Trampling Civil Rights
By: Terry Schwadron
Tags: Civil Rights, Trump, Values, Choices, LGBTQ

Terry H. Schwadron

June 10, 2019

For transgender people and many gays, next year’s election may primarily be about civil rights.

Without doubt, the Trump administration has become a steamroller squashing individual rights for transgender people in particular, but also more generally against expanded rights for all LBGT individuals. Generally speaking, the 20-plus Democratic candidates are more sympathetic.

The emotion-laden debate over the government’s place in individual decision-making has been brought to the fore again by the recent abortion laws, but from a civil rights view, the impact is much broader.

In the Trump zero-sum gain, apparently it is more importantto be seen reaching out to Christian evangelicals than to gays and communities of Other. That has come to mean an agenda that is heavy both with symbolic support and actual legal changes that favor the evangelical foreign and domestic agendas.

In the foreign policy sphere, evangelical support for Israel as a home for Judeo-Christian religious history as well as modern-day, anti-Muslim democracy has led Trump administration thinking to recognize Jerusalem as the official capital, to support Israeli expansion of settlements in the occupied areas and vocal promotion of the Netanyahu government. The evangelical agenda is an important source of support for a southern border Wall, even in the face of policies to separate migrant families.

On the domestic side, the friendship of the Trump administration for anti-abortion forces, for conservative judges, and for decisions that favor the rights of Christians who stand against gay marriage, for example, over the now-legal right for same-sex marriage and employment rights.

Among some of the examples recently gathered by the news agency Axios:

· The administration is moving to make it easier for federally funded adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples.

· Trump Rolled back an Obama-era order allowing transgender people to openly serve in the U.S. military.

· The administration has proposed rolling back protections for transgender people established under the Affordable Care Act.

· The government argued to the Supreme Court last year that federal law doesn’t protect transgender people from workplace discrimination.

· The White House has vowed to make it easier for religious health care workers to object to providing care and procedures that conflict with their religious or moral beliefs, potentially putting gay and transgender patients at risk.

· The Housing and Urban Development Department would weaken protections for homeless transgender people, including allowing HUD-funded shelters to deny them access or force transgender women to share quarters and bathrooms with men.

· The Department of Education has removed Title IX protections for transgender youth ensuring they had access to bathrooms and facilities of their choice.

· The Justice Department has changed an Obama-era policy allowing prisoners to be housed based on their gender identity.

As a pattern,Trump is steadily rolling back Obama-era nondiscrimination policies across the entire federal government — including health care, housing and the military — that had sought to expand civil rights.

The discussion about limiting adoption agencies from working with same sex couples comes out of complaints from religious organizations that doing so violates belief systems, much like the recent court battles over services by bakers and others citing religious beliefs to refuse services to same-sex couples.

The White House is weighing either rescinding the rules altogether next month or adding an explicit exemption for religious organizations, with the debate focused not on rights, but on what approach would best withstand a court challenge.

The Department of Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Civil Rights also wants to eliminate an Obama-era policy that says doctors can’t discriminate against transgender patients, a policy already frozen by a federal judge.

The point is, it’s not just abortion. Rather there is a wide swath of services that evangelicals want a friendly White House to help eliminate that would help support transgender and LBGT folks.

Just why one group’s rights necessarily must be seen as stomping on another’s is a good debate,

But we’re not having that debate.

We’re simply making America evangelical.

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