What's Tulsi Gabbard's game? Is she a ringer for Trump?

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65. Tulsi was raised in a cult.

For Tulsi Gabbard, politics is a family business. Her mother, Carol Gabbard, was on Hawaii’s State Board of Education; her father, Mike Gabbard, was a political activist and Honolulu City Council member, best known in Hawaii for being one of the state’s leading opponents of LGBTQ equality. He founded an organization called Stop Promoting Homosexuality that opposed not only marriage equality but the very idea of tolerance for homosexuality itself.

“Homosexuality is not normal, not healthy, morally and scripturally wrong,” he said in a 1992 interview, in which he also blamed the spread of AIDS on the repeal of sodomy laws.

Mike Gabbard’s opposition to LGBTQ rights (as well as abortion) seemed to stem from his religious background. Born in American Samoa, he is both Catholic and a member of an obscure offshoot of the Hare Krishna sect called the Science of Identity Foundation. The group’s leader, a self-described guru named Chris Butler, has condemned homosexuality, once arguing that it led to “an increasing number of American women [keeping] dogs for sexual purposes.’”

Tulsi Gabbard grew up in Butler’s movement, which has faced allegations of cult-like practices. She told the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh that he shaped her Hindu identity, speaking of her “gratitude to him for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me.”

Her early political career reflected both Butler’s views and her father’s. She worked for her father’s organization, which supported the use of “conversion therapy” to try to turn kids straight. She once blasted “homosexual activists” for trying to “force their values down the throats of the children in our schools.” During her successful run for the Hawaii Legislature in 2002, when she was just 21 years old, she vowed to pass a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage.