“Donald Trump is the most pro-LGBT Republican president in history,” a gay GOP group still insists, despite the fact that his VP is an unabashed homophobe, that fact that his new attorney general voted against federal hate crimes legislation as a senator, that fact that he’s promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn marriage equality, and the fact that he pretends to be pals with Caitlyn Jenner while simultaneously rescinding transgender student protections.
Gregory T. Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, attempts to explain some of his nonsensical reasoning to writer and LGBT activist Michelangelo Signorile:
“Yes, I don’t think that this one decision on transgender guidance changes that,” he explained. “We have never had a Republican president who so candidly and openly discussed not only gay, not only lesbian, not only bisexual but transgender Americans as well.”
These folks really think that because Trump once held an upside-down Pride flag during a campaign rally and was in a (disturbing) skit with former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani in full-on drag, he’s suddenly replacing Cher as the next gay icon. “This would be laughable if it weren’t such a serious matter,” writes Signorile.
Signorile goes on to explain how Sessions—now the top law enforcement officer in the nation, despite a worthy but unsuccessful fight from immigrant, civil rights, and other groups—cannot be counted on to protect the rights of LGBT Americans and other vulnerable populations:
Sessions has a long, well-documented, grotesque anti-LGBT record. As a U.S senator for nearly 20 years, he has scored a big fat zero from the Human Rights Campaign, voting for every anti-LGBT bill and against every pro-LGBT bill, including the long-blocked hate crimes bill President Obama pushed and signed in 2009 and which Sessions is expected to enforce as attorney general.
He called the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell ruling on marriage equality in 2015 an “effort to secularize, by force and intimidation.” And he backed the now-suspended Alabama state supreme court chief justice, Roy Moore (now being considered by the Alabama governor among those who might replace Sessions in the Senate), who defied the Supreme Court on the ruling. Over the years, Sessions actively tried to block effective methods of preventing HIV, putting lives at risk over morality, and tried to pull National Endowment for the Arts funding for a lesbian filmmaker.
In 1996, as Alabama attorney general, Sessions tried to stop the Southeastern Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual College Conference from meeting at the University of Alabama, arguing that public universities were banned by the state from promoting “actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws.” A federal judge struck down the state ban after the group took the issue to court, but Sessions was undaunted: “I intend to do everything I can to stop that conference,” he told the Huntsville Times. But the federal judge weighed in again and halted him.
“I think we need to be careful about using words like homophobic,” Angelo continued, in discussing Sessions. “In many ways, that word has been brandished so much. You can call people wrong, and disagree with them and fight them, without branding them as homophobes.”
Weird—most people these days probably think voting against the 2013 Violence Against Women Act because it protects gay people and once supporting a Constitutional amendment “that would limit the definition of marriage to heterosexual couples” adds up to being a homophobe, but whatever.
Still, Angelo insists that LGBT groups need to “understand the political reality of today” and maybe learn how to “compromise” with Trump and his who’s who of zealots by accommodating things like “religious freedom.” Signorile explains why this is such a dumb and dangerous idea:
When you compromise on civil rights it creates a new normal. And just as we can’t let Donald Trump become the new normal, we can’t allow him or our opponents to make compromising on our rights, and allowing religious exemptions, the new normal.