The Trump cavalcade of homophobic cabinet members continues.
President Trump has announced that he will nominate William Barr, a former Attorney General under George Bush, to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. While Sessions was vociferously anti-LGBTQ, Barr doesn’t quite rise to the same levels – but he’s definitely not an ally.
“William Barr, who has wrongfully suggested that LGBTQ people – not Trump and his destructive policies – have harmed the United States, is the latest in a long line of replacements who President Trump has appointed to his Cabinet who are just as anti-LGBTQ as their predecessors,” Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO of GLAAD, said in an emailed statement.
“If confirmed, there’s little doubt that William Barr would continue the Trump Administration’s objective of erasing LGBTQ Americans from the fabric of this nation.”
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The organization points to some of Barr’s problematic history, including:
- Delivered multiple speeches in the early ‘90s condemning the “permissiveness,” “sexual revolution” and “moral upheaval” that he insisted had led to America’s decline.
- Condemned church/state separation in public schools: “This moral lobotomy of public schools has been based on extremist notions of separation of church and state or on theories of moral relativism which reject the notion that there are standards of rights or wrong to which the community can demand adherence.”
- Insisted Georgetown University’s equal footing for LGBTQ rights groups was an attack on morality: “The second way in which secularists use law as a weapon is to pass laws that affirmatively promote the moral relativist viewpoint. Such laws seek to ratify, or put on an equal plane, conduct that previously was considered immoral…Another example was the effort to apply District of Columbia law to compel Georgetown University to treat homosexual activist groups like any other student group. This kind of law dissolves any form of moral consensus in society. There can be no consensus based on moral views in the country, only enforced neutrality.”
- Bemoaned the attention shown to “the homosexual movement”: “It is no accident that the homosexual movement, at one or two percent of the population, gets treated with such solicitude while the Catholic population, which is over a quarter of the country, is given the back of the hand. How has that come to be?”
