Evangelicals Furious Over Trump Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality

Trump and Pence with hate merchant, Tony Perkins.

The spittle is flying and shrieks of outrage are echoing form evangelicals over the purported Trump/Pence regime play to push for the decriminalization of homosexuality across the globe.  Most in the LGBT community have yawned and discounted the legitimacy of purported effort in light of Trump/Pence's continuous attacks of LGBT Americans. At this point, most wonder where the purported effort is headed since Trump himself pleaded ignorance about it. If the plan proceeds, it will be one of the few times Trump has failed to deliver on promises to his loyal, misogynist evangelical base.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the evangelical melt down.  Here are excerpts: 

The Trump administration’s push to decriminalize homosexuality abroad — which the president seemed strangely unaware of when questioned by reporters this week —  is drawing the ire of the religious right.

Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and the highest-ranking openly gay official in the administration, is leading the effort to persuade countries where homosexuality is illegal to change their laws, administration officials said Tuesday. Grenell wrote an article on the plan for a German newspaper, referring to Iran’s reported execution of a man believed to be gay as an example of the harm caused by such laws. The campaign has met with skepticism from LGBTQ advocates, given the administration’s homophobic and transphobic domestic policies.

Religious right activists, while not endorsing the death penalty for LGBTQ people, denounced the push for decriminalization.

“Let’s find common ground in calling for an end to all forms of physical violence against homosexuals —  but refrain from imposing the values of the sexual revolution on the rest of the world.” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, a longtime supporter of Donald Trump, wrote in his Washington Update column Thursday.

Massachusetts minister and occasional political candidate Scott Lively, always a virulent homophobe, was even more pointed in a column for World Net Daily, a right-wing website. “Reasonable tolerance and sympathy for people who suffer from same-sex attraction disorder is warranted — as is protecting them from violence — but sanitizing homosexuality and transgenderism as if they were morally, psychologically and behaviorally equivalent to sexual and gender normalcy is PC-driven lunacy,” he wrote.
 In a commentary for BarbWire, another far-right site, Julio Severo denounced Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a conservative Christian, for supporting Grenell’s effort, and took the opportunity to accuse LGBTQ people of being a danger to children.

“Such push coming from the Trump administration is a shame.” Severo wrote. “Coming from an evangelical who is the State Secretary, helping homosexual activist Grenell, is a bigger shame, because he is doing exactly what left-wing Protestant Hillary Clinton was doing when she was also a State Secretary.”

“When I think about violence and homosexuality, the first thought coming to my mind is not individuals suffering violence for their sexual lifestyle,” he added. “The first thinking is children suffering homosexual violence — physical and psychological. There is a massive effort to cover up the suffering of children in the hands of homosexual predators.”

Scientists have found no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, but Severo continued to push the assertion that gays are predators, and he blamed gay priests for the widespread abuse of children and teens in the Roman Catholic Church.

The commentators were still reluctant to blame Trump for the decriminalization campaign. . . . Perkins was encouraged that Trump seemed not to know of the campaign when reporters asked him about it Wednesday.

There may be another reason for Trump appearing to be ignorant of the move, however. New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman floated a possible explanation on Twitter: Or he does and doesn’t want to acknowledge on camera because it risks offending portions of his base.