The Farce of Trump's "Pro-LGBT" claims

Trump has totally sold out to anti-LGBT Christofascists

For years now I have had little more than polite contempt for LGBT Republicans who each election cycle claim that the election at hand will be the turning point where the Republican Party will shift its stance from one of comprising an open enemy of LGBT Americans to something less hostile and animus-filled.  Each election then proves that such fantasies of a changed GOP have been nothing more than the delusions of self-loathing gays who for some perverse reason want the acceptance of those who hate them and/or will sell them down the river in a heartbeat to win the votes of Christofascists. This past presidential election proved to be no exception to the same tired phenomenon of LGBT Republicans claiming that this would be the point where a change in course would sweep the Republican Party.  Worse yet, these same suckers/delusional fools claimed that Donald Trump would be "pro-LGBT."  Apparently, those uttering these words paid no attention to Trump selling his soul to Christofascists and anti-gay zealots last June in New York City. Given my past activism in the GOP, I believe it is safe to say that the ONLY thing that will cause the GOP to drop its anti-gay agenda will be repeated electoral defeats (which might have happened if every LGBT individual had gone out to vote and voted Democrat).  A main editorial in the New York Times looks at the foolishness of members of the LGBT community who allowed themselves to be played for fools by Der Trumpenführer and, in my view acted akin to any Jews who voted for Hitler in the 1930's.  Here are excerpts:

It was a jarringly unorthodox moment even for Donald Trump. At a rally in Colorado last October, an audience member handed him a gay pride flag that bore a handwritten endorsement: “LGBTs for TRUMP.” The candidate smiled as he unfurled the flag, displaying it for a few seconds. A spokesman later said Mr. Trump was “proud to carry the ‘L.G.B.T. for Trump’ rainbow flag on stage,” since he was campaigning to be “president for all Americans.”

It didn’t take long for prominent gay Republicans to proclaim that the Republican Party had, at long last, turned a corner on gay rights under Mr. Trump. After he was elected, some gay rights activists held out hope that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, would be staunch allies in the West Wing, considering that they had traveled in liberal circles in New York.

Yet, the nomination of several key officials, who have disparaged the L.G.B.T. community and sought to curtail the rights of its members, has exposed the narrative that Mr. Trump would be a champion of gay and transgender people as a fallacy. “It has been a catastrophe,” said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a leading strategist behind a string of legal and policy victories the community achieved during the Obama administration. “Every twitch we’ve seen from the administration has been anti-L.G.B.T.”

At the Department of Justice, where former Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year delivered an impassioned speech telling transgender Americans, “We see you; we stand with you,” her successor, Jeff Sessions, wasted no time reversing course.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which worked to expand access to health care for gay and transgender Americans, is now being led by Tom Price, who was a vocal opponent of gay rights as a congressman. The agency’s civil rights office, which oversaw regulatory changes that made it easier for transgender people to get insurance coverage for medical care, is now run by Roger Severino, an ultraconservative activist who last year accused the Obama administration of attempting to “coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology.”

Mr. Obama’s last secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning, an openly gay man, was instrumental in nudging the Pentagon brass to allow transgender people to serve openly. Mark Green, a Tennessee state senator nominated to replace him, last year called being transgender a “disease.”

Last month, Health and Human Services amended two surveys of the elderly to remove a question about sexual orientation. The Census Bureau, meanwhile, has scrapped plans to include questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the 2020 Census and the American Community Survey.

The only good news for the L.G.B.T. rights movement this year has come from the courts. . . . For the foreseeable future, the federal courts are likely to be the only avenue for progress.  It’s not too late, of course, for Mr. Trump to act like the transformational Republican on gay rights . . . Yet his record of empty talk makes that seem as unlikely as the sight of a Republican presidential candidate waving a gay pride flag.

And let's not forget that Trump himself signed executive orders reversing non-discrimination protections put in place by the Obama administration.