The suspect, Anderson Lee Aldrich, is a known gun nut who was arrested a little over a year ago in a suburb of Colorado Springs for threatening to blow up his mother — “threatening to cause harm to her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition.” He does not appear to have been convicted of any crime in the incident, during which the police had to evacuate the neighborhood. That’s right. A man arrested in the summer of 2021 for menacing his mother with multiple weapons and a homemade bomb was allowed to continue to keep long guns to shoot down gay people with. It is nice to be white.

The Club Q massacre was the six hundredth mass shooting of 2022.

Club Q owner Nic Grzecka told The Colorado Springs Indy in 2020 that his establishment sought to emulate and compete with successful LGBTQ clubs that “were gay as hell. They had go-go dancers and drag queens and bartenders in jockstraps. We knew we had to be gay as hell (to survive).”

Sarah Kay Ellis of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said, according to The Denver Post, “You can draw a straight line from the false and vile rhetoric about LGBTQ people spread by extremists and amplified across social media, to the nearly 300 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced this year, to the dozens of attacks on our community like this one,”

The three hundred anti-gay pieces of proposed legislation and the rhetoric against gay people have largely come from Republican lawmakers, who therefore bear some of the blame for whipping up this kind of hate.

Examples:

1. Republicans in the Tennessee legislature have introduced bills to ban drag shows and gender-affirming health care for transgender teens. Ban drag shows? Now RuPaul is the equivalent of the Communist Manifesto for these loons? I think the first amendment may have something to say about that.

2. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t say Gay” law is intended to whip up anxiety among parents that public schools are turning their children gay by talking to them about the full range of sexual identities. There is no evidence that children’s sexual identities are affected by such information. The point of the law isn’t children, it is to imply to parents that Democrats are tinkering with the identity of their children and so to make them angry. The anger inevitably falls in part on gay teachers in the schools, who are thus having their basic human rights withdrawn. DeSantis’s tactic is particularly sinister in its potential for provoking anti-gay hatred, since straight parents are being encouraged to experience anxiety about their own children’s sexuality in the presence of even the mention of a gay person.

3. Republicans in Congress want to emulate DeSantis by passing a national “don’t say gay” bill.

4. Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh “Insurrectionist Fist Bump” Hawley and John Cornyn have signaled that they want to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell that found a right to marry for gay persons.

5. Tennessee and Wisconsin have proposed bills that would forbid towns and counties from protecting gay rights more extensively than does state law.

6. Kimberly Kindy at the Washington Post writes, “About 75 of the new bills call for bans or severe restrictions on classroom discussions, curriculum and library books that mention LGBTQ issues, mostly but not exclusively in primary grades.”

But DeSantis is pushing back at Disney on behalf of big capital, in a roundabout way. The entertainment corporations are problematic for the Republican Party, even though they fund GOP campaigns. Disney donated to DeSantis’s run for governor. This is because entertainment is wrought up with identity, and the Republican Party is now made up of identity warriors. As far back as the early 1990s, Dan Quayle ran against the Hollywood “cultural elite” and lambasted the sitcom character Murphy Brown, played by Candice Bergen, for a story line in which she decides to have a child as a single mother when her fictional husband, a political radical named Jake Lowenstein, refused to settle down into a domestic role. Quayle saw this fictional decision as a slam at male privilege.

The phrase “cultural elite” was an early 1990s code word for antisemitism. In this instance it referred to the husband-wife team of Diane English and Joel Shukovsky, the force behind “Murphy Brown.” Quayle was heavily implying that WASP, white Evangelical manhood was being eroded by Hollywood Jews who were weak and were surrendering to feminism.

So the white identity warriors are not new in the Republican Party. But their narrative has taken new twists and turns as substantial elements of the party have become entwined with the QAnon cult.

It is true that the purpose of the Republican Party is to represent the 33 million persons who constitute the richest 10% of Americans, who own 70% of the country’s wealth. The party is an even more fierce partisan of a smaller group, the top 1% — 3.3 million Americans who own $36.2 trillion of the nation’s wealth, more than the middle 60 percent of American households.

The basic problem for the top ten percent is that they don’t have the votes to win elections, and if they don’t win elections then they cannot continue to craft laws that aid in the wealth accumulation of the top 10% (and especially the top 1% or even 0.1%).

