Trump Unveils More Anti-LGBTQ 'License to Discriminate' Plans

The Trump/Pence regime is continuing its attacks on the LGBT community and moving to grant a license to discriminate to religious - mostly conservative "Christian" - organizations that receive taxpayer funded support.  The goal is to (i) solidify evangelical support in advance of the 2020 presidential election, and (ii) prop up religious organizations that cannot survive financially without government funding, their respective denominations no longer being able to support their operations.  The Trump/Pence rule making is targeted to allow discrimination against not only LGBT individuals, but also those of other religions or no religion.  Stated another way, it is an effort to have a stated supported religion - conservative Christianity - in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this very dangerous and discriminatory agenda.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s administration has made yet another move to enable discrimination, including anti-LGBTQ discrimination, in the name of “religious freedom.”

On Thursday, National Religious Freedom Day, Trump announced his administration is issuing nine proposed rules that govern how faith-based nonprofits with government contracts interact with their clients, reversing regulations put in place under President Barack Obama.

Under the Obama-era regulations, these contractors “need to give beneficiaries notice of the providers’ religious character and the right to get services elsewhere,” The Washington Post reports. “The providers also have to make reasonable efforts to refer beneficiaries to another provider if the person receiving services is uncomfortable.” The Trump administration says these rules are unfair to faith-based providers because they don’t apply to secular organizations.

The newly proposed rules, which are subject to public comment before becoming final, would apply to organizations that provide a wide range of services through contracts with the departments of Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Labor, Agriculture, Education, Justice, Homeland Security, and International Development. Services offered by these contractors include substance abuse treatment, adoption and foster care placements, refugee resettlement, and much more.

[W]e are talking about government grants to the tune of millions and millions of dollars,” she explained. “And increasingly, they are excluding members of the public from receiving services based on who they are.”

The rules would indeed enable faith-based contractors to turn away people who are LGBTQ or follow a different religion, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. “We will keep saying this as long as we have to: Religious freedom is a fundamental right, but it does not confer a license to discriminate,” said Heather Weaver, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, in a press release. “Government-funded programs, including those operated by faith-based organizations, should not be able to discriminate against vulnerable people seeking help.

“The right to believe and to exercise one’s faith is a core American value. The right to discriminate with taxpayer dollars is not. These regulations would dismantle meaningful protections for beneficiaries of these federally funded programs and strip away basic notice requirements designed to ensure that beneficiaries know their rights to be free from discrimination and their right to an alternative, nonreligious provider. Taxpayer funds should not be used to allow discrimination.”

Today’s announcement comes on top of many other efforts by the Trump administration to establish a right to discriminate in the name of religion. In November, for National Adoption Month, HHS announced a new rule that would allow adoption agencies and other programs that receive HHS grants to reject same-sex couples and rainbow families on the basis of religious freedom. Other programs that stand to be affected include elder services, Head Start, refugee resettlement, HIV services, and programs for runaway and homeless youth.

The administration has finalized a so-called conscience protection rule allowing health care providers to opt out of procedures that offend their religious beliefs, but court challenges have kept the rule from going into effect. It also wants to eliminate provisions of the Affordable Care Act that ban anti-transgender discrimination and even allow homeless shelters to discriminate against trans clients.

Anyone who is not an evangelical "Christian" extremist should be very, very worried.  Yes, I have the word Christian in quotation marks because, in my view, the members of Trump's base are Christian in name only.  Look at Christ's social gospel message, and these people are the antithesis to that message.  Indeed, the make the Biblical Pharisees seem like good, upstanding people.

