if you look at — statistically, if you're doing political science, African Americans don't want to vote for a homosexual," Van Orden said.

He kept going. The Democratic Party, he said, "needs to carry African American votes" or it will never get anyone elected. "And statistically speaking, if you look at the actual, uh, you know, polling stuff, African Americans are not ready to vote for a, uh, gay candidate."

His conclusion: the first gay president is "objectively" more likely to be a Republican.

He blamed one group of Americans for his own party's record

Van Orden insisted he personally doesn't care. He pointed out that he's endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay conservatives. "I don't think in those terms and I never have," he said, according to the Milwaukee Courier. "To me, it's irrelevant."

Then he spent the rest of the answer making a sweeping claim about how tens of millions of Black Americans vote.

Shaundel Washington-Spivey, the mayor of La Crosse, a city in Van Orden's district, is Black and openly gay. He called the comments "an out-of-touch and sweeping generalization about the Black community to serve his own political agenda."

"Claiming Black people aren't ready for a gay president is just his most recent attempt to divide Americans by pitting two communities against each other," Washington-Spivey said in a statement quoted by the Courier. "He would rather blame historically marginalized groups rather than reckon with the Republican Party's history of enabling homophobia. That is holding America back, not Black people."

The "polling stuff" says something else

Van Orden said the "actual polling stuff" backs him up. It doesn't.

During the 2020 primary, when this same question dogged Pete Buttigieg, a Winthrop University poll found that 79% of Black voters said a candidate's sexual orientation made no difference to them, the Courier reported. Sixteen percent of Black voters said they'd be less likely to support a gay candidate — slightly more than white voters, at 13%.

That is a gap of three points, not a wall.

And a June study from Northwestern University found where the real resistance is, The Daily Beast reported: being gay reduced a candidate's chance of support by roughly 22% among Republicans, while support among Democratic voters went up slightly.

So the voters least willing to back a gay candidate, according to that study, are Van Orden's own party's — the opposite of what he claimed.

His own state is proof too. Wisconsin has sent Tammy Baldwin, who is openly gay, to Congress for decades. She was the first openly LGBTQ person elected to the U.S. Senate.

This isn't new for Van Orden

Van Orden's comments about gay people and about minority groups have a history.

In June 2021, before he was elected, a library worker said he confronted staff at the Prairie du Chien public library over a children's Pride Month book display — demanding to know who set it up — and then checked out nearly every book in it.

He has also called Islam "a violent religion" and refused to say whether that includes the Muslims he represents, and he has a pattern of amplifying anti-Muslim and racist claims online.

Each time, the pattern is the same: a whole group of Americans gets described as a problem.

What the record shows

On September 17, Derrick Van Orden told TMZ that "African Americans don't want to vote for a homosexual" and are "not ready to vote for a gay candidate," citing "polling stuff." The polling says otherwise: 79% of Black voters told Winthrop pollsters a candidate's sexual orientation makes no difference, and a Northwestern study found the biggest drop in support for gay candidates comes from Republicans. The openly gay, Black mayor of La Crosse, in his own district, called it an attempt to "divide Americans by pitting two communities against each other."

Sources

This post is based on reporting by The Daily Beast and the Milwaukee Courier. Image: Mark Schiefelbein/via REUTERS, via The Daily Beast.