For instance, the super-wealthy really wanted the Republicans to cut their taxes in 2017, since that was the purpose for which they bankrolled the GOP into the majority. According to the Center for Public Integrity, at a 2017 confab of Republicans and their rich patrons hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, the wealthy voiced their frustration that the Republicans had not come through for them.

“One wealthy attendee, Texan Doug Deason, who oversees his family’s $1.5 billion fortune, was blunt. He declared that his “Dallas piggy bank” was closed for 2017 until Congress achieved both Obamacare repeal and tax reform. “All we were saying was that we were not going to support legislators anymore until they did what they promised to do when they were elected,” Deason told the Center.”

When you see analyses that the 2017 tax cut affected all social classes, be aware that you are being gaslit. A small tax benefit to middle class people can’t be compared to the huge windfall the law bestowed on the billionaire class. Just notionally– these are not real figures — if someone makes $70,000 a year and pays 24% instead of 26% that person saves $1,400 (though the person will also receive fewer government services). If someone pays taxes on $20,000,000 a year, a 2% decrease in taxes is $400,000. And the person can use that $400,000 to lobby congress to lower taxes on the wealthy even more. It is a perpetual motion machine.

But you have to have a majority in Congress to get this result, and nobody is going to vote for a platform of giving some rich person an extra half-million dollars a year and cutting everyone else’s government services, so that highways have potholes and airports are falling apart.

So how do you get 41% of the people to join in with the very wealthy and support their agenda?

In the old days, the Republicans attempted to put together a coalition of property-holders– small business-people and even homeowners, against the workers and the poor. The beauty of Communism for them in the 1950s was that you could just accuse Democrats and unions of being Communists, and the homeowners would vote for you in fear that the Bolsheviks might attach their property the way they did the mansion of Dr. Zhivago in the movie.

But then Russia became a white, Christian plutocracy, and it was hard to get a rise out of people on the Communism issue. Then al-Qaeda and Muslim terrorism were appealed to, but that pretext seems to have worn thin since so many Muslim Americans are physicians, businessmen and scientists and pillars of the community.

The answer the contemporary Republican Party has hit upon is to stir anxiety among people who think of themselves as white, straight and Christian. It is no longer enough to make them afraid for themselves or their property.

The Republican Party wants to make them afraid for their children, and especially for the identity of their children.

That is why elements of the party accused Hillary Clinton in 2016 of running a pedophilia ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. (which eventually got the pizza parlor shot up). That is why the Republican senators hinted around as heavily as they could that Ketanji Brown Jackson had given light sentences to pedophiles.

This tactic is so bizarre on the surface that the corporate news outlets have difficulty taking it seriously, so that they often don’t see clearly what is going on. As the wealth inequality in the US skyrockets, most voters have less and less in common with the top 1%, making the job of the GOP as political brokers for the latter ever harder. So Republicans are becoming ever more hysterical and phantasmagorical in the threats they try to conjure up.

Preventing teachers from telling white, straight, Christian children that their ancestors enslaved Black people, and preventing teachers from mentioning that some people are gay, are also ploys in this Child Identity McCarthyism. DeSantis is one of the ringleaders in these efforts, having been a longtime white supremacist who ran a racist Facebook group before conning Floridians into electing him.

Most of the corporate world doesn’t care about how the Republicans get into power, and even if they find the politicians’ antics distasteful, they just want the tax cuts and corporate welfare Congress can bestow on them.

But the entertainment industry is different. Its CEOs have to care about identity because they market to identities. And they cannot afford to have a lockstep policy of playing only to white straight Christians, since they would lose half or more of their profits. They want gays, atheists and agnostics, and people of color to consume their shows and movies.

Disney at first tried to pretend it made steel and to avoid coming out against DeSantis’s “Don’t say gay” law aimed at regimenting teachers. But the entertainment industry’s employees are diverse, and the employees let the corporate leaders know in no uncertain terms that this ostrich policy was unacceptable. Disney can’t afford the bad publicity of strikes and demonstrations by its own employees.

So Disney defied the Republican Politburo, and Chairman DeSantis responded by trying to punish the company by taking away its administrative autonomy. This step may backfire on DeSantis, since he seems to have taken on $1 billion in debt for infrastructure in the area of Disney World. Or rather, he has saddled Florida’s taxpayers with it.

