The Trump/Pence regime has been steadily pushing to make right wing evangelical Christianity the de facto established religion in America. The religious freedom rights and beliefs of others simply do not matter and, if they offend the self-centered, hate-filled, divisive views of Christofascists, they are subject to being undermined and trampled upon. Trump/Pence trumpets support for "religious freedom," but that freedom only applies to white, far right evangelicals who through policies and Department of Justice initiatives are being placed above the laws that bind the rest of the populace. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of LGBT rights where Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, both far right "Christians," seek to convince Trump to roll back rights and to dish out slights wherever possible. Part of that agenda this year was banning U.S. embassies from flying rainbow flags during June, which is Pride month. As the Washington Post reports, a number of embassies are defying the Trump/Pence regime's order. Here are article excerpts:
Since the State Department began rejecting all embassy requests to hoist rainbow flags outside the mission buildings during LGBTQ Pride Month this year, some U.S. diplomats have been finding ways to defy, or at least get around, the new policy.The facades of the U.S. missions in Seoul and Chennai, India, are partially hidden behind large rainbow flags, while the embassy in New Delhi is aglow in rainbow colored lights. The website for the embassy in Santiago, Chile, shows a video of the chief diplomat raising a rainbow flag last month for the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.
The Vienna embassy’s website features a photo of a rainbow flag flying below Old Glory on a mast jutting from the building, a statement by Diplomats for Equality and a story about a professor lecturing on the visibility and growth of LGBT rights.
U.S. diplomats in Jerusalem joined a March for Pride and Tolerance, and several ambassadors have tweeted photos of themselves in local Pride parades or standing outside the embassies surrounded by employees holding up letters spelling PRIDE.
“This is a category one insurrection,” said one diplomat, who like others interviewed about the sentiment over the rejections, which were not made in writing, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired.
A practice routinely approved for most of the decade at many embassies now requires top-level approval from the State Department. But this year, as first reported by NBC News, all requests were nixed.
In 2011, the Obama administration directed agencies involved with foreign policy to promote LGBT rights, a striking policy for an agency that, up to the early 1990s, considered homosexuality a security risk and cause for termination. . . . . By 2016, approvals were left up to each ambassador or chief of mission.
That process changed last year, after Mike Pompeo became secretary of state. An evangelical Christian who believes marriage should be defined as between a man and woman, Pompeo has said gay employees will be respected and treated like everyone else. But he has downplayed some symbols of LGBT rights, while introducing several new panels and envoys specializing in religious freedom issues.
The advisory cable that came out last year said diplomats are required to obtain top-level approval from approval from the State Department’s Office of Management to fly a rainbow flag.
Some gay employees in the foreign and civil service say the ban on flying the rainbow flag is just the tip of an iceberg of slights.
“Day by day, a death by a thousand cuts, our rights as lgbt+ Americans are being eroded with the removal of a guidance here, the rewriting of a policy there, or just the quiet disappearance of a web site,” Robyn McCutcheon, a transgender woman who has served in several posts abroad, wrote in her blog “Transgender at State,” lamenting what she has observed throughout the government in the past two years. “It should come as no surprise that this erosion would happen also at the U.S. Department of State.”
“We fly below the radar,” one employee said. “We survive because they don’t realize we’re here.”
Expect things to get even worse as Trump steps up anti-LGBT efforts to maintain the support from evangelicals and ultra-right wing Catholics, all of whom want to take America back to the 1950's, including new Jim Crow laws and gays being forced to hide from sight.
