How pro-LGBTQ+ is Kamala Harris?

Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to be the Democratic presidential nominee now that President Joe Biden has exited the race and has endorsed her. She brings a long and strong record of support for LGBTQ+ equality, reproductive freedom, and other progressive causes.

If she wins in November, Harris will make history as both the first woman to be president and first woman of color in the nation’s highest office — the first Black woman and the first one of South Asian heritage. She'd also most likely be the most pro-LGBTQ+ president.

Harris was born October 20, 1964, in Oakland, Calif., and grew up in Berkeley and the surrounding East San Francisco Bay Area, along with spending a few years in Montreal. She is the daughter of two immigrants — her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in India, and her father, Donald Harris, in Jamaica. Gopalan was a research scientist and Harris an economist. Her parents were active in the civil rights movement and took young Kamala to marches in a stroller. She is a graduate of Howard University, one of the nation’s preeminent historically Black universities, and earned a law degree from the University of Hastings College of Law. In 2014, she married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer. They have two children, Ella and Cole.

Harris began her law career in 1990 in the district attorney’s office in Alameda County, Calif. There, she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. In 2003, she was elected district attorney for San Francisco City and County. The following year, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom declared same-sex marriage legal in the city, Harris conducted marriages for same-sex couples (the marriages were later nullified, however). “One of the most joyful [moments of my career] was performing the marriages in 2004. Truly joyful,” Harris told The Advocate in 2023. This year, she reunited via a video call with a couple she married, Bradley Witherspoon and Raymond Cobane. “I’ll never forget pulling up to see all the families of every configuration and just pure joy, pure happiness,” she said on the call. “It was such a special moment, and it was all about love.”

She established a hate-crimes unit in the DA’s office as well as an environmental justice unit. She also created a program to give first-time drug offenders the opportunity to earn a high school degree and find employment. The U.S. Department of Justice called it a national model of innovation for law enforcement.

In 2010, she was elected California attorney general, overseeing the largest state-level justice department in the nation. As AG, she played a key role in restoring marriage equality in the Golden State. One of the signature issues in her campaign was her opposition to Proposition 8, the voter-approved ballot initiative that revoked marriage equality in California in 2008, undoing the state Supreme Court decision that allowed same-sex couples to marry. Both she and Jerry Brown, who was elected governor in 2010, said they would not defend Prop. 8 in court, and Brown’s predecessor as governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had done the same. If Steve Cooley, Harris’s opponent in the AG race, who had pledged to defend Prop. 8, had won, it might have changed the ballot measure’s fate.

As it was, the proposition’s supporters had to defend it against court challenges, and courts all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court agreed they didn’t have legal standing to do so, and because of that Prop. 8 was struck down. After Prop. 8 bit the dust in 2013, she officiated the first post-Prop. 8 same-sex marriage in California, between Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, who had been part of the court case.

As AG, she went on to lead efforts to abolish gay and transgender “panic” defenses in criminal trials. She received some criticism for a position she took as AG, backing the state of California when it sought to deny gender-affirmation surgery to a trans prisoner. But Harris has pointed out that when she was attorney general, the state’s Department of Corrections was a client of hers, and she had to represent its interests — but she worked behind the scenes to get the policy changed so that any inmate requiring such procedures could receive them.

Also as AG, she won a $20 billion settlement for state residents who had lost their homes to foreclosure and a $1.1 billion settlement for those who were cheated by a for-profit education company. She defended the Affordable Care Act in court and enforced environmental laws.

She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016. She received perfect 100 scores on the Human Rights Campaign Congressional Scorecard, which measures support for LGBTQ+ equality, before leaving the Senate to become vice president. Her record likewise includes perfect ratings from reproductive rights groups such as Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America (now known as Reproductive Freedom for All), and NARAL Pro-Choice California.

As a senator, she introduced a bill to mandate insurance coverage of pre-exposure prophylaxis, the HIV prevention method, and she notably stumped Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh with a question on marriage equality during his confirmation hearings. Further, “she championed legislation to fight hunger, provide rent relief, improve maternal health care, expand access to capital for small businesses, revitalize America’s infrastructure, and combat the climate crisis,” according to her official White House biography.

Her advocacy for progressive causes has continued during her vice presidency. She has spoken out against the rash of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in conservative states around the country, such as “don’t say gay” laws affecting education and bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. “I hate bullies,” she told The Advocate in the 2023 interview. She noted that the politicians attacking LGBTQ+ people and reproductive rights are usually the same. “The intersection on the issue of reproductive care and trans care, and the ability of families to be able to have care for their children and their families, is really, again, an intersection around attacks that are on an identity,” she said.

She has hosted Pride Month receptions and visited New York City’s Stonewall Inn, where an uprising against police harassment of gay bars in 1969 jump-started the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. She met with WNBA star Brittney Griner and her wife, Cherelle Griner, before Brittney’s first game after her release from captivity in Russia.

President Biden honored her work on marriage equality by gifting her with the pen he used to sign the Respect for Marriage Act in December 2022. The act wrote marriage equality into federal law, protecting it against future negative Supreme Court action.

The possibility of that action became top of mind with the high court’s 2022 ruling overturningRoe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established abortion rights nationwide, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. States are now free to ban or severely restrict the procedure, and about half of them have. While Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion, said it shouldn’t be read as opening attacks on other precedents, both he and fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas have said they’d like to see the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling overturned. Thomas also called for overturning decisions that struck down sodomy laws and state bans on contraception. That would take a case on any of the issues coming to the Supreme Court, but that’s possible.

Since the Dobbs ruling, Harris has talked extensively about the importance of reproductive freedom. She and Biden have called on Congress to pass a law restoring the protections of Roe. Americans need to send a message to anti-choice politicians that their actions are not acceptable, she said at a reproductive rights rally this year in Virginia.

She has remained equally outspoken on LGBTQ+ rights. “The fight for equal rights is patriotic,” she said at a 2023 Pride reception. “We believe in the foundational principles of our country; we believe in the promise of freedom and equality and justice. And so the fight for equal rights is an expression of our love of our country.”