Tim Walz's remarkably courageous stand for LGBT youth
Walz supported gay kids at a time when most Democrats did not.
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In Boston on Wednesday, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz talked about his desire to engage with young voters without resorting to fear.
“We’re seeing a whole group of young people who’ve never been involved in the politics of joy, never been involved in the politics of what’s possible,” he said.
Kamala Harris has described the ticket as “joyful warriors,” and that moniker is very apt for how Walz has stood up for LGBTQ kids long before taking the national stage.
In 1999, when Walz was a geography teacher and assistant football coach at Mankato West High School in Minnesota, he became the faculty advisor for the Gay-Straight Alliance. He took on that responsibility after being asked by Jacob Reitan, a student who was being bulled for being gay.
Walz, notably, understood why it was symbolic for him to work with the group: “It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” he said in 2018.
In an interview with ABC earlier this month, Reitan explained that Walz “had the ability to talk about issues of bullying in a way that helped both the bully and the bullier” and that Walz’s work with the group “made the school safer for me.” Why did Reitan think to approach Walz? Because two years previously, when Reitan was still in the closet, Walz’s wife Gwen, also a teacher at the school, “stood up and said that this was a safe place for LGBT students.”
No teacher had ever done so before.
Ahead of his time
That group became a lifeline for LGBTQ students in rural Minnesota, even though it started with only five or six students. It even spawned at least one marriage. Two former Walz students, Elysse and Elle Strom, were in the Gay-Straight Alliance in the early 2000s, married in 2011, and showed up at the Rochester Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) office recently looking for Harris-Walz yard signs.
It’s impossible to overstate how far out ahead of his Minnesota Democratic peers Walz was at this time. It was only three years since the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) sailed through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. It arose when Hawaii was considering legalizing same-sex marriage and would have been the first state to do so. Congress sprung into action and passed DOMA, a short-lived but brutal law.
First, DOMA said that no state was required to recognize a same-sex marriage from any other state. The Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution requires states to recognize marriages from other states, so DOMA had the effect of upending that constitutional protection for same-sex couples. Next, DOMA defined “marriage” as “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and “spouse” as only “a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." That definition was designed to ensure that no one in a same-sex marriage, even if it was legal in their state, could access federal benefits, such as Social Security survivorship payments after their spouse died.
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Only one member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation, Martin Sabo, who represented Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, which includes Minneapolis, voted against DOMA. At the time of the DOMA vote, Minnesota’s Democrats held six of the state’s eight House seats. In the Senate, progressive icon and rural hero Paul Wellstone voted yes on DOMA, a stance that profoundly disappointed LGBTQ Minnesotans. It wouldn’t be until 2001, some two years after Tim Walz started working to smooth the path for LGBTQ kids in Mankato, that Wellstone expressed misgivings about his vote, but even then he didn’t fully endorse same-sex marriage, instead musing that he “still wonder[ed] if I did the right thing.”
In 1997, Minnesota passed its own version of the Defense of Marriage Act, banning same-sex marriage and stating any same-sex marriages from other states would not be legal or recognized.
So this was the landscape in 1999 when Tim Walz told Reitan he would be the faculty adviser for the GSA. It’s a testament to the strength of Walz’s character that this was so important to him that he was willing to take a public role when that was not looked on fondly.
Walking the walk for a quarter century
Importantly, this isn’t just a part of Walz’s history that it is now advantageous to highlight as he and Harris are polishing their progressive bona fides.
When Walz first ran for Congress in 2006, he ran on a platform of expressly supporting same-sex marriage, beating a six-term Republican incumbent who had supported DOMA. In 2009, as a 24-year veteran of Minnesota’s National Guard, Walz called for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, another bigoted legacy of Democrats’ anti-LGBTQ positions of the 1990s.
And, of course, Walz’s track record as governor of Minnesota, particularly once the state Democrats won a trifecta in 2022, has been one of active support of LGBTQ people.
In 2023, Walz signed a bill banning the horrifying practice of youth conversion therapy, and he made Minnesota a trans refuge state, a place where minors would not be barred from accessing gender-affirming care. Moreover, Minnesota law now prohibits the state courts from enforcing a law of another state that would remove a child from a parent’s care simply because the parent allowed the child to get gender-affirming health care.
Of course, conservatives in the state howled about that law when it passed, saying that it violated the constitution somehow. Now that Walz is the VP pick, the howling has gone national. The New York Post huffed that he had turned Minnesota into a “danger zone” for youth. National Review said he made the state a refuge for “child sex changes,” a statement that willfully mischaracterizes what gender-affirming care for minors is. Tiffany Justice of Moms for Liberty, the group behind book bans all across the country that target LGBTQ youth, complained that Walz was “the most anti-parent candidate that Kamala Harris could have chosen.”
It’s good to remember here that Walz is also the hype man for calling out the weirdness of Republicans, particularly on the issue of policing gender. And in the end, that’s the contrast between Walz and JD Vance and other hard-right types: the latter is a politics of unendingly weird grievances and fear. In contrast, Tim Walz offers joy — a joy clearly borne out of a deep love for the kids he used to teach, a deep love for letting them flourish just as they were.
As Seth Meyer, a former Walz student and GSA member from 2002 to 2004, explained to NBC News, “I had a really hard time in high school, and I felt like a lot of teachers wanted me to be someone else.” Walz, though, “wanted me to be OK with who I was and speak my mind, and whether it was with GSA stuff or anything else, was happy to be questioned and challenged, because he wanted to question and challenge things.”
What a great thing to teach a kid, and what a great thing for the rest of us to learn.
That’s it for this week
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Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
I worked for 30 years in state schools as a school psychologist and one of the things that people don't realize is just how frightened the vast majority of teachers are of taking a political stance. They know that most political opinions are split around 50-50 which means they'll almost certainly be at least one parent who will complain to the principal. What Tim Walz did took real guts and I think we can almost guarantee that his principal received complaints. People who hate homosexuality are really committed campaigners and there would have been stacks of them around 20-30 years ago. God knows there's plenty of them today!. Tim Walz is a seriously brave guy. How the hell did he get into successful mainstream politics?
As a formerly bullied gay kid in high school, I’m in awe of Walz and the stand he took during his HS teacher years. That support could have changed the entire trajectory of a kid’s life. One wonders how a Log Cabin Republican type still justifies supporting MAGA, who will surely take action to harm LGBTQI if power is handed to Trump.