With more than a year before the 2020 presidential election a nationwide gay group, the Log Cabin Republicans, have announced they are endorsing President Donald Trump for re-election. The 42-year old group wisely refused to endorse Trump during the 2016 election, but in a flip on Thursday decreed the anti-LGBTQ President has “met his commitments to LGBTQ Americans.”
That’s just plain false.
Log Cabin Republican chairman Robert Kabel and vice chairwoman Jill Homan penned a 751 word Washington Post op-ed, which the paper surprisingly appears to not have thoroughly fact-checked, attempting to justify the turnabout endorsement.
The op-ed comes during the same week that Trump has fired strong and potentially devastating attacking against the LGBTQ community in a clear attempt to further weaken our civil rights.
On Tuesday, as NCRM reported, Trump’s Dept. of Justice was caught attempting to strong-arm the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to reverse years of findings and rulings, and declare before the U.S. Supreme Court that discrimination against LGBT workers is legal.
One day later Trump’s Dept. of Labor announced a new rule to make it easier for what it now calls “religion-exercising organizations” that are also federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ workers. Not only would the Dept. of Labor make it easier, it would offer them a roadmap on how to avoid being charged with discrimination.
In their Washington Post op-ed, after pointing to a 1992 speech by former GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchnan, a homophobic white supremacist, the Log Cabin leaders say Trump has made the Republican Party better “by moving past the culture wars that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s, in particular by removing gay rights as a wedge issue from the old Republican playbook.”
And in an astonishing act of gaslighting, Kabel and Homan say Trump “has committed to end the spread of HIV/AIDS in 10 years, through the use of proven science, medicine and technology to which we now have access.”
They conveniently leave out of their op-ed President Trump’s actual record on HIV/AIDS.
In June Trump axed federal funding for HIV treatment testing research over the usage of fetal tissue.
In February The New York Times reported: “Trump Pledged to End H.I.V. But His Policies Veer the Other Way,” The paper offered a litany of examples detailing how the Trump administration has actually worked to reverse progress being made in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
“In May 2017,” as HIV Plus Magazine reminded earlier this year, “the White House announced intended and deliberate funding cuts to HIV programs including PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), the Ryan White Program, and the Global Fund.
In June of 2017 six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned, citing President Trump’s lack of interest or strategy to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Trump “simply does not care,” they wrote. Later that year, in December, without warning, Trump fired the remaining 16 members, “via a letter from FedEx.”
NCRM offered many more examples of Trump’s attacks on people living with HIV/AIDS in an article published in March.
Meanwhile, in yet another astonishing act of gaslighting, the Log Cabin leaders wrote this apparent falsehood:
Trump has used the United States’ outsize global influence to persuade other nations to adopt modern human rights standards, including launching an initiative to end the criminalization of homosexuality, which is considered illegal in more than 70 countries. To lead this effort, the president has chosen the highest-ranking LGBTQ individual in the administration, Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, who brings his experience as the United States’ spokesman at the United Nations to bear on this critical campaign.
Trump has done no such thing. In fact, he has time and time again looked the other way and ignored the human rights abuses that occur around the world, despite calls for him to act.
On decriminalizing homosexuality, there is no record that any substantial effort has been made by the Trump administration, and as NCRM reported at the time, when asked about the supposed initiative during an Oval Office press gaggle, President Trump said he knew nothing about it.
This is but a small sampling of President Donald Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ people.
If the Log Cabin Republicans wish to pretend to support the LGBTQ community, they would do better than hitching their wagons to the most anti-LGBTQ president in modern American history.
Donald Trump is the most anti-LGBT President in modern American history.
