Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Muslims and Gays - GOP targets for the 2016 election

Thanks to Donald Trump, the 2016 presidential election is turning into a sort of open season on Muslims. However, the lgbt community shouldn't feel left out. We're not exactly left behind on the pecking scale of scapegoating. Think Progress has come out with an excellent article showing that while Trump has made attacks on Muslims into a main issue, other GOP candidates have extreme anti-gay positions. Allow me to give a few examples:

Rubio
Marco Rubio:

In an interview this weekend with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Marco Rubio outlined outlined extensive plans for enabling discrimination against LGBT people in the name of religious liberty. As president, Rubio said he would do the following:
  • Rescind President Obama’s executive order protecting the LGBT employees of federal contractors.
  • Only appoint Supreme Court Justices committed to undoing marriage equality and a woman’s right to an abortion.
  • Protect religious organizations that wish to refuse service to same-sex couples.
Rubio seemed to imply that employing and serving LGBT people were themselves sinful actions. “There are many government contractors and small companies who provide services to the government who are faith-based people, and they are being compelled to sin by government in their business conduct,” he said. “That is not something we should be supporting.”


Cruz
 Ted Cruz:

Ted Cruz recently sat down with National Organization for Marriage founder Robert George for an interview on EWTN, a Catholic television network. In one segment, Cruz agreed with George that the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision was “profoundly wrong,” “fundamentally illegitimate,” “lawless,” and “not based on the Constitution.”

Cruz then referenced Justice Anthony Kennedy’s recent comments that a public official that can not follow the decision, like Kim Davis, should resign. During his remarks, Kennedy alluded to the fact that very few judges resigned from the Nazi German government. Thus, Cruz claimed, he was comparing the Supreme Court to Nazis. “This isn’t me calling them the Nazis,” Cruz explained, “this is Justice Kennedy calling the court on which he serves, calling the opinion that he wrote — analogizing that to the Nazi decrees that we must obey. That is an arrogance, it is an elitism, it is being out of touch with our nation.

In another segment, Cruz fielded a question about accommodations for transgender students in public schools. He condemned such policies as “ridiculous” decisions made by “zealots.” “I don’t want my daughters taking showers with little boys; I don’t want them when they’re in junior high or high school. And it’s absurd. No parents do.”
 
And those two are seen as the front-runners behind Trump. The others - Huckabee and Carson - aren't exactly "prom nights" for the lgbt community.

In light of what we have gained this year - i.e. marriage equality - it would be cultural suicide for the lgbt community to sit this election out or not pay attention to the Islamophobic rhetoric coming out of the mouths of the GOP.

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