The Far Right's Effort to Eliminate the Establishment Clause

In addition to guaranteeing freedom of religion, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states: says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  It's a provision increasingly ignored by the far right and the political whores in the Republican Party who seemingly have no limits on how far they will go in seeking to force far right Christian dogma on the entire nation and all of its citizens.  Between red state anti-abortion laws and the Trump/Pence regime's new "conscience rule" that exempts right wing Christians from the state and federal non-discrimination laws, America has a de facto established religion.  Worse yet, due to the tax-exempt status granted to churches and the plethora of  "ministries" so loved by Christofascists, all of us are underwriting this de facto established religion.  All of this would shock the Founding Fathers who knew well the evil of an established church.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon which violates the U.S. Constitution and puts the religious freedom of everyone else at risk.  Here are highlights:

It’s almost exactly a year since Irish voters, by an overwhelming two-thirds majority, threw off the shackles of the Roman Catholic Church and repealed the country’s constitutional provision banning abortion. On Friday, voters are expected to defy the bishops again and repeal the provision that requires at least four years of living apart before a couple can apply for a divorce. (Ireland legalized same-sex marriage by popular vote back in 2015.)

Back in Alabama, the state’s governor, Kay Ivey, issued this official statement when she signed the abortion ban into law: “To the bill’s many supporters, this legislation stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God.”

I lack the social science expertise to explain the opposite trajectories of our two countries: Ireland marching proudly into the future, while the United States is reconfiguring itself into a theocracy that would have appalled our Founding Fathers. (Abortion, by the way, was legal at the nation’s founding, and for much of a century afterward.)

But I do know something about the United States Constitution. If the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause means anything, it has to mean that God’s will cannot be a constitutional justification for a law that erases an individual right.

[I]t’s past time for the rest of us to step back and consider the impact of religion’s current grip on public policy — not only on the right to abortion, but on the availability of insurance coverage for contraception in employer-sponsored health plans and on the right of gay and transgender individuals to obtain medical services without encountering discrimination.

The Establishment Clause says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But we don’t hear much about it these days. It has shrunk noticeably at the hands of the current Supreme Court, in contrast to the First Amendment’s other religion clause, the Free Exercise clause, much in favor with today’s majority.

The only Supreme Court justice who ever linked abortion and the Establishment Clause was John Paul Stevens, now nine years into retirement and, at age 99, author of a new memoir.

Thirty years ago, in a case called Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the court considered a Missouri law that placed several restrictions on access to abortion. The law contained a preamble declaring it to be a “finding” of the state legislature that “the life of each human being begins at conception.”

Justice Stevens, alone, disagreed. The preamble was “an unequivocal endorsement of a religious tenet of some but by no means all Christian faiths,” he wrote in his separate opinion. It “serves no identifiable secular purpose,” he continued, adding, “That fact alone compels a conclusion that the statute violates the Establishment Clause.”

Stevens explained: “Bolstering my conclusion that the preamble violates the First Amendment is the fact that the intensely divisive character of much of the national debate over the abortion issue reflects the deeply held religious convictions of many participants in the debate.” He concluded, “the Missouri legislature may not inject its endorsement of a particular religious tradition into this debate.”

The court will face another Establishment Clause test, which it will predictably fail, in a year or so when it confronts the Trump administration’s Religious Exemption Rule. This rule grants employers who have religious objections to birth control an opt-out from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to cover contraception in the employee health plan. The rule represents a metastasis from the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision in 2014, . . . the Trump rule offers no such workaround. Women with the misfortune to work for anti-contraception employers will become second-class citizens, their statutory right to full health care benefits sacrificed to protect the boss from complicity in the sin of birth control.

In the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, 14 leading scholars of the Constitution’s religion clauses have filed a brief arguing that the rule manifests unconstitutional “religious favoritism,” an “unyielding preference for religious interests over any conceivable secular interest,” while shifting “serious burdens to third parties.”

This month, the administration issued an expanded “conscience rule” to permit health care workers, down to the level of receptionist, to opt out of involvement with procedures to which they have moral or religious objections. Another new rule to be issued shortly would limit protections for transgender patients seeking even ordinary health care by expanding opt-outs for providers who have religious objections to treating them. These new measures, carrying out [Trump's] the president’s pledge to serve the interests of his allies on the religious right, will undoubtedly be the subject of lawsuits.

[B]efore the end of the current term, we will have a better idea of whether there’s anything left of the Establishment Clause when the court decides the pending case on the constitutionality of a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Lurking in the background of this case is the argument that the Establishment Clause permits any religious favoritism short of actual coercion of non-adherents. You don’t like the public display of sectarian symbols? No problem — no one’s making you look at them.

