A Frightening Warning to Gays and Women Out of Texas

Wonder what things might look like if the Republican controlled Congress and Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer pass the First Amendment Defense Act ("FADA")?  Look no farther tan a ruling out of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas where a right wing federal judge during the waning days of 2016 that doctors and medical personnel had the right to refuse to treat women who had had abortions and transgender patients.  Indeed, the judge ruled that to require them to do so would violate the medical providers' rights of "religious freedom."  Never mind that the Founders' concept of freedom of religion never contemplated such a twisting of their concept of freedom of religion: the right to worship as one chose and freedom from supporting an established church. This ruling and the language of FADA indicate that LGBT citizens, women who have had an abortion and cohabitating heterosexual couples - and perhaps others - could find themselves facing unprecedented discrimination in the near future.  It is also a reminder that other than Der Fuhrer, no one is more selfish and self-centered than the "godly folk" who hate the majority of their fellow citizens.  A piece in Slate looks at this grim warning:

In the waning hours of 2016, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor unleashed a bizarre ruling that fundamentally alters the balance between medical treatment and religious freedom in the United States. O’Connor’s decision blocked a critical regulation enacted pursuant to the Affordable Care Act, which forbade doctors from discriminating against transgender patients or women who’ve previously had abortions. Most disturbingly, O’Connor found that such a nondiscrimination rule violated the “religious freedom” of doctors and insurance companies that consider gender transition and abortion to be “evil.” The ruling marks an extreme extension of the dubious logic behind the Supreme Court’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision—and indicates that conservative courts believe the purported right of health care professionals to discriminate against patients trumps patients’ right to sound medical treatment.

O’Connor recognizes only one kind of sex discrimination: hostility against a man or woman for being a man or a woman. This belief directly contradicts Supreme Court authority; it also doesn’t make much sense, since it only raises the key question of who decides whether an individual is a man or a woman.

O’Connor got away with this blinkered understanding of sex in blocking federal guidelines on bathroom access for transgender students. And naturally he pulled the same trick here, holding that the HHS rule does not build upon “sex discrimination” and is therefore unlawful.

So far, so predictable. Texas, which brought this suit along with four other states and several Christian medical associations, chose O’Connor’s court specifically because of his clear opposition to federal rules protecting transgender people. A simple ruling on sex discrimination, coupled with a nationwide injunction forbidding the HHS regulation from taking effect, could’ve ended the matter. But O’Connor—despite having already resolved the dispute—decided to go much further, analyzing the case under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA.

Ever since the Hobby Lobby decision, progressives have warned that RFRA poses a grave threat to LGBTQ rights, fearing that businesses can use it to circumvent nondiscrimination laws shielding LGBTQ people.

That fear is now an undeniable reality. O’Connor held that treating transgender patients—and even insuring transgender patients—“substantially burdens” insurance companies and hospitals’ “exercise of religion.”

And what about those abortion-related protections? O’Connor blocked those too, holding that RFRA also protects doctors and insurance companies from providing or covering “abortion-related services.” The judge may be right about that, but it really doesn’t matter, because the rule in question does not require anybody to perform or insure abortions. As Timothy Jost explains in Health Affairs, “Judge O’Connor is simply wrong in believing that [the rule] requires anyone to pay for or perform abortions.” In reality, the rule prohibits doctors and insurance companies from discriminating against women who have had abortions in the past. With his decision, then, O’Connor provides a neat template for future judges irritated by nondiscrimination statutes: Make up a version of the law that isn’t real, then strike down the real law based on your made-up version of it.

The Christian medical associations and insurance companies behind this lawsuit argued that treating transgender patients and women who’ve had abortions constituted “material cooperation with evil.” O’Connor agreed, and he decided that the law should value these beliefs over everyone else’s right to receive medical treatment. The ramifications of this reasoning are chilling, especially for women and LGBTQ people. Does RFRA bar the government from protecting gay people against medical discrimination? What about women who don’t wish to become pregnant?

