For five days spread over the month of April in 2017, I set up a chair, a sign, and a rainbow flag in front of the local federal building, and handed out a list to passers-by of anti-GLBT actions that President Trump had put in place in the two months since his inauguration.

The list at that time was somewhat short, so part of my spiel was to warn people that more would be coming.

Since then I have listened as some GLBT people excuse those Trump actions and dismiss the notion that more would be on the way as hysterics.

I reluctantly gave the younger GLBT people a bit of a pass, with education about the matter of course, as here in Massachusetts those under 30 came of age when most of the work to get GLBT equality had been done and they only saw the benefits. It is with the older members of the community that I have a problem as they are enjoying the equality others fought for without any idea what it took, and now have decided that it is only anti-Trump people who are imagining future slights just to oppose the president who has created policies that will benefit them any minute now and protect us from all those immigrants lining up to join MS-13. They also believe, without offering any examples of actions that would validate the claim beyond his having said he was, that Trump is the best friend of GLBT people.

My original list included:

• Cancelling Obama’s executive order 13673, the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplace Order”, that had established that companies seeking government contracts could not discriminate against GLBT people.
• Appointing the virulently anti-GLBT Roger Severino to head The Office of Health and Human Service’s Office on Civil Rights.
• Dropping GLBT people as a counted population from the 2020 Census.
• Cutting $340 million from AIDS research and prevention, and $50 million from the domestic HIV/AIDS budget and $50 million from the global CDC program.

Since I put my folding chair in my junk closet, Trump has added:

• Appointing homophobic people to his cabinet, people like Rick Perry, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Tom Price, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pompeo, and Robert Wilkie, the most homophobic member of Congress, as head of Veterans Affairs.
• Turning the GOP over to the religious right to whom he caters.
• Appointing members of the Supreme Court who have a record of anti-GLBT people and concerns.
• Appointing federal judges with at least one-third having extensive anti-LGBT track records and ideologies that oppose GLBT progress and can obstruct it for decades to come.
• Personally reversing the military’s policy of allowing Trans military personnel to serve their country because Mike Pence and Tony Perkins wanted him to.
• Favoring “religious liberty” which makes the federal government a proponent of discrimination against GLBT people, and creating a division within Health and Human Services that allows health care workers to refuse care for GLBT people on religious grounds.
• Taking away the Obama enacted protection for Transgender students, and his Department of Education no longer accepting complaints of discrimination from transgender students.
• Arguing in court that employers should be able to fire an employee for being Gay, and rescinding the Obama era ruling that existing federal gender nondiscrimination protections applied to Trans workers.
• Firing his entire HIV/AIDS Council without saying why, and gutting Obamacare to the point that someone with HIV, a pre-existing condition, can be refused cover age or can be charged higher premiums.
• Taking money from AIDS programs, already cut, to fund his policy of separating children from their parents when they tried to enter the U.S. as asylum seekers.
• Sending Gay people arriving at the border fleeing anti-Gay persecution in their home countries back to that persecution, while separating same-sex married couples after years of living together in this country.
• Choosing to honor June as National Ocean Month while ignoring GLBT Pride Month after years of the White House celebrating it.

This is not evidence that backs the claim that he is the best driend of the GLBT Community, nor is it consistent with his saying in his nomination acceptance speech,

“As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology”,

while promoting oppression here and sending GLBT people back to where that happens.

There is a segment of the GLBT Community that needs to stop waiting for Trump’s gifts to flow forth, and start ensuring that what we have will not be taken away.

 

 

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