Trump Punts on Anti-Gay "Religious Freedom" Executive Order

While the news of the House of Representatives vote on Trumpcare yesterday was depressing.  On a more positive note, the "religious freedom" executive order signed by Der Trumpenführer, while troubling, failed to include the license to discriminate demanded by Christofascists and their political prostitutes in Congress.  To say that the Christofascists and professional Christian class (who live well by peddling hate and division - think Tony Perkins and Brian brown as but two examples) are livid livid is an understatement.    Here's a taste of Brian Brown's shrieking:

This is the second time that President Trump has backed away from signing a comprehensive order protecting religious liberty after LGBT groups complained about the proposed actions. We cannot accept this capitulation on such a critical issue and must fight back. Will you help us insist that President Trump fulfill his repeated promises to protect the religious liberty of people of faith?

By "help us" Brown means send money so that he can continue to make over $500,000 a year. Brown was far from alone in his wailing and lamentations over Trump's failure to exempt Christofascists from non-discrimination laws and ordinances.  American Family Association hate monger Bryan Fischer was equally peeved and blamed Ivanka Trump and her Jewish husband for Der Trumpenführer's betrayal:

These are essentially hollow promises on the president’s part. No church has ever been deprived of its tax exempt status using the Johnson Amendment. . . . the gravest concern is aroused by what the president did not say. The draft of this executive order that was leaked to the liberal media in February contained robust protections for Christians engaged in business from being compelled by government to violate their own values and consciences in showdowns with the radical, vitriolic, and virulently aggressive LGBT lobby.  This morning’s empty and symbolic action on the president’s part most likely betrays the hidden hand of the president’s uber-liberal daughter, Ivanka, who likely leaked the February draft to a liberal rag (The Nation) in order to stir up enough intense outrage from the LGBT community to strangle this baby in the cradle. It worked. Ivanka wore out her red pencil eviscerating the original order, leaving us with today’s order which has very nice language but is virtually entirely lacking in substance. 

While Trump has delivered on some of his promises made to Christofascists, today's failure to include the much demanded anti-LGBT provisions underscores the reality that Christofascists and evangelical Christians are Motivated by two things: racism and homophobia.  In their strange bubble detached from objective reality and moral decency, they believe that the rest of society harbors similar hatreds.  That bubble is about to burst.  A full one-third  of the under 30 generation has left organized religion and many older Americans are following suit.  A piece in Sojourner looks at this reality.  Here are excerpts:

Last Friday, Jerry Falwell, Jr. took to Fox News to proclaim that in Donald Trump, “evangelicals have found their dream president.” Two years ago, this statement would have made virtually no sense, at least on the surface. To many outside the white evangelical world, it seemed — and still seems — inconceivable that a thrice-married serial adulterer, ultimate materialist, casino owner, habitual liar, and unprincipled deal-maker could ever become the standard bearer for a group that professes to base their vote on “family values.”

In the two years since Trump announced his candidacy, we have seen a remarkable moral unmasking of white Americans who call themselves Christian, and in particular those who claim the “evangelical” label. Eighty-one percent of white evangelical voters cast their vote for Donald Trump, and the most recent Pew Research poll puts Trump’s support after his first 100 days in office at 78 percent among white evangelicals (and 80 percent among white evangelicals who attend church once a month).

In supporting Trump’s crackdowns and, in Trump's words, “big" and "beautiful” wall that will keep immigrants out, Falwell is explicitly and proudly saying that white evangelicals voted for Trump not in spite of his racist and xenophobic rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, but because of this rhetoric. How that relates to Christians, including evangelicals, who are in direct relationship to the undocumented immigrants and refugees that Trump wants to deport or keep out of our country, Falwell didn’t say.

Falwell also didn’t mention that Trump’s agenda and proposed budget would brutally cut off vital support to all “the least of these” that Jesus asks us to protect in the 25^th chapter of Matthew’s gospel. . . . . Jerry Falwell Jr. has once again shown himself to be nothing more or less than a Republican political operative, interested in advancing his preferred policy agenda much more than examining what it means to be a Christian.

This is about the moral hypocrisy of white American evangelical religious right leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. causing a crisis in the church, dividing American Christians on racial lines, and astonishing the worldwide body of Christ — the international majority of evangelical Christians who are people of color — and whose leaders keep asking many of us what in the world is going on with white American evangelicals.

That number, 81 percent, has become an international symbol that tragically now represents what white American evangelicalism stands for. It dramatically and painfully symbolizes the white ethno-nationalism that Donald Trump appeals to and continues to draw support from among white American evangelicals. It is the most revealing and hurtful metric of what I will call the racial idolatry of white American evangelical Christianity . . . . .

Racism is not a gospel issue to the Falwells, and never has been. That Donald Trump began his political career with a racist lie about America’s first black president isn’t an issue for Falwell, Jr. That Trump opened his campaign by demonizing immigrants in calling them “rapists” and “criminal” doesn’t matter to Jr. either. And Trump’s xenophobic assaults on Muslims seems to be something that Falwell. also agrees with, as his comments at the Liberty University convocation in 2015 indicate. 