The entire struggle, however, points to how a dangerous fascism has increasingly taken hold of the American Republican Party, forming an existential threat to our democracy.

In other words, only born-again Christians are allowed to express prejudice and hostility, while other Americans live by kinder standards.

Actually, around the world, there’s a clear pattern: Strong religion produces judgmental, bigoted attitudes. Fundamentalists are unforgiving, less accepting of outcasts. Puritans are quick to condemn.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump exuded racism and ethnic intolerance. He implied that America’s first black president was born in Kenya. He demanded a wall to keep out Hispanics. He tried to block Muslims from entering the United States. Trump also degraded women and boasted of grabbing their genitals. His slogan of “Make America great again” was perceived as “Make America white again.”

Surprisingly, Trump’s most ardent supporters were white evangelicals, who backed him by an astounding 81 percent at the polls. It seemed as if those fundamentalists eagerly embraced bigotry.

It’s an old story: Less-educated white churchgoers have a record of discrimination. In the 1950s, big-time evangelist Jerry Falwell preached against racial integration, saying it “will destroy our race eventually.” After integration arrived, he founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy for whites – a “seg academy” designed to evade association with blacks.

In the 1970s, tax-exemption was stripped from segregated religious schools – which impelled white evangelicals to become a belligerent political force, the “Christian right” attached to the Republican Party. Today, that segment is a strong bastion of intolerance.

Christianity Today, the foremost evangelical magazine, recently lamented:

“Every week, we are treated to another revelation about the alarming attitudes of white evangelical Christians.” It said kind-hearted people should “find President Trump’s closing the door to the world’s neediest refugees repulsive. But white evangelicals support Trump’s exclusionary policy by a whopping 76 percent…. White evangelical Christians, more than any other religious group, say illegal immigrants should be identified and summarily deported.”

The article concluded that too many white evangelicals “show little mercy for those who are not white Americans.”

College professor David Myers, who grew up in born-again churches, wrote:

“Despite my roots in evangelical Christianity, I no longer claim that identity. I don’t want to be associated with the prejudice and intolerance that the word ‘evangelical’ now, alas, so often connotes.”

A gathering of fundamentalists drafted a “Nashville Statement” declaring war on “homosexual immorality or transgenderism.” (Some social media comments branded it “un-American toilet paper written by hypocrites.”)

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote that, by embracing Trump, born-again believers are “associating evangelicalism with bigotry, selfishness and deception. They are playing a grubby political game for the highest of stakes: the reputation of their faith.”

However, I think the reputation of their faith has been rather obvious for a long time.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

KCCI: “LGBTQ group says new statehouse bill discriminates due to religious freedom”

More LGBTQ candidates ran for office in the United States in 2020 than ever before – at least 1,006. That’s a 41% increase over the 2018 midterms, according to the LGBTQ Victory Fund.

While an estimated 5% of the U.S. population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, just 0.17% of elected officials across all levels of the American government are LGBTQ.

Better political representation could help LGBTQ Americans maintain some of their hard-won rights, which have come under attack over the past four years. Since 2016, the Trump administration has weakened trans-inclusive protections in schools, attempted to remove LGBTQ protections in health care and proposed allowing homeless shelters to turn away transgender people.

Marriage equality, too, may be under threat. In early October, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito suggested that the 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal across the United States, should be overturned.

In short, candidates and LGBTQ rights were both on the ballot in the 2020 election, either explicitly or implicitly. While many questions remain undecided at press time, here’s the takeaway from four down-ballot races I’ve been following as a scholar of LGBTQ politics.

Delaware

Democrat Sarah McBride made history on Tuesday when she won a state Senate seat in Delaware. In doing so, she’ll become the United States’ highest-ranking transgender elected official and the first openly transgender person to serve in a state Senate anywhere in the nation. McBride defeated Republican Steve Washington.

Previously, Danica Roem, a Virginia Democrat who won a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017, was the highest-ranking transgender person in elected office. Roem was re-elected in 2019.

Other transgender women, including Taylor Smalls of Vermont and Stephanie Byers of Kansas, also won state-level races on Tuesday in notable victories.

Hawaii and South Dakota

At the start of this election cycle, only three U.S. states – Hawaii, South Dakota and Mississippi – had no openly LGBTQ elected officials at any level of government. This year, candidates in Hawaii and South Dakota hoped to get their states off that list.

