Oh, the irony.
The GOP just unveiled its most anti-LGBT policy platform ever ― and then welcomed Donald Trump to the Republican National Convention’s smoke-filled stage with Queen singer Freddie Mercury’s vocals blaring out.
California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was quick to point out the hypocrisy on the first day of the GOP convention in a series of social media posts targeting the Republican Party, its presumptive presidential nominee and his likely running mate, Mike Pence.
“It’s important to note that tonight’s RNC convention ended with a song, ‘We Are The Champions,’ sung by a gay man, Freddie Mercury,” Newsom wrote on Facebook early Tuesday. (It should be noted that Mercury did date women and while Lt. Gov. Newsom referred to him as gay, other sources have identified him as bisexual.)
“Freddie Mercury died of AIDS in 1991,” added the longstanding LGBT rights advocate, who famously married same-sex couples while he was the mayor of San Francisco in 2004.
“His music, which he famously labored over, which was intricate and complex, was played at a convention where Mike Pence, a man who has spent his political career actively looking for opportunities to discriminate against LGBT people, sat comfortably in a VIP box.”
Newsom speculated that if Mercury were alive today and hadn’t been a rockstar, he would “probably have been greeted by a wall, a really high wall, because he represented everything that Mike Pence and Donald Trump are scared of.”
His post soon gained major traction online, as did the above Facebook live post in which he called out the GOP for “going further than they have in the past to offend and demean the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.”
It’s the “most anti-LGBT platform language in the history of the Republican party, which is an extraordinary thing to say, in 2016,” Newsom added.
The Republican Party’s platform states that all children deserve a married mother and father, while defining “natural marriage” as being between a man and a woman. Read the full, offensive statement here.
Newsom unleashed a further tirade against the policies on Twitter, in dozens of tweets principally aimed at Trump. Here are just a few:
The surviving members of Queen posted the following response to Twitter on Tuesday, in which they said the song had been used without their authorization.
Queen’s guitarist Brian May said in June, after Trump used the anthem to mark his victory in the final round of Republican primaries, that Queen was “taking advice on what steps we can take to ensure this use does not continue.”
“Regardless of our views on Mr. Trump’s platform, it has always been against out policy to allow Queen music to be used as a political campaigning tool,” he added.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