This system would completely upend medical practice in the United States, legalizing prejudice-based refusal of service and placing the burden on patients to find a doctor and insurance company who will provide the treatment they need. There is no clear limit to the damage that O’Connor’s ruling could do. It appears that in our post–Hobby Lobby world, patients who draw ire from conservative Christians must get used to being deprived of insurance and denied medical treatment solely on account of their identities.

With Trump in a position to load the Supreme Court with right wing ideologues, there is a strong chance that this ruling might ultimately be upheld.  Be very afraid.  Religion is a pervasive evil.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

The Battlegrounds for LGBT Rights Under Trump

As I have indicated in a number of posts, the inauguration of Donald Trump will set in play numerous assaults on the rights and dignity of LGBT Americans.  Without sufficient mobilization of LGBT individuals and our allies, we are likely to the enactment of license to discriminate laws at the state level and a broad reaching denigration of LGBT rights and protections at the federal level under the deliberately disingenuously named "First Amendment Defense Act" which would allow individuals, businesses and even government employees to discriminate at will against LGBT citizens merely by claiming that to do otherwise offends their religious beliefs.  Thankfully, the assault against LGBT citizens will dovetail with the larger Republican assault on women's reproductive rights and the social safety net, particularly in the realm of healthcare as the GOP moves to fulfill a long held dream of voucherizing Medicare and making draconian cuts to Medicaid.  These efforts will make LGBT citizens, women, the elderly and even health care providers and hospital systems allies in resisting the GOP onslaught.  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the coming battle grounds and what must be done in the Age of Trump.  Here are some article excerpts:

As Inauguration Day nears, and as our new, orange-tinted reality sets in, it behooves all Americans who believe in fairness and equality to take stock of what we’re up against — because that’s how we’ll be able to resist it.

On the campaign trail, Trump hurled insults at groups which, combined, represent a vast majority of Americans. He insulted women, Muslims, Mexicans and Latinos, African-Americans, people of color, members of the press, people with disabilities, and career politicians whom he denounced as “crooked.”

That means it’s not at all hyperbolic to issue a warning call to each of those groups who will, in all likelihood, have their freedom targeted by the incoming administration.

But even though the President-elect was relatively quiet on LGBT issues during the campaign trail (aside from a couple mangled acronyms he managed to spit out and a lukewarm response to marriage equality), his cabinet appointments make clear that we cannot afford to “wait and see” just how Trump’s team dismantles LGBT rights. Instead, we must use the resources at hand to anticipate the onslaught we are about to step into — giving us the best chance of emerging with dignity, sanity, and faith in this American experiment.

Prepare to Oppose the First Amendment (Defense Act)First and foremost, the so-called First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) is all but certain to become law. Although the precise language has yet to be seen in this year’s Congress, the text of the bill introduced in the 114th Congress sought to prohibit the federal government from taking “any discriminatory action” against a person (defined to include for-profit and nonprofit corporations) who “acts in accordance with a religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.” The bill offered no similar protections for other views about marriage or sexual relations.

FADA is arguably the clearest and most present danger for LGBT Americans, particularly because it exemplifies the ways in which the bedrock principle of “religious freedom” has been weaponized to block the advance of LGBT equality.

[B]arring some truly unexpected outbreak of empathy in the newly empowered Republican Party, it’s safe to assume the sweeping legislation will become law early on in Trump’s presidency. The president-elect has signaled his support for the bill, promising Catholics in a September statement that he will sign the bill into law. Once FADA becomes law (and perhaps before), it’s reasonable to assume similar “turn away the gays” bills will be introduced in state legislatures, likely under the guise of “religious freedom.”

Take Care of Our Health CareLike most of Trump’s cabinet nominees and advisers, the potential Secretary of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price, has a long history of opposing LGBT-inclusive policies. Price, specifically, is a staunch opponent of the Affordable Care Act, and is expected to be a key figure in the yet-to-be-announced plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. And Price is no friend to the gays. According to LGBT media watchdog GLAAD’s “Trump Accountability Project,” the Georgia Republican scored a zero (out of 100) on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Equality Scorecard, voted against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and in favor of amending the Constitution to ban marriage equality. More relevant to this discussion and Price’s potential tenure as the nation’s chief healthcare official, though, is the fact that he has defended false equivalencies between pedophilia and homosexuality as nothing more than harmless “Christian beliefs regarding proper sexual ethics.”