Democrat Jared Nieuwenhuis of South Dakota was unable to win a seat for state House District 25 to become the state’s first openly LGBTQ elected official in the state Legislature.

However, in Hawaii, Adrian Tam – who upset a 14-year incumbent in the August Democratic primary for the state House of Representatives – defeated Republican Nicholas Ochs, making him Hawaii’s only openly LGBTQ elected official.

Georgia

One Georgia Senate race remained undecided on election night. The other – an unusual race called a “jungle primary” between Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and 20 other candidates from various parties – has drawn national attention from LGBTQ advocates.

A political newcomer, Loeffler was appointed to her seat by Gov. Brian Kemp in late 2019 following the retirement of longtime Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson. Neither Loeffler nor her top opponent in the jungle primary, Democratic contender the Rev. Raphael Warnock, received over 50% of the vote, so a runoff election will be held in the coming weeks.

This runoff will be significant for the LGBTQ community because of Loeffler’s recent sponsorship of a Senate bill to ban transgender girls from playing school sports.

Loeffler’s proposed legislation is similar to Idaho’s new “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” – a law that could require girls who excel in athletics to “prove their gender” through a genital exam, DNA test or testosterone test. LGBTQ rights groups fear Loeffler’s bill would allow schools across the country to conduct genital examinations of student athletes who are presumed to be transgender.

Warnock, a pastor at Georgia’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, has made a strong public commitment to LGBTQ rights and condemned Loeffler’s legislation, saying in an interview with the LGBTQ outlet Project Q that “no one is free until we are all free.”

In the same interview, Warnock expressed his support for the Equality Act, proposed legislation that would add LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections into federal law.

[Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get expert takes on today’s news, every day.]

Historic victories and challenges ahead

LGBTQ Americans vote heavily Democratic. In 2008, John McCain won 27% of the LGBTQ vote while running for president against Barack Obama. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 22% of the LGBTQ vote. And in 2016, nationwide exit poll data of LGBTQ voters shows that Donald Trump received roughly 14% of the LGBTQ vote.

Harvey Milk, the late San Francisco city councilman, is often incorrectly cited as the first openly LGBTQ elected official. That pioneer was actually Kathy Kozachenko, who at age 21 won a seat on the Ann Arbor City Council in Michigan in 1974.

Nearly 50 years later, LGBTQ candidates have made historic strides in political representation. In 2017, there were under 450 openly LGBTQ elected officials in the entire U.S. Over 150 LGBTQ candidates won elections at the federal, state and local levels in the 2018 midterm elections. Another “rainbow wave” came in 2019, bringing the total number of openly LGBTQ American elected officials to just under 700.

Social acceptance of LGBTQ people is growing too, with over 70% of Americans saying transgender people should be protected from discrimination, according to polling by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, and a similar percentage supporting marriage equality. That has translated into ever more openly LGBTQ candidates running for office – and winning.

Timothy R. Bussey, Associate Director for the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Kenyon College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Roll Call: “Mondaire Jones to become one of the first openly gay, Black members of Congress”

If the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is replaced this year, the Supreme Court will become something the country has not seen since the justices became a dominant force in American cultural life after World War II: a decidedly conservative court.

A court with a 6-3 conservative majority would be a dramatic shift from the court of recent years, which was more closely divided, with Ginsburg as the leader of the liberal wing of four justices and Chief Justice John Roberts as the frequent swing vote.

As a scholar of the court and the politics of belief, I see three things likely to change in an era of a conservative majority: The court will accept a broader range of controversial cases for consideration; the court’s interpretation of constitutional rights will shift; and the future of rights in the era of a conservative court may be in the hands of local democracy rather than the Supreme Court.

Embed from Getty Images
File: Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court smile during their formal group photograph in the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, June 1, 2017. Seated left to right; Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and Associate Justice Stephen Breyer. Standing left to right; Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr., Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

A broader docket

The court takes only cases the justices choose to hear. Five votes on the nine-member court make a majority, but four is the number required to take a case.

If Roberts does not want to accept a controversial case, it now requires all four of the conservatives – Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas – to accept the case and risk the outcome.

If they are uncertain how Roberts will rule – as many people are – then the conservatives may be not be willing to grant a hearing.

