Human Rights Not Just For Conservative Christians
By: James Finn
Tags: Human Rights, Religion, Equality, Politics, LGBTQ

Trump wages war on the Beijing Declaration of women’s rights

According to the groundbreaking 1995 Beijing Declaration, a woman’s right to decide if and when she has children is an “indivisible, universal and inalienable human right.” The US helped lead the world toward that recognition, but the Trump administration is spearheading a global fight to dilute women’s self determination.

“Women don’t care about contraception,” said Nikki Haley, Trump’s first UN ambassador, in a burst of Orwellian doublespeak. “We don’t want government to mandate when we have to have it and when we don’t.” Under her leadership, the US stopped contributing to the UN Population Fund, the world’s largest supplier of contraceptives. Also under Haley, the US named Valerie Huber to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Huber is a long-time, vocal proponent of restricting women’s access to contraception, citing personal religious justification.

In May 2017, Trump placed anti-abortion activist Teresa Manning in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services’ family-planning programs. Manning opposes the use of birth control on religious grounds and told NPR (falsely) that “contraception doesn’t work.”

According to Amnesty International, the Trump administration’s global “gag rule” policy has significantly reduced contraception availability for poor women abroad.

A proposed domestic gag rule, currently working its way through federal courts, would choke off most public funding for contraction in the US, including in 103 counties that would lose all publicly funded contraceptive services.

Trump lieutenants promote racist and anti-Muslim ideology

Secretary Gilmour told the Associated Press that he “never thought that we would start hearing the terms ‘concentration camps’ again. And yet, in two countries of the world there’s a real question.”

He appeared to be referring to China, where some 1 million members of the Muslim Uighur minority are being held in internment camps, and to detention centers on the US southern border where Central American migrants have been held in notoriously inhumane conditions, often forcibly separated from spouses and children as they wait to apply for legal asylum.

The administration has slashed legal caps for refugee admission and made rules that limit who can can apply for asylum, virtually guaranteeing that almost all new applications will be denied. New revelations point to senior Trump officials acting out of of racism, white nationalism, and anti-Muslim ideology.

Trump administration wages war on LGBTQ rights

At home and abroad, Trump’s lieutenants are systematically dismantling legal protections for members of gender and sexual minorities. Pushing rules and legal rationale that privileges conservative Christianity, the administration is attempting to erase LGBTQ rights as human rights.

Jim Crow’s spirit is back in play as those same arguments ignite racism and anti-semitism. From the the Department of Health and Human Services, to Housing and Urban Development, to the DOJ and State Department, Trump’s lieutenants have pushed rules to allow LGBTQ people to be discriminated against.Those same rules have enabled taxpayer-funded private agencies to legally deny services to Jews, Catholics, and atheists. It’s already happening.

Trump’s senior lieutenants are Christian extremists

What explains this American march away from progress in human rights? The Trump administration’s most senior officials hold restrictive, exclusionary views of human rights, shaped by conservative Christian beliefs. According to many observers, the Trump administration is working to privilege right-wing Christian nationalists and to establish or maintain the US as a conservative Christian nation where human rights are defined by religious creeds.

The administration is filled with conservative Christians ideologues like Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Many of these officials have attended weekly Bible studies led by avowed “Christian nationalist” pastor Ralph Drollinger, who besides being a sexist and a racist who supports separating immigrant children from their parents, holds notoriously anti-LGBT beliefs.

Attorney General William Barr thinks America is going to hell

According to New York Times editorialists Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” and Caroline Fredrickson, president emerita of the American Constitution Society, Attorney General William Barr believes America is going to hell, and he bases most major policy decisions on that and other extremist views.

They point to Barr’s infamous speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School in which he blamed “secularists” for “moral chaos” and “immense suffering, wreckage and misery.”

They demonstrate that Barr seeks out legal cases in which he can elevate Christian institutions to positions of privilege not enjoyed by secular or non-Christian religious organizations. He endorses the “religious liberty” rhetoric of the Christian nationalist movement. He advances the agendas of religious authoritarians who wish “to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.”

Barr has a long history of religious extremism

In 1995, he complained that “we live in an increasingly militant, secular age,” and fretted that the law might force religiously unwilling landlords to rent to unmarried couples. He implied that universities treating “homosexual activist groups like any other student group” was an intolerable breach of religious liberty, ignoring the liberty interests of the students.

Barr has made clear that he believes a strict interpretation of Christian dogma will mitigate against what he sees as “the wreckage of the family,” “record levels of depression and mental illness,” “drug addiction” and “senseless violence.”

Stewart and Fredrickson write that Barr’s conservative constitutional interpretation is merely “window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism” that seeks to elevate Trump to the equivalent a “Christian monarch.”

Mike Pompeo leads a different religious charge to erase human rights

Besides a dismal record on women’s right, Mike Pompeo’s State Department is notorious for rejecting the human rights of LGBTQ people. He’s working to erase human rights recognition in both arenas.

Pompeo launched an advisory panel last summer to reevaluate human rights in the context of “Natural Law,” a religious belief system associated with Roman Catholicism and evangelical Christianity that denies the legitimacy of women’s reproductive rights and of LGBTQ rights. Nearly all panel members are religious extremists, including the chair, Mary Ann Glendon, who is a staunch, religious opponent of LGBT civil equality. Peter Berkowitz, another panelist, has argued against decriminalizing private same-sex sexual activity between consenting adults.

Despite recent administration lip service, in the middle of 2018, Pompeo’s State Department stopped pressuring African nations to repeal their anti-LGBTQ criminal laws. One official justified the decision by stating the US doesn’t want to “discourage Christian values in other democratic countries.”

According to the New York Times, the State Department recalled career diplomat Daniel L. Foote, ambassador to Zambia, in December after he criticized the Zambian government for sending a gay couple to prison for 15 years. The State Department gave in to Zambia’s demands rather than pressuring the African nation to stop human rights abuses that Foote describes as “horrifying.”

Also in 2018, the State Department stopped granting visas to the same-sex partners of UN and international NGO staffers. Staffers who live in countries where same-sex marriage is illegal may no longer bring their same-sex partners to the US.

The State Department routinely refuses to acknowledge the citizenship of babies born overseas to same-sex, mixed-citizen couples. Gay parents have to go to court to fight for passports for their children, and even though multiple courts have ordered the State Department to comply, department lawyers are still appealing and still denying passports.

Human rights must exist outside sectarian religious frameworks

The Trump administration is empowering conservative Christians who demand to discriminate against minorities in the name of “Religious Liberty.” They deny equality and self determination to women and LGBTQ people while denying human rights to people of color legally seeking asylum from abuse and oppression.

In the name of religious freedom, Trump’s senior lieutenants are fanning the flames of racism and white Christian nationalism. Conservative Christian extremists are pursuing exclusionary, sectarian agendas that directly contradict the founding principles of the United States while they wreak havoc with decades of human rights progress.

Religion must not serve as a rationale for hurting members of minorities and denying basic rights. Christianity ought to be a force for good in the United States. It’s time to turn Trump out on his heels and return to a quest for human decency and equality in our republic.

Human rights are for everyone, not just conservative Christians.