The 89-year-old former Republican senator and longtime anti-LGBTQ+ politician James Inhofe died after suffering a stroke on July 9th.
Inhofe retired from the Senate only last year after a six-decade career in the Oklahoma Legislature, during which he was the mayor of Tulsa, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the Senate. Throughout this career, he continuously pushed anti-LGBTQ+ policies and ideologies, both in his personal and political lives.
According to LGBTQ Nation, his animosity became clear in the 1990s when he stated that he wouldn’t hire gay staffers and refused to give James Hormell, a gay philanthropist and President Clinton’s choice for the U.S. Ambassador to Luxemburg, a confirmation vote.
Inhofe fought against marriage equality specifically multiple times, both federally and locally. In 2010, he supported an unsuccessful referendum that would require D.C. to refrain from issuing same-gender marriage certificates until the public voted on it. He co-introduced legislation that would prohibit same-gender marriage from being held on military bases in 2012 and introduced an amendment that would allow businesses and organizations that discriminated against married same-gender couples to still have access to government contracts and federal funds. He cited religious exemption in his proposed amendment, saying that the amendment would “protect the constitutional right for an individual, business, or organization to peacefully and freely adhere to their religious beliefs.”
Inhofe was also a part of the Family, also known as the Fellowship, a fundamentalist Christian group filled with powerful people in politics. The group has historically promoted anti-gay, anti-abortion, and pro-free-market ideas, and members of the group are well known for helping draft Uganda’s Kill the Gays law.
In addition to his staunch and consistent homophobia, Inhofe was also a consistent climate change denier and once brought a snowball to the Senate floor to “prove” that global warming was “a hoax.”
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