With six conservatives on the court, that would change. More certain of the outcome, the court would likely take up a broader range of divisive cases. These include many gun regulations that have been challenged as a violation of the Second Amendment, and the brewing conflicts between gay rights and religious rights that the court has so far sidestepped. They also include new abortion regulations that states will implement in anticipation of legal challenges and a favorable hearing at the court.

The three liberal justices would no longer be able to insist that a case be heard without participation from at least one of the six conservatives, effectively limiting many controversies from consideration at the high court.

A rights reformation

The rise of a 6-3 conservative court would also mean the end of the expansion of rights the court has overseen during the past half-century.

Conservatives believe constitutional rights such as freedom of religion and speech, bearing arms, and limits on police searches are immutable. But they question the expansive claims of rights that have emerged over time, such as privacy rights and reproductive liberty. These also include LGBTQ rights, voting rights, health care rights, and any other rights not specifically protected in the text of the Constitution.

The court has grounded several expanded rights, especially the right to privacy, in the 14th Amendment’s due process clause: “…nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This sounds like a matter of procedure: The government has to apply the same laws to everyone without arbitrary actions. From the conservative perspective, courts have expanded the meaning of “due process” and “liberty” far beyond their legitimate borders, taking decision-making away from democratic majorities.

Consequently, LGBTQ rights will not expand further. The line of decisions that made Justice Anthony Kennedy famous for his support of gay rights, culminating in marriage equality in 2015, will advance no further.

Cases that seek to outlaw capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” will also cease to be successful. In 2019 the court ruled that excessive pain caused by a rare medical condition was not grounds for halting a death sentence. That execution went forward, and further claims against the constitutionality of the death penalty will not.

Challenges to voting restrictions will likely also fail. This was previewed in the 5-4 decision in 2018 allowing Ohio to purge voting rolls of infrequent voters. The Bill of Rights does not protect voting as a clear right, leaving voting regulations to state legislatures. The conservative court will likely allow a broader range of restrictive election regulations, including barring felons from voting. It may also limit the census enumeration to citizens, effectively reducing the congressional power of states that have large noncitizen immigrant populations.

Birthright citizenship, which many believe is protected by the 14th Amendment, will likely not be formally recognized by the court. The court has never ruled that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen. The closest it came was an 1898 ruling recognizing the citizenship of children of legal residents, but the court has been silent on the divisive question of children born of unauthorized residents.

The conservative understanding of the 14th Amendment is that it had no intention of granting birthright citizenship to those who are in the country without legal authorization.

Noncitizens may also find themselves with fewer rights: Many conservatives argue that the 14th Amendment requires state governments to abide by the Bill of Rights only when dealing with U.S. citizens.

In any case, individual rights will likely be less important than the government’s efforts to protect national security – whether fighting terrorism, conducting surveillance or dealing with emergencies. Conservatives argue that the public need for security often trumps private claims of rights. This was previewed in Trump v. Hawaii in 2018, when the court upheld the travel ban imposed against several Muslim countries.

Not all rights will be restricted. Those protected by the original Bill of Rights will gain greater protections under a conservative court. Most notably this includes gun rights under the Second Amendment, and religious rights under the First Amendment.

Until recently, the court had viewed religious rights primarily through the establishment clause’s limits on government endorsement of religion. But in the past decade, that has shifted in favor of the free exercise clause’s ban on interference with the practice of religion.

The court has upheld claims to religious rights in education and religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws. That trend will continue.

A return to local democracy

Perhaps the most important ramification of a 6-3 conservative court is that it will return many policies to local control.

For example, overturning Roe v. Wade – which is likely but not certain under a 6-3 court – would leave the legality of abortion up to each state.

This will make state-level elected officials the guardians of individual liberties, shifting power from courts to elections. How citizens and their elected officials respond to this new emphasis is perhaps the most important thing that will determine the influence of a conservative court.

Morgan Marietta, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Wilkinson’s grounds for not serving the White House spokesperson amounted to personal indecency. It is important to underline that this is what social scientists call an “achieved” status. The grounds had to do with Sanders’ own record of behavior and character, not with anything arbitrary about her.

