2020 just won’t quit. Amid what many have called the most homophobic election cycle in recent memory, queer Congressional candidate Gina Ortiz Jones is facing attacks from Republican lobby groups over her support for transgender troops.
The 39-year-old Iraq War veteran is currently the subject of a series of attack ads in the race for Texas Congressional District 23, which stretches the border from El Paso to Eagle Pass. A 30-second TV segment claims Ortiz Jones that supports “closing military bases” and suggests that she will divert “military money to pay for transgender reassignment surgeries.”
The ad goes on to state that the alleged anti-military, pro-trans plan would be a “death sentence” for jobs in Texas and said she simply “doesn’t care” about the state. “Gina Jones: too liberal for Texas,” it concludes.
The ad is patently false, although Ortiz Jones has expressed her support for transgender troops in the past. When Donald Trump’s ban on open trans service went into effect last year, she claimed in a tweet that the policy “weakens our military, because it is based on things other than individual merit, qualifications, or physical and mental fitness to serve.”
This is only, however, the most recent inaccurate anti-LGBTQ+ attack on Ortiz Jones in a race that has seen her opponents repeatedly use homophobic and transphobic dog-whistles against her. Earlier this year, a website run by the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) took a sly jab at her sexual orientation by claiming that “Jones and her female partner lived and worked near Washington D.C., not Texas,” referring to her 2017 move back to her home state.
Although the reference was removed following the publication of a HuffPost report, the website in question, DemocratFacts, still features a photo of the couple.
And just days after that controversy attracted nationwide attention, her conservative opposition in the race, Tony Gonzales, accused Ortiz Jones of having a “transgender agenda” during a podcast interview. “We’re up against a social Democrat that wants to have a socialist agenda,” he said in August.
The Victory Fund, a pro-LGBTQ+ political action group, pointed out that these tactics are similar to those that have been deployed against other queer candidates in 2020, such as Alex Morse and Robbie Goldstein. In Michigan, the NRCC recently ran an advertisement referring to Democrat Jon Hoadley as “creepy,” in reference to decade-old blog posts from his college years which have been willfully taken out of context, as them. previously reported.
The group’s president and CEO, Annise Parker, said the ads were a sign that the “national fundraising arm of the Republican Party has declared war on LGBTQ candidates this election cycle — and homophobia and transphobia are their weapon of choice.”