It took Ireland many years and much pain to claim the secular freedom its people now enjoy. It’s taking us just a few years of disingenuous politics to hurl us backward to a place many of us never imagined.

Be very afraid.  The far right, especially the Christofascists represent a clear and present danger to constitutional government.

Trump Set to Legalize Anti-Gay Discrimination

Trump with hate group leader and white supremacist, Tony perkins

Since last June I have noted over and over again that Donald Trump met with leading Christofascists in New York City and made many promises in order to win the support of many "family values" groups that under the surface are little more than anti-gay hate groups or thinly veiled white supremacy organizations. Family Research Council, whose president has a documented white supremacist ties, is but one of the better known groups.  James Dobson's Focus on the Family - which ought to be named Focus on the White Family - is another.  Among the promises made was a promise to legalize anti-LGBT discrimination under the smoke screen of protecting "religious liberty."  In the minds of the Christofascists, religious liberty translate as the right to discriminate against and abuse anyone who doesn't adhere to Christofascist religious tenets.  The favorite target of such mistreatment has long been the LGBT community, but others are on the target list: women who use contraception, women who have had abortions, unmarried cohabitating couples, and, of course, non-Christians of all varieties.  After a false start earlier in the year that created a furor, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer,  is reportedly set to sign an executive order tomorrow that will make good on his promises to one of the most hate-filled segments of American society.  It is expected that the order will allow Christofascists to ignore all state and local nondiscrimination statutes and ordinances.  Here are highlights from Politico:

President Donald Trump has invited conservative leaders to the White House on Thursday for what they expect will be the ceremonial signing of a long-awaited—and highly controversial—executive order on religious liberty, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

Two senior administration officials confirmed the plan, though one cautioned that it hasn’t yet been finalized, and noted that lawyers are currently reviewing and fine-tuning the draft language. Thursday is the National Day of Prayer, and the White House was already planning to celebrate the occasion with faith leaders.

The signing would represent a major triumph for Vice President Mike Pence—whose push for religious-freedom legislation backfired mightily when he served as governor of Indiana—and his allies in the conservative movement.

The original draft order, which would have established broad exemptions for people and groups to claim religious objections under virtually any circumstance, was leaked to The Nation on Feb. 1—the handiwork, many conservatives believed, of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who have sought to project themselves as friendly to the LGBT community. Liberals blasted the draft order as government-licensed discrimination, and the White House distanced itself from the leaked document in a public statement.

Pence and a small team of conservative allies quickly began working behind the scenes to revise the language, and in recent weeks have ratcheted up the pressure on Trump to sign it. The new draft is being tightly held, but one influential conservative who saw the text said it hasn’t been dialed back much—if at all—since the February leak. “The language is very, very strong,” the source said.

Signing it this week could also lessen the sting Trump’s religious backers are feeling over the newly-approved omnibus spending bill, which keeps federal funding in place for Planned Parenthood. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List holds its own annual gala on Wednesday, one night before the Becket Fund’s, and the news of Planned Parenthood’s continued funding has dampened some of the enthusiasm surrounding Pence’s keynote address to the event.

  

"As one LGBT journalist friend notes, the draft order 'privileges' a certain set of beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity—beliefs identified most closely with conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians—over others. That goes beyond 'what RFRA might authorize' and may violate the Establishment Clause."  While the order will hopefully be struck down by the courts, the damage done in the interim will be widespread. 

Trump’s "Religious Freedom" Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination

A post yesterday suggested that folks should not be tricked by Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer's, purported decision to leave President Obama's LGBT supportive executive orders in place.  Based n a leaked draft of Der Fuhrer's proposed "religious freedom" executive order, any rights left in place by virtue of Obama's executive orders will be wiped out.  Thus, Trump can claim he maintained LGBT protections even as he issue a plan to legalize massive anti-LGBT discrimination.  The man is a foul douche bag - and that description is far too kind.  A leaked draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” reveals frightening and sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination.  Such has always been the goal of the Christofascists who backed Trump and extracted promises from him in return.  The Nation looks at the details of this foul plan.  Here are article highlights:

A leaked copy of a draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” obtained by The Investigative Fund and The Nation, reveals sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination. 