But what about the millions of Americans who aren’t transgender? Well, any of those citizens who have a uterus or plan to make their own decisions about when or if they want children need to pay attention, as the National LGBTQ Task Force’s executive director Rea Carey explained when Price’s nomination was announced. “Let’s be quite clear: if confirmed, Price’s decisions will impact the health and social services of millions of people — especially the most vulnerable populations who rely upon access to quality, affordable, culturally competent care. If confirmed, Tom Price would steer HHS in a dangerous direction that’s motivated by profit and the desire to control our bodies.”

Get Ready to Fight the Department of JusticeIn his excellent piece for the Winter 2017 issue of The American Prospect, former Justice Department attorney and current University of Michigan law professor Samuel R. Bagenstos raised a terrifying possibility: President Trump’s Department of Justice may use the muscle that agency developed under Obama to suppress voting rights, privatize education, and strip away existing civil rights protections.

If Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, is confirmed, the fate of American civil rights law is effectively sealed, given that Sessions was considered too racist to be a federal judge in the ‘80s. Naturally, Sessions has also consistently opposed LGBT rights, and could even use his sway as Attorney General to try to convince the Supreme Court to reconsider marriage equality.

[A] generous, inclusive interpretation of civil rights law is unlikely to continue in a Trump administration. In fact, Bagenstos warns, where LGBT people have found an ally in the DOJ for the past eight years, we may now find a powerful foe. Bagenstos aptly points to G.G. v. Glouchester County School Board, the case out of Virginia where a transgender boy sued his school for the right to use the boy’s bathroom, after the school barred him from using the appropriate facilities on campus. . . . That case is currently pending before the Supreme Court, and could be heard by a full panel of justices — including a Trump appointee.

But the battle is just beginning, Bagenstos writes: . . . there is a substantial prospect that the Civil Rights Division will take an affirmatively anti-LGBT-rights position and intervene to make religious-freedom or free-speech arguments on behalf of the defendants in LGBT discrimination cases brought under state laws.

Which brings us to the final and overarching point of how to agitate for equality in Trump’s America:

Get to Your StatehousesWhile it may seem counter-intuitive to focus a national resistance on regional or state offices, the truth is that local elections matter, and local politicians are often easier to access than high-ranking administration officials. So yes, participate in the Women’s March on Washington if you feel called to, and phone-bank the hell out of every preposterous nominee Trump and the Republicans riding his coattails offer. But also participate in Lobby Days organized by your favorite local advocacy group, and make it a priority to meet your elected officials. If you feel comfortable doing so, introduce them to your family, and force them to look into the faces of the real people their decisions will impact. And when lawmakers try to pull a fast one, take a page from the good people of North Carolina and shout and yell and disrupt and sit-in until uniformed officers drag you away. And then go back again the next day.

It takes dedication, persistence, and a stubborn refusal to ever back down. It seems only fair that those of us feeling targeted by Trump and the GOP in general return the favor they offered to President Obama, and aim to make Trump a one-term president.

Congressional Republicans essentially wrote the playbook on how to be the most obstructionist, least productive legislative body in American history, so I say we borrow that book and use the tactics right-wingers perfected to defend the messy, complicated, frustrating glory of this country.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Trump is More Paranoid and Dangerous than Nixon

A piece in the New Republic takes a frightening look at the lust for revenge and paranoia that will sweep into the White House on January 20, 2017, and the danger that Donald Trump poses to anyone that his warped and narcissistic mind may deem and "enemy."  Given Trump's pettiness, there could be few limits on his efforts to seek revenge and punish those who see him for what he is and the danger that he poses to the nation.  Add to Trump's dangerous personality the surveillance and other  powers that will be at his disposal, and all of us have cause to be very afraid.  Here are article excerpts:

Donald Trump and Richard Nixon have at least one thing in common: They are the two most paranoid and vindictive men ever to win the presidency. Both came to power armed with enemies lists, vowing to seek revenge against those who stood in their way. Both roamed the mansions of power late at night, raving against every perceived slight. Both were caught on tape describing the ways they enjoyed bending others to their will.