In contrast, to achieved status, you have ascribed status. The latter is determined by things people think about your inherited characteristics. Being Black or Latino is an ascribed status. Or your family religion as a Catholic or Jew would be in this category of ascribed. It has to do not with your personal standards of character but with what prejudices people might have toward a whole group, of which you are part by virtue typically of inheritance. Even if you converted to Catholicism, e.g., you are not responsible for what all Catholics might have done or for what fanatic Protestants think about Catholicism.

It is wrong to shun people because of their ascribed status. It isn’t wrong to refuse to associate people because of their achieved status.

Sanders achieved her status as pariah in many quarters by lying assiduously on television for a living– by saying things she knew were wrong and/or untrue.

In contrast, Sanders is an advocate for allowing restaurateurs to discriminate on truly objectionable grounds, of ascribed status.

Last December, this report about her appeared in The Advocate:

“President Trump’s press secretary said her boss would have no problem with businesses hanging antigay signs that explicitly state they don’t serve LGBT customers. Hours after oral arguments concluded in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case — where a Colorado baker argued to the Supreme Court that his religion allows him to refuse service to gay people — press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was confronted on legalized discrimination during today’s White House press briefing.”

So she thinks businesses are allowed not only to refuse to serve gay, Lesbia, bi- and Trans customers, but are actually allowed to libel and denigrate them in print outside their establishments! (By the way, the Supreme Court decision did not actually allow this; it only concluded that the backer had not gotten a fair trial.)

She also defended Trump’s decision to ban transgendered people from serving in the US military, lying that it was a military rather than a political decision (no military commanders asked for it and some actively resisted it).

When Trump complained about Sanctuary cities having a “ridiculous” “crime-infested and breeding concept,” Sanders was unfazed, telling a reporter whether the term “breeding” wasn’t a racist dog whistle: “Certainly I think it could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But the president is talking about a growing problem.”

Or there is her insistence that the national epidemic of police shootings of unarmed, innocent Black people in the US is “a local matter.”

Nobody excluded Sanders Huckabee from anything because she was born into a racist and Islamophobic family, or because she is a Christian, or because she is white, or because she is hetero. She wasn’t served because she has chosen to lie for a living and to use one of the nation’s most powerful platforms to put down beleaguered minorities.

Featured Photo: AFP/File / NICHOLAS KAMM. White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders confirmed she was asked to leave The Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.

License for Actions Harmful to Women, LGBT People

(Washington, DC) – An executive order issued by President Donald Trump on May 4, 2017, opens the way to overriding regulations that protect women’s health, Human Rights Watch said today. While media attention has largely focused on the order’s efforts to roll back limits on political speech by religious leaders, its other and less sensational provisions could harm the rights of millions of women.

President Trump described the executive order on promoting free speech and religious liberty as an effort “to defend the freedom of religion and speech in America.” Its signing was timed to coincide with the National Day of Prayer. But the order also invites agencies to issue regulations that would allow the “conscience-based objections” of employers and insurers to override regulations that protect women’s health.

“It’s shameful to target life-saving women’s health services and call it an act of ‘conscience,’” said Amanda Klasing, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “This order will take away many women’s access to affordable family planning options.”

“It’s shameful to target life-saving women’s health services and call it an act of ‘conscience.’ This order will take away many women’s access to affordable family planning options.”

– Amanda Klasing

Senior women’s rights researcher

The Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty invites the secretaries of the treasury, labor, and health and human services departments to consider issuing amended regulations to address conscience-based objections to the preventive-care mandate as it pertains to women – and women only.

The mandate was introduced as part of the Affordable Care Act. It states that: “A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall, at a minimum provide coverage for and shall not impose any cost sharing requirements for…with respect to women, such additional preventive care and screenings not described in paragraph (1).”

Preventive care and screenings under this provision currently include breast cancer screening for average-risk women; breastfeeding services and supplies; contraception; screening for cervical cancer, gestational diabetes, HIV, and interpersonal and domestic violence; counseling for sexually transmitted infections; and visits to health facilities for preventive care, known as well women visits. Religious employers are already exempted from the contraceptive mandate while religious non-profits and certain closely held corporations have also been extended accommodations to address religious objections to contraception. Yet, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price quickly responded to the order by welcoming the opportunity to re-examine the contraception mandate, promising swift action.