The four-page draft order, a copy of which is currently circulating among federal staff and advocacy organizations, construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”

The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act. 

Language in the draft document specifically protects the tax-exempt status of any organization that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”

The breadth of the draft order, which legal experts described as “sweeping” and “staggering,” may exceed the authority of the executive branch if enacted. It also, by extending some of its protections to one particular set of religious beliefs, would risk violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

“This executive order would appear to require agencies to provide extensive exemptions from a staggering number of federal laws—without regard to whether such laws substantially burden religious exercise,” said Marty Lederman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on church-state separation and religious freedom.

The exemptions, Lederman said, could themselves violate federal law or license individuals and private parties to violate federal law. 

The leaked draft maintains that, as a matter of policy, “Americans and their religious organizations will not be coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience.”

It sets forth an exceptionally expansive definition of “religious exercise” that extends to “any act or refusal to act that is motivated by a sincerely held religious belief, whether or not the act is required or compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.” “It’s very sweeping,” said Ira Lupu, a professor emeritus at the George Washington University Law School and an expert on the Constitution’s religion clauses and on the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). “It raises a big question about whether the Constitution or the RFRA authorizes the president to grant religious freedom in such a broad way.”

In particular, said Lupu, the draft order “privileges” a certain set of beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity—beliefs identified most closely with conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians—over others. That, he said, goes beyond “what RFRA might authorize” and may violate the Establishment Clause.

[T]he new draft order codifies a laundry list of claims advanced by the Christian right in recent years as indicating that the advance of LGBT rights has put the religious freedom of conservative Christians at risk. “They would say this is a nondiscrimination order,” said Lambda Legal’s Pizer. “We disagree. We would say being denied the ability to discriminate against others is not discrimination against you.”

Images of the draft executive order are here: 

First Amendment Defense Act Would Be "Devastating" for LGBTQ Americans

I have addressed the issue of the disingenuously named "First Amendment Defense Act" before - one that "friends" who voted for Donald Trump, a/k/a, Der Fuhrer try to ignore - and the adverse impact it will have if passed by the Republican Controlled Congress and signed into law by Der Fuhrer as he promised Christofascists.  NBC News looks at some of the consequences of this effort to put Christofascist beliefs above the law and to provide a de facto establishment of extreme right wing Christianity as the nation's recognized religion. While clearly unconstitutional in a normal world, if Trump has the opportunity to stack the Supreme Court, there is no assurance that this foul law would be struck down if enacted.  As for Trump supporting "friends" will they get off their asses and tell Congress to defeat this bill?  I am, sadly, not holding my breath.  Here are article highlights: 

Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, through his spokesperson, told Buzzfeed they plan to reintroduce an embattled bill that barely gained a House hearing in 2015. But this time around, they said, the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) was likely to succeed due to a Republican-controlled House and the backing of President-elect Donald Trump.

FADA would prohibit the federal government from taking "discriminatory action" against any business or person that discriminates against LGBTQ people. The act distinctly aims to protect the right of all entities to refuse service to LGBTQ people based on two sets of beliefs: "(1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage."

Ironically, the language of the bill positions the right to discriminate against one class of Americans as a "first amendment" right, and bans the government from taking any form of action to curb such discrimination—including withholding federal funds from institutions that discriminate. FADA allows allows individuals and businesses to sue the federal government for interfering in their right to discriminate against LGBTQ people and would mandate the Attorney General defend the businesses.

Jennifer Pizer, Law and Policy Director at Lambda Legal, told NBC Out FADA "invites widespread, devastating discrimination against LGBT people" and is a deeply unconstitutional bill.

"This proposed new law violates both Equal Protection and the Establishment Clause by elevating one set of religious beliefs above all others," Pizer said, "And by targeting LGBT Americans as a group, contrary to settled constitutional law."