But Nixon, unlike Trump, was an introspective man. In one particularly fascinating moment of self-reflection following his resignation, he described to a former aide the habits that had enabled him to rise to the top of Washington’s greasy pole. When you’re on your way, he explained, it pays to be crazy.

“In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances,” Nixon said. “It is then you understand, for the first time, that you have the advantage—because your competitors can’t risk what they have already.” That’s an insight that Trump put to good use during the Republican primaries, when he was willing to place high-stakes bets that his more experienced rivals were unwilling or unable to match.

But then you win, and your problems begin. “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top,” Nixon confessed. “You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it, because it is a part of you and you need it as much as an arm and a leg. You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice, because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”

The ways Richard Nixon chased that high are now a matter of voluminous historical record. None is more harrowing than his exploitation of the vast powers of his office to spy on those he perceived as threats to his power, and then seek to use the results of that surveillance to neutralize or destroy them.

The first phone tap on one of his own officials came in the fourth month of his presidency. That same year, federal agents snared a gay, closeted antiwar organizer named David Mixner in a “honey trap,” and threatened to release photographs of his assignation unless he ratted out his comrades. By the second year, an entire unit of the Internal Revenue Service was chartered in a locked, soundproof room to harass a blacklist of antiwar activists.

His enforcer, Chuck Colson, drew up “enemies lists” that included such fearsome figures as actress Carol Channing and Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton. The IRS was deployed to audit their taxes or take away the nonprofit status of their organizations. 

Donald Trump assembles enemies lists, too; his organs of cognition appear to be structured around the idea of revenge. There are Republicans who voted against him, like Senator Lindsey Graham. (“It’s so great our enemies are making themselves clear,” Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault exulted, “so that when we get to the White House, we know where we stand.”) There are media organizations he claims have covered him unfairly, like The Washington Post. . . . And it’s not hard to imagine that Trump’s list of targets will only grow longer as his power expands. Like Nixon, he has spent his entire life chasing the narcotic rush afforded by dominating others, the better to fill the void where a functioning soul ought to be.

But there are two key differences that set Trump apart from his predecessor in paranoia. First, his soul is sicker by miles than Nixon’s. And second, the surveillance apparatus he is about to inherit is far scarier than the one available to Nixon. . . . .  “Now we are about to hand over that entire apparatus to a paranoid, score-settling sociopath whose primary obsession seems to be with crushing his personal enemies.”

Today the government can monitor virtually every form of communication, including the contents of emails, phone calls, online searches, and a host of personal data.

It’s not hard to imagine the kind of damage Trump could do with the powers of the NSA at his disposal. “Let’s say you become part of the Trump opposition,” says Jon Stokes. “It probably won’t be long before Trump knows what kind of porn you like. Sure, that’s against the law—but the government has been breaking those laws for 20 years. We’ve just been doing it for noble, Jack Bauer reasons, not petty Donald Trump reasons.”

Consider, too, all the federal officials beyond the director of national intelligence who will serve at the pleasure of Trump. There’s the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, whom the president could illegally order to target enemies with tax audits, like Nixon did. The head of the Small Business Administration, which could cut off loans to Trump’s rivals. The entire Cabinet, which oversees billions of dollars in federal research grants and defense contracts and construction jobs. . . . And the head of military intelligence, who could use the Pentagon’s powers to spy on left-wing groups, as it did under Lyndon Johnson and to a vastly expanded degree under the paranoid auspices of Richard Nixon.

What will happen when President Trump orders some eyesore removed from his sight, only to discover the limits of presidential power? Revenge is a narcotic, and Trump of all people will be in need of a regular, ongoing fix. Ordering his people to abuse the surveillance state to harass and destroy his enemies will offer the quickest and most satisfying kick he can get. The tragedy, as James Madison could have told us, is that the good stuff is now lying around everywhere, just waiting for the next aspiring dictator to cop.

Be very, very afraid.

