This is a profoundly anti-LGBT administration through and through, and what should scare us even more is that Donald Trump is attempting to stack federal judgeships with hate mongers who will continue to issue decisions harmful to LGBT communities long after he’s hopefully sent packing from office:
A transgender first grade student is part of “Satan’s plan,” according to Jeff Mateer, a lawyer that Donald Trump wants to put on the federal bench. Mateer also defended “conversion therapy,” which claims to reduce same-sex attraction, and warned that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy, bestiality, and whatever the word is for a person marrying a plant.
If a same-sex couple is allowed to marry, Mateer claimed in a 2015 speech, “why couldn’t four people wanna get married? Why not one man and three women? Or three women and one man?” Then his speech got weirder. “There are people who marry themselves. Somebody wanted to marry a tree. People marrying their pets.”
Why is it that anti-LGBT extremists always jump to the most grotesque and twisted conclusions? If you want to talk threats to the sanctity of marriage, perhaps start with a president who has five children from three women. And Mateer isn’t even the most rotten apple in the barrel, with Think Progress identifying “at least half-a-dozen Trump judicial nominees with explicitly anti-LGBTQ records.”
Michael Joseph Juneau is affiliated with SPLC-designated hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, whose current president has extremist ties dating back to the days of the hateful Jerry Falwell, the so-called “Moral Majority” leader who blamed 9/11 on gays and once stated that "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals, it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals”:
Juneau … is an “allied attorney” with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a well-funded Christian right legal shop that the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a hate group. As an allied attorney, Juneau agreed to take pro bono cases on behalf of clients identified by the ADF. Among other things, ADF has suggested that homosexuality should be recriminalized and claimed that “the endgame of the homosexual legal agenda is unfettered sexual liberty and the silencing of all dissent.”
“Unfettered sexual liberty” like, say, carrying out a highly-publicized marital affair or asking your mistress to get an abortion despite running on a “pro-life” platform? What’s worse than this blaring hypocrisy is the damage these picks could do to our most vulnerable, like our LGBT and questioning children. So-called “conversion therapy” is torture, yet one of the groups Steven Grasz is allied with has defended it:
Steven Grasz, who Trump nominated to the Eighth Circuit, sits on the board of the Nebraska Family Alliance, an organization where Grasz’s son Nate works as policy director. In a piece written by the younger Grasz, the Family Alliance defended “conversion therapy” and claimed that laws prohibiting it “suppress parental rights by prohibiting parents from choosing the therapy that’s right for their family.” The organization also publishes articles with titles like “How Jayson Found Help for Unwanted Same-Sex Attraction,” and claims that “the conclusion that marriage is the union of man and woman follows from a proper understanding of human nature.”
Trump’s Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch has already “emerged as a crusader against LGBTQ rights,” penning “a dissent in Pavan v. Smith suggesting that a state can deny to same-sex married couples certain rights it affords to opposite-sex couples, and also written that business owners should have a sweeping power to defy laws they object to on religious grounds, a position with troubling implications for LGBTQ victims of discrimination.”
”If you want to catch the eye of Trump’s judicial selection team,” notes Think Progress, “one of the quickest ways appears to be joining the fight against LGBTQ rights.”