Billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel dismissed “fake culture wars” in a speech endorsing Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Thursday night, saying they distract from the real problems facing America.

“I am proud to be gay,” said Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal PYPL, +3.26% and an outspoken libertarian. “I am proud to be a Republican,” he continued, despite a recently adopted Republican Party platform that is avidly opposed to same-sex marriage, and which critics have called the most anti-LGBT platform in history. Thiel was the first openly gay man to speak at the RNC since 2000.

“I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline,” Thiel said.

“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel at RNC: 'Proud to Be Gay'

Thiel railed against broken government, recalling the glory of America’s past technological and scientific achievements.

“Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks,” Thiel said. “Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all.”

“That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.”

”Our economy is broken,” Thiel said, acknowledging that much of the country has not benefited economically as much as Silicon Valley has in recent years. “It’s time to rebuild America.”

Thiel is one of the few Silicon Valley leaders backing Trump. Just last week, about 150 tech industry leaders wrote an open letter calling a Trump presidency “a disaster for innovation,” and complaining that he “campaigns on bigotry.”

Thiel made headlines in May after being exposed as secretly financing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Gawker Media on behalf of pro wrestler Hulk Hogan, reportedly as revenge for the gossip site outing him as gay in 2007.