First I've heard her mentioned as a potential Prez candidate. Interesting. "
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Gabbard is also a pretty reliably progressive voice in the House on a host of domestic issues. As far back as 2012, she was calling for restoring Glass-Steagall. She opposed any cuts to Medicare or Social Security under the Obama-backed Simpson-Bowles proposal. She believes Obamacare didn’t go far enough and supports universal health care. She’s against nuclear energy, pushed to curb the NSA’s bulk collection of data, and personally protested the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Yet the starry-eyed anointment of Gabbard has obscured the more unsavory aspects of her politics — so unsavory, in fact, that White House adviser Steve Bannon has reportedly spoken well of her. From her vigorous opposition to the Iran nuclear deal to her obsession with “radical Islam” to her love for the far-right Indian leader Narendra Modi, Gabbard is far from the progressive hero many assume her to be.
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Despite her progressive image today, Gabbard has conservative roots. Her father is Mike Gabbard, a former Honolulu city councilman, state senator, and high profile anti-gay activist who led a campaign against same-sex marriage in Hawaii in the 1990s. He founded the educational nonprofit Stop Promoting Homosexuality and bought himself a show on a local radio station to denounce LGBT people.
Early in her career, Gabbard took after her father. She opposed abortion and supported a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. After Honolulu Magazine emailed her father to ask about his former ties to a conservative Hare Krishna splinter group for a 2004 profile, it was Gabbard who replied angrily, accusing the magazine of “acting as a conduit for The Honolulu Weekly and other homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case [her father’s opponent].” The same year, she used her platform as a state representative to testify against civil unions, calling the claim that they were different from same-sex marriage “dishonest, cowardly, and extremely disrespectful to the people of Hawaii,” who had voted in favor of Constitutional Amendment 2 in 1998, empowering the legislature to withhold marriage from same-sex couples.
“As Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists,” she said at the time.