Thursday, August 15, 2019

Trump Says OK to Anti-LGBT Discrimination

To date Donald Trump's re-election campaign appears to be based on pandering to those who hold hatred towards others and seek to discriminate against or eliminate those they deem "other." On one front, he is fanning the ugly agenda of white supremacists - the El Paso shooter used some of Trump's language in his "manifesto - and one of his spokesmen, Ken Cuccinelli, who was a toxic extremist while attorney general of Virginia, has argued that the poem on the Statute of Liberty only applied to white Europeans.  On a second front, as underscored yesterday, he is fanning the anti-LGBT hatred of evangelical Christians and has given a nod to employers, including government contractors, to discriminate against LGBT individuals in hiring and employment practices if they site religious belief as the basis of their bigotry. Needless to say, Christofascists and professional "Christians" like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Tony Perkins are near orgasmic over the new Department of Labor rule. Nothing in Trump's agenda seeks to unify Americans.  Instead, it is all about playing to his base and sowing hatred and division. A piece in The Advocate looks at how LGBT individuals are being targeted.  Here are excerpts:
Civil rights advocates are enraged by a proposal released by the Department of Labor today to allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ people and others who offend the contractors’ religious beliefs. 
The action is a notice of proposed rulemaking by the DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. A DOL press release says a proposed rule on compliance is “intended to clarify the civil rights protections afforded to religious organizations that contract with the federal government” and assure that “conscience and religious freedom are given the broadest protection permitted by law.” But civil rights groups say it weaponizes religious freedom and encourages discrimination.
Basically, any employer, even a for-profit corporation, could claim that sincerely held religious beliefs allow it to deny employment to certain people, including LGBTQ people, single parents, members of other faiths, and more, representatives of several organizations said on the conference call.
The George W. Bush administration had approved an exemption for faith-based contractors, such as, say, Catholic nonprofit organizations, allowing them to favor members of their faith in employment. The Obama order maintained that. But the new proposed rule goes much further, allowing virtually any contractor to claim that religious beliefs allow discrimination against employees who do not follow all of those beliefs, according to the civil rights groups.
The proposal would expand the Bush exemption “by leaps and bounds,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said on the conference call. She explained, “Any company could take taxpayer dollars and fire a religious minority” or anyone else to whom it objected. And companies would be taken at their word on whether they’re religious in nature, she said: “If they say they’re religious, they are.”

Today’s news follows on other Labor Department actions. The department issued a memo in August of last year instructing those who enforce antidiscrimination law to take companies’ religious beliefs into account, advising compliance program staff that they “cannot act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices” . . . . The proposed rule, which will be published in the Federal Register Thursday, would expand upon and codify the memo, activists said. In both the memo and the proposed rule, the DOL refers to recent Supreme Court decisions involving businesses run by religious conservatives, . . . . But the Labor Department is “cherry-picking” those rulings, which did not establish a broad right to discriminate, the activists said. While business owners have every right to observe their religion in their private lives, when they are engaging in commerce, they should not discriminate, said Steve Freeman, vice president of civil rights for the Anti-Defamation League. “The proposal itself is anti-religious, particularly religious minorities. … We are seeing religious freedom weaponized,” he said.
The move also once again shows that the administration of Donald Trump and Mike Pence “is the most anti-LGBTQ administration in modern history,” Warbelow said.  “At the end of the day, it is those two who are responsible,” added Winnie Stachelberg, executive vice president for external affairs at the Center for American Progress.
Among the administration’s other anti-LGBTQ actions, Tobin said, the Department of Justice is preparing a brief in an upcoming Supreme Court case arguing that a funeral home operator in Michigan had the right to fire an employee because she is transgender. Tobin said she has also learned that the Justice Department has demanded that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission quit defending trans people who’ve lost their jobs. The EEOC is a semiautonomous federal agency tasked with investigating discrimination.
These come on top of actions involving discrimination in health care. One is a rule, now final, allowing health care workers to opt out of procedures to which they have religious or moral objections, no matter how marginal their involvement in the procedure might be. The administration is also working on a rule aimed at undermining the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition on discrimination against trans people.
“This administration straight-up believes the LGBTQ community should not have rights,” Stachelberg said.

1 comment:

Angelo Ventura said...

Hope trump gets impeached or someone puts him down for good