That Trump is the dream president for people like Falwell and such a nightmare for the vast majority of evangelical, Pentecostal, and Catholic Christians around the world, and our brothers and sisters of color in the United States, really says it all.

This stark contrast reveals white evangelical Christianity in America as a bubble — a very destructive one, and one that is about to burst.

I hope the bubble bursts soon and that it accelerates the de-legitimization of conservative Christianity as a positive moral force in society.  Conservative Christianity is a pestilence that needs to be removed from society.  No deference is deserved and the media needs to cease providing a platform to Christofascist leaders and granting a false equivalency to their beliefs. 

Why Trump’s Second 100 Days Will Be Even Worse For LGBT Equality

Trump with leading gay hating Christofascists who have his ear

As was noted in a post yesterday about the rally Der Trumpenführer held in Pennsylvania on Saturday, one of the motivating factors for the deporables in attendance was the desire/need to feel superior.  Superior over blacks, superior over Hispanics, superior over non-Christians, and of course, superior over LGBT individuals.  The latter is especially true for the morally bankrupt 81% of evangelicals who voted for Trump, a serial adulterer, sexual predator and pathological liar just to name a few of his less than Christian traits.  Adding to the mix is Trump's polling numbers that are in the toilet and GOP fears for the 2018 mid-term elections.  Thus, as Michelangelo Signorile predicts, the next 100 days of the Trump/Pence regime will likely bring more assaults of LGBT equality and, most frighteningly, a likely executive order that will legalize anti-LGBT discrimination nationwide and  override state and local non-discrimination ordinances.  Trump and the GOP simply will need to show the anti-modernity, anti-science, and largely uneducated evangelicals that they have delievered some small sliver of campaign promises.  Here are Michelangelo's post in HuffPost:

When I wrote a piece a few days after the election, “The Mike Pence (Donald Trump) Assault On LGBTQ Equality Is Already Underway,” I hoped against all hope that something might change to alter what was already happening during the Trump transition.

But in fact, much of what I reported has materialized in the first 100 days. And there’s reason to believe the second 100 days will be worse.

In the first 100 days Trump installed viciously anti-gay individuals in his cabinet and throughout the government departments, all of whom were brought forth from the Mike Pence-run transition team, from Ben Carson and Roger Severino to Tom Price and Jeff Sessions. Trump and Sessions, the attorney general, already rescinded guidance on fighting discrimination against transgender students across the country, and had the Justice Department halt litigation against North Carolina regarding HB2 and the equally discriminatory law that replaced it. The Trump administration decided there was “no need” to move forward with the Census Bureau’s planned data collection on LGBT Americans, thereby keeping LGBTQ people invisible. 

Though Trump made a little bit of a spectacle of not rescinding President Obama’s executive order banning anti-LGBT discrimination among federal contractors, his administration later quietly issued an order ending data collection among contractors about such discrimination – thus allowing for it. Similarly, the administration stopped collecting data on discrimination against elderly LGBTQ people. Trump removed Eric Fanning as Army Secretary, appointed by President Obama and the first openly gay Army Secretary in history, and has now nominated an anti-LGBTQ Tennessee legislator, Mark Green, to the job ― a man who sponsored a bill allowing discrimination against LGBTQ people and who has called transgender people “evil.”

And perhaps most consequentially, Trump placed on the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, a constitutional originalist in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia ― by his own description ― and someone whose idea of “religious liberty” is a direct threat to LGBTQ rights. 

But here’s why the next 100 days ― and after that ― could be far worse: Trump is continuing to plummet in approval ratings and he needs his base to back him ― and to back the GOP ― more than ever if he has any hopes of re-election and of keeping Congress in the hands of the GOP in 2018 and beyond. He just barely made it in 2016, and any softening of any part of his base will spell doom. The anti-LGBTQ religious right turned out for Trump in numbers as great or bigger than every previous recent Republican presidential candidate. 

Christian right activists are already demanding much more. They were hoping a religious liberty executive order ― which would allow for widespread discrimination against LGBT people [and others] ― would have been issued already, and were disappointed when the Trump administration early on said a leaked draft of it wasn’t coming soon.

Last week USA Today reported that a group of 51 GOP legislators in the House sent a letter to the White House asking for the order to be signed.

They’re pressuring him to move ahead with the anti-LGBTQ agenda he promised. Though the media downplayed it, Trump courted these people at events and through their media during the campaign, promising everything from “protecting” religious liberty to getting the Obergefell marriage equality ruling overturned. 

The Christian right isn’t satisfied with what they see as the crumbs Trump has given them in the first 100 days. They’re demanding much, much more, and Trump, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom courted the Christian right and believed they needed evangelical voters for re-election, will feel compelled to deliver. 

That’s why the next 100 days and beyond are even more treacherous, and why we’ll have to pay great attention and fight back hard. 

All I can say to my "friends" who voted for Trump is this:  I will NOT forgive or forget your betrayal. You have proven yourselves to be false friends who I now know I simply cannot trust.