House Republicans Vote to Hobble Independent Ethics Office

So it begins.  Donald Trump. a/k/a Der Fuhrer has not even yet been sworn into office and the reign of corruption begins.  House Republicans, with no notice or debate, voted yesterday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office that oversees the conduct of Members of the House of Representatives and House congressional officials.  One can only assume the move was taken in the wake of Der Fuhrer's refusal to disengage himself from his business empire and not use the office of the presidency to further enrich himself.  Obviously, this does not bode well for the country and the typical American voter and signals that things will likely only get worse.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the disturbing development.  Here are story highlights:  

House Republicans, defying their top leaders, voted Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

The move to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics was not public until late Monday, when Representative Robert Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change with no advance public notice or debate.

In its place, a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review would be set up within the House Ethics Committee, which before the creation of the Office of Congressional Ethics had been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.

The full House is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the rules, which will last for two years, until the next congressional elections.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, with emboldened Republicans ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The move by Republicans would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

Mr. Goodlatte defended the action in a statement issued Monday evening, saying it would strengthen ethics oversight in the House while also giving lawmakers better protections against what some members have called overzealous efforts by the Office of Congressional Ethics.
 

Let's be clear.  Goodlatte is a liar and obviously id looking to enrich himself off of lobbyist bribes.  Now corruption is a GOP "family value."  The cesspool gets worse and worse.  

Trump: Putin's Willing Accomplice in the Hacking Attacks

David Frum is not wild eyed liberal.  Indeed, he is a hardcore traditional conservative - or at least what a conservative used to be prior to the rise of the Christofascists, white supremacists and, of course, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer within the GOP.  Moreover, but faced with the choice between Trump and Der Fuhrer, Frum has never been a friend to Hillary Clinton.  Yet, in a piece in The Atlantic, Frum hits on an important aspect of the Russian hacking effort to throw the 2016 presidential election to Trump: Trump's willing complicity in exacerbating the impact of the leaked information and blowing the disclosures far out of proportion. Equally, disconcerting was Trump's reference to information on several occasions before the contents of the leaks had been publizied. Did he know what was coming in advance?  The Kremlin has confirmed communications with Trump's campaign during the election.  Did Trump cooperate in the hacking efforts?  Trump is claiming ignorance and down playing the need for a bipartisan investigation.  Frum suggests it may be because such an investigation might expose the full extent of Trump's complicity and prior knowledge.  Here are article highlights:

“It’s all just an attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump.” That’s the argument you hear from Trump supporters each time new information comes to light about how hard Russian spy services worked to damage Hillary Clinton. You heard it again on Thursday.

The Trump supporters are 100 percent right: The information is delegitimizing. The president-elect of the United States reportedly owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service. It’s hard to imagine a crisis of presidential legitimacy more extreme than that. But that’s no argument against airing this information. It’s precisely why the information must be aired.

Vladimir Putin took a fearful risk. If the Electoral College had taken a slightly different bounce on November 8, Putin would now be facing an enraged President-elect Hillary Clinton. Putin had every reason to expect that he probably would end up facing a President Clinton. Yet he took the gamble anyway, apparently doing something none of his Soviet predecessors had ever dared to do: mount a clandestine espionage and disinformation campaign on behalf of one candidate for U.S. president, and against another.

The word “clandestine” is the key term here. In every election, foreign governments have their preferred candidates. It was no secret in 2004 that America’s French and German allies hoped George W. Bush would lose, or that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt the same way about President Obama in 2012. Those allies made their wishes known through the familiar and lawful method of grumbling to sympathetic American journalists about the awfulness of the incumbent administration. What they did not do was organize their spy agencies to break the law of the United States. But that is evidently what Russia did—and it seems to have worked.

Obama pledged today that before he leaves office, the American people will learn more fully how the Russians did it.

This will be important to know. But there is something else important to keep in mind.  The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives.  . . . We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material.

Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump.

Many questions remain about how the Russian spy services did what they did. That includes Putin’s motives for ordering the operation. But on issues from Crimea to Syria to NATO to the breakup of the European Union, Trump’s publicly expressed views align with Putin’s wishes.

Over Trump’s motives for collaborating so full-throatedly with Russian espionage, there hangs a greater and more disturbing mystery—a mystery that Trump seems in no hurry to dispel. And maybe he is wise to leave the mystery in place: as delegitimizing as it is, it’s very possible the truth would be even worse.    

