Monday, October 22, 2018

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.'" . . .

Trump Administration plan to erase the trans community is politically-driven bullshyte

Roger Severino, HHS official and one of the parties leading the Trump Administration's effort to erase the trans community.

Unless you are living in a cave, you already know about the Trump Administration's brazen attempt to erase the transgender community. Here is the breakdown in a way we should know and repeat:

Trump’s Religious Right Team Schemes to Legally Erase Trans Identity - PFAW's Right Wing Watch calls it right.

1. Who is behind it:

The push by the Department of Health and Human Services to impose a trans-denying definition of “sex” onto federal civil rights law “would essentially eradicate federal recognition” of an estimated 1.4 million transgender Americans, according to the Times story.

The effort is being led by Roger Severino, who has taken the anti-LGBT agenda of his former employer, the Heritage Foundation, into the Trump administration as director of the civil rights division at HHS. When he was named to that position, a dozen U.S. senators objected, citing Severino’s “long history of making bigoted statements toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and attacking women’s access to health care services and reproductive rights.”

2. The mindset of behind this proposal is politically-driven
One of Severino’s former colleagues at the Heritage Foundation, Ryan Anderson, is at the forefront of the Religious Right’s anti-trans crusade. Anderson’s latest book is “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.” Anderson argues that gender cannot be severed from biological sex, and that “taking our sexual embodiment seriously in public policy is not discriminatory.”

That language is strikingly similar to Anderson’s approach to sexual orientation, suggesting that if Religious Right activists in the Trump administration are successful in wiping out legal recognition based on gender identity, they may be willing to try the same with regard to sexual orientation.
Anderson is not a conservative willing to seek “compromise” in the form of religious exemptions to non-discrimination laws. He says that “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) laws” are “bad public policy” and argues against legal protection for LGBTQ people from discrimination