Family Research Council tries to quell firestorm caused by Trump's 'Erase Trans America' proposal

Trump has got the LGBTQ community galvanized against him and the Family Research Council is scared.

You can count the Family Research Council as another entity (i.e. group or person) angry about the Trump Administration's  "Erase Trans America" proposal. However, seeing that it is the Family Research Council, the anger is not at anyone in the Trump Administration, but the New York Times for breaking the story:

No one is "defining transgenders out of existence." What President Trump is doing is following the law -- which, after eight years of Barack Obama's overreach, is suddenly a shocking concept. Under the last administration, liberals were so used to the president twisting the rules to suit the Left's agenda that it's news when Donald Trump decides to operate within the plain text of law. As far as the New York Times is concerned, the most "drastic" thing any president could do is bring America back in line with legal statutes. And this non-story that's setting the far-Left's hair on fire is nothing more than that.

In Sunday's piece, a trio of reporters argues that the Trump administration is disenfranchising people by defining gender as it always has been: a "biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth." No one is quite sure how that's radical, since it's how the law has been understood both before and since 1964. Not a single president questioned it until Obama, who decided that he didn't care what the Civil Rights Act said. He was going to "reinterpret" the 54-year-old law on "sex" discrimination to mean "sexual orientation" and gender identity too.

That's how the Obama administration justified its gender-confused school bathroom and shower mandate. They argued that people who identify as transgender were somehow part of the broad umbrella of "sex" outlined in the law in 1964. But, as FRC and others argued, sexual orientation wasn't on the minds of legislators 54 years ago when it was trying to weed out prejudice -- and more importantly, it wasn't in the text of the law it passed! Even the courts, where liberals turn when the public isn't on board with its extremism, called it a bridge too far. A half-century ago, Judge Reed O'Connor ruled, "Congress did not understand 'sex' to include 'gender identity.'" . . .

Contrary to FRC's explanations, this newest attack on the transgender community by the Trump Administration would do damage. According to Zack Ford of ThinkProgress:

The Trump administration has already taken steps to roll back transgender protections in piecemeal ways. For example, the Department of Education rescinded its guidance protecting transgender students under Title IX and stopped hearing their discrimination complaints entirely, the Bureau of Prisons rescinded protections for transgender prisoners, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is working to undo transgender health care protections found in the Affordable Care Act, and the Department of Housing & Urban Development has delayed implementing homeless shelter protections for transgender people. The DOJ has already begun arguing that employment discrimination against transgender people should be legal, and President Trump himself dictated a ban on transgender people serving in the military, which the administration continues to fight for.

 The new memo suggests an attempt to codify this transphobia across the entire federal government. This would impact not only Title IX’s education protections, but Title VII’s employment protections, the health care protections under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, and every single law that protects against discrimination on the basis of sex. The reality is that if these protections do not apply to people according to their gender identity, they would not apply to transgender people at all.

Ford also  points out how this could short circuit the progress trans men and women have made via court cases they have won.

FRC attacking the New York Times for revealing the Trump Administration proposal merely demonstrates how much of an impact the reveal has made. Activists and celebrities blasted the policy online and in huge protests in New York and D.C. The ACLU has already threatened to sue when the proposal is made official. And finally members of the media are noticing how Trump lied to the LGBTQ community while running for president when he said he would fight for the community.

People are galvanized. People are scared. Most of all, people are pissed.

And the Family Research Council is scared. But not scared enough to develop a pushback narrative. Too bad it probably won't work to dampen the firestorm.