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

The Coming Onslaught of Anti-LGBT Proposals in 2017

My Trump supporting "friends" continue to thing my sense of foreboding and doom is unfounded. That's easy to say when you are a heterosexual white Christian.  For those of us that do not fall in that category, there is much to fear, especially if one is a member of the LGBT community which is a favored target of the Christofascists ascendant in the Trump/Pence cabal (one mus remember that Pence himself is vitriolically anti-LGBT).  Here in Virginia the LGBT community is protected at the state level thanks to our Democrat governor, Terry McAuliffe, but with statewide elections in November what happens in 2018 will be frightening if the Republicans win the governor's mansion.  In short, it is difficult to feel much security in 2017 and beyond.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at some of the coming attacks on LGBT Americans.  Here are article highlights:

In 2016, state legislatures across the country proposed more anti-LGBT measures than they had in almost a decade, and activists anticipate more of the same in 2017. There was some good news last year: There was a dramatic jump in proposed pro-LGBT rights bills. And in North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory lost his reelection bid, and his defeat was seen as a victory for opponents of the LGBT discrimination legislation that he'd championed.

While the 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision was a high point in gay rights, there are a number of proposals for 2017 whose intent is to roll them back. During a recent press call, the ACLU predicted a crop of "religious exemption" bills in the near future, laws that allow businesses and service providers to use their religious beliefs as justification for refusing service to a member of the LGBT community. "A Trump administration will embolden some of the folks in state legislatures who already wish to move legislation that harms the LGBT community," Bowman says. "That piece is very concerning."

Lawmakers in a number of states have already pre-filed discriminatory bills for 2017. Here are some of them: 

Alabama: HB24 would allow adoption agencies and foster care facilities to refuse, on the grounds of religious objections, to place kids in certain homes. The bill would also allow them to refuse to refer children to other agencies.

Missouri: HB205 would let government and religious officials refuse to perform marriages because of religious objections. SB98 aims to make transgender kids in school use an individual bathroom instead of the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

Tennessee: SB1 would give mental health counselors the ability to refuse service to LGBT patients on religious grounds.

Texas: SB92 would standardize nondiscrimination laws across the state, effectively preventing localities from passing stronger protections. The ACLU also notes that Texas does not have any state-level nondiscrimination laws for LGBT citizens on the books.
The ACLU plans to keep an updated list of discriminatory bills on their website throughout the year.

Congress: In Congress, the First Amendment Defense Act, which allows refusal of service on a religious basis, and the Russell Amendment, which would allow federal contractors to do the same with hiring, are likely to be revived, this time with potentially greater chances for success.

Republican lawmakers, who control both houses of Congress and have President-elect Trump's assurance he'll sign the bill, expect FADA to pass, inviting "widespread, devastating discrimination against LGBT people," Jennifer Pizer of Lambda Legal Defense Fund told NBC. "This proposed new law violates both Equal Protection and the Establishment Clause by elevating one set of religious beliefs above others." . . . Other discriminatory riders could also be attached to must-pass bills, such as defense spending or budget proposals.

Supporters of LGBT rights will renew efforts to pass the Equality Act, which would prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity at the federal level. . . . With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, its passage is unlikely. 

[M]any of his [Trump's] Cabinet picks have been vocally anti-gay throughout their careers. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump's pick for attorney general, co-sponsored the State Marriage Defense Act in 2014, which would have allowed states to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, even after the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned by the Supreme Court. Tom Price, who was tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services, called the federal recommendations for protecting trans people issued to schools and health care providers an "absurd" overreach of power.

Add to this list the rabidly anti-LGBT Betsy DeVoes, a prominent funder of a who's who of anti-gay extremist groups, who will head the Department of Education and likely move to end LGBT protections and turn a blind eye towards bullying.   

Trump supporting "friends" claim that they knew nothing of the anti-LBGT agenda that will unfold, yet had they spent a few minutes looking at the 2016 GOP party platform, the details were in plain view.  Somehow, they expect me to excuse their laziness.  I can't and I will not.