The order also instructs the attorney general to issue guidance to all agencies interpreting religious liberty protections in federal law. This vague provision seems to invite new interpretations of existing law that recognize new religious exemptions, which is deeply alarming given that both President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have signaled support in public statements for broad religious exemptions aimed at facilitating discrimination.

As the governor of Indiana, Vice President Pence signed a religious exemption law that drew widespread criticism from the LGBT community. On the campaign trail, President Trump repeatedly indicated he would sign the First Amendment Defense Act, a bill that would prohibit the federal government from taking action against those who discriminate or refuse service based on their opposition to same-sex marriage or sex outside of marriage. In South Dakota and Alabama, state governments have recently enacted religious exemptions that facilitate discrimination against LGBT people in adoption and foster care.

“This order attacks the rights of women using religion as a pretext,” Klasing said. “Even as the House guts health care, the President struck a real and immediate blow with this order, giving free reign to restrict the contraceptive mandate that benefits millions of women in the US.”

Via Human Rights Watch

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Al Jazeera English: “Trump’s new executive order relaxes rules on religious advocacy”

In an interview with Brazilian TV, the ex-wife of Omar Mateen claimed the U.S. agency told her to keep quiet about his homosexuality.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation told the former wife of the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, Sitora Yusufiy, not to speak of his homosexuality or the fact that she, his family and others believed he was gay, Yusufiy’s current fiance, Marco Dias, told a Brazilian TV channel in an interview.

Dias told the Brazilian television station SBT Brazil Tuesday that Yusufiy believed Mateen was gay and that his father called him gay several times in front of her. However, “the FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media.”

Since the attack, Mateen has been dubbed an “Islamic terrorist” by politicians, senior officials and commentators in the U.S. following reports he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

However, the idea that he could have been a closet-homosexual indicates that the Orlando shooting might have been a deeply felt and personal act of hate.

The FBI and law enforcement in the United States have so far been pursuing the “Islamist terrorism” angle and their alleged demand from Mateen’s ex-wife to keep mum about his homosexuality suggests they want to downplay the personal and self-hating nature of the attack in favor of the Islamic terrorism-related one.

Since his attack on the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, the developing narrative surrounding Mateen’s life is that of a troubled human being who had a history of domestic violence, a struggle with his sexual orientation, as well as an inclination toward a radical version of Islam.

However, in addition to recently pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group, Mateen had previously shown support for both al-Qaida and Hezbollah, who have radically different interpretations of Islam and are in fact bitter enemies.

This suggests Mateen had an extremely shallow and confused understanding of Islam as he failed to comprehend the social and political differences between the diferent groups. Hezbollah are currently fighting against the Islamic State and other radical Sunni groups in Syria.

Furthermore, Yusufiy has told the media that her ex-husband started to emotionally and physically abuse her just months into their marriage. She said he exploded in anger and often beat her while also keeping her hostage, which led her family to “literally rescue” her from the abusive relationship and Mateen’s mental instability.

To add to this a former male classmate of Mateen said he had been asked out romantically by the mass shooter, who was reported to be a regular at the Pulse nightclub, having visited it more than a dozen times over the years.

Reports also suggest the attacker used several gay dating apps and communicated with several users. Kevin West, a regular at Pulse, told the Los Angeles Times he had exchanged messages with Mateen on an app.

And now, it seems the overwhelming reports and testimonies pointing to Mateen’s personal motives are forcing the FBI to pursue a different angle.

On Wednesday gay dating apps Jack’d and Grindr said they had been contacted by the FBI as part of the Orlando shooting investigation. They also said they could not provide information on whether Mateen had profiles on those sites as such details are now part of a classified investigation.

A spokesman for dating app Grindr also indicated they have been contacted by authorities. In response to an inquiry from BuzzFeed News, the company announced: “We will continue to cooperate with the authorities and do not comment on ongoing investigations.”

Similar attacks by troubled white men in the U.S. against minorities are rarely referred to as terror attacks by either law enforcement agencies or the media, which points to a troubling trend that links the label terror to non-white Muslim attackers only.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

CNN: “Orlando Mateen was spotted in gay nightclub, on apps”

“Three LGBTQ Muslims offer their thoughts on the Orlando shooting and dismiss right-wing attempts to pay lip service to their cause.”

AJ+: “Gay And Queer Muslims Dismiss GOP Attempts To Woo Them After #Orlando”