Commentary

#AskTheGays: Trump’s America would be disastrous for LGBT people

#AskTheGays: Trump’s America would be disastrous for LGBT people
On Monday, Donald Trump addressed the massacre in Orlando by reiterating some of his wildest and most dangerous promises of the campaign. Foremost among them was that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States. Nevermind that this is both infeasible (how do you prove someone is Muslim?) and unconstitutional (federal government and religion): Trump has never been noted as particularly knowledgeable or practical in his campaign.

Almost lost among the horror of his foreign policy however was some pretty fantastical claims about LGBT people and their relationship with the Obama administration.

Trump stated “And by the way the LGBT community is just — what’s happened to them is just so sad and to be thinking about where their policies are currently with this administration is a disgrace to that community, I will tell you right now.” Which is an odd thing to say, since the Obama administration is certainly the most LGBT friendly Presidency in history.

During his tenure we’ve seen President Obama support:

  • The end of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”
  • The end of the Defense of Marriage Act
  • The Department of Justice opposing laws against marriage equality
  • An inclusive Violence Against Women Act
  • Removing the surgical requirements to change your gender on basically every form of federal ID
  • EEOC and Department of Education decisions supporting Title VII and IX claims by transgender people
  • An executive order banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in the federal government and contractors

The party whose ticket he is running on opposed all of this, and Trump has promised to strike many of the most important gains down via judicial appointments.

Just as strangely, he also claimed he was a better ally to the community than Clinton.

“Ask yourself who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community, Donald Trump with actions or Hillary Clinton with her words?”

Q: So what claim would Trump have to being better for the LGBT community than Obama or Clinton?

A: Simply that he wouldn’t let Muslims into the country because they’re hostile to the LGBT people.

“She can’t claim to be supportive of these communities while trying to increase the number of people coming in who want to oppress these same communities,” he said.

Support for same-sex marriage
Support for same-sex marriage Pew Research Center

The entire concept is an asinine torture of logic, while ignoring some very ugly truths.  The most important of which is that Muslims are much more tolerant and accepting of LGBT people than evangelical Christians according to 2014 polling data from Pew Research. If we based who gets into the US on how much they dislike LGBT people, Mormons, evangelical Christians, and Jehovah’s Witnesses would be last in line.

There are LGBT Muslims in the US. In fact, there’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Muslims everywhere there’s Muslims. Most LGBT people in the US have a pretty good understanding of the physical danger that comes with being queer, and thus empathize enough with Muslims trying to escape from the horror that is ISIS. Given a choice between keeping all Muslims out and let them die, or provide some place safe for our LGBT brothers and sisters, the vast majority of queer people in the US would choose to save lives.

Another reason Trump’s statements are completely off base is that Omar Mateen was born in the US to immigrant parents (just like four of Trump’s children, I might add.) His (unenforceable, unconstitutional) immigration policy would have had zero effect.

The most important point that Trump fails to grasp is the LGBT Americans got 99 problems, and Muslims ain’t one of them. We can still get married on Sunday and be fired on Monday in most states. We can be denied credit, housing, public accommodations simply for who we love and who we are. The economic results of this discrimination are devastating: queer women of color and those with children fare especially badly economically in a culture with strong biases and weak protections.

When it comes to violence, LGBT people aren’t scared of Muslim terrorists. It’s the Christian ones already here that scare us. Twice in the past few weeks the leader of the richest, largest, most influential evangelical Christian organization in America has lamented that real men aren’t doing their Godly duty, and that in the good ol’ days they’d be out there shooting queers in bathrooms.

So what are Donald Trump and the Republican party’s positions on all of this? Not protections for LGBT people in any of the areas above, but they definitely support appointing judges who would roll back marriage equality, oppose Title VII and IX protections for transgender people, repeal Obama’s executive order protecting LGBT federal employees and contractors, grant churches the ability to directly engage in politics, and generally attack the few things the LGBT community has that put us on an equal legal footing with other Americans.

The most supreme irony in all of this nonsense is that Trump supports the First Amendment Defense Act, which would grant legal exemptions for religious people, churches, and businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.

In other words, Trump wants to roll back legal protections for LGBT people, while granting increased legal protections for those urging their followers to shoot us in bathrooms. In order for an LGBT person to vote for Trump, we would have to assume that a Clinton presidency would so utterly devastate America that we are all better off living as permanent second class citizens, subordinate to people who think we should be shot by vigilantes for using a bathroom.

On second thought, maybe LGBT Muslims should consider seeking asylum in Canada instead. Trump’s America doesn’t sound like much of an improvement for LGBT people over where they were fleeing from.

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