Pizer warned that the bill's language also left room for individuals and businesses to discriminate against unwed heterosexual couples and single mothers, because of the clause stating that "sexual relations are properly reserved" to marriage between a man and a woman.

"There cannot be even one iota of doubt that this bill endorses one set of religious beliefs above others, and targets people in same-sex relationships, married or not, as well as unmarried heterosexual couples who live together," Pizer said. "It's an unconstitutional effort to turn the clock back to a time when unmarried mothers had to hide in shame, and LGBT people had to hide, period."

Kentucky Halts Taxpayer Financing for Creationist Museum

The United States Constitution and virtually ever state constitution bars the establishment of a particular faith or dogma as the official religion and likewise prohibits the provision of special state benefits to a particular religious group.  This means that if one is receiving taxpayer derived funds, one cannot impose discriminatory requirements for employment at the taxpayer funded facility.   It's really a very simple concept unless, of course, one is a Christofascist who believes that the laws apply to everyone else, but not themselves. As Slate reports, Kentucky stupidly issued state bonds to help finance a a Noah’s Ark–themed creationist amusement park under the guise that it would supposedly  create 600 to 700 jobs.  Now, the state has ceased advancing funds because the theme park - Ark Encounter - has put in place discriminatory hiring practices and requiring applicants to sign a extreme Christofascist statement of faith.  Obviously, the state financing should never have been awarded to the project in the first place.  Here are highlights from Slate on the debacle:

The trouble began when the park, officially called Ark Encounter, listed its employment opportunities in August. Nestled among the requirements for all job applicants were three troubling obligatory documents: “Salvation testimony,” “Creation belief statement,” and a “Confirmation of your agreement with the AiG statement of faith.” (AiG is Answers in Genesis, Ham’s ministry and Ark Encounter’s parent company.) These first two requirements are problematic enough: The park is quite openly instructing all applicants to pledge that they personally believe in creationist Christianity. If an applicant has other beliefs, her application to Ark Encounter isn’t welcome.

But the third requirement is far, far worse. AiG’s statement of faith is no mere loyalty oath: It’s a four-part theological declaration mandating that all signatories accept dozens of fundamentalist Christian principles. Employees at Ark Encounter don’t just have to believe in God; they have to believe in Christ, the Holy Spirit, Satan (as “the personal spiritual adversary of both God and mankind”), Adam and Eve, “the Great Flood of Genesis,” a 6,000-year-old Earth, and the eternal damnation of “those who do not believe in Christ.” All employees must follow “the duty of Christians” and attend “a local Bible believing church.” Just for good measure, employees must oppose abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, and trans rights.

Ark Encounter isn’t privately funded; the citizens of Kentucky have been roped into paying for it, whether they like it or not. Earlier this year, Kentucky’s Tourism Development Finance Authority gave preliminary support for $18.25 million in tax credits for Ark Encounter, citing Ham’s promise that the project would create 600 to 700 jobs. And that’s just for the first phase of construction; ultimately, the state could grant Ark Encounter up to $73 million in tax breaks.

Tax breaks come with government oversight—and right now, the Kentucky government doesn’t like what it sees. As Americans United for Separation of Church and State pointed out, Section 5 of the Kentucky constitution states that the government may never preference “any religious sect, society, or denomination” over another. Courts have interpreted this section to mean that the state may not create benefits for the public that are available only to specific religious groups. Yet that is precisely what Kentucky has done by funding Ark Encounter with taxpayer money.

One voice has been conspicuously absent from the debate over Ark Encounter’s intolerance: that of Christian conservatives.  . . . . This collective conservative shrug at Ark Encounter’s discriminatory practices is as revealing as it is unsurprising. The persecution complex of conservative Christians is based upon a fever dream, a strangely aspirational fantasy that they will someday face the same kind of persecution that minority groups face on a daily basis. Actual persecution—of gay and trans people, say, or non-Christians—seems to not bother them.

The citizens of Kentucky shouldn’t be forced to subsidize a religious group or its discriminatory practices. It is their religious freedom—not Ken Ham’s—that is truly at stake.