Monday, February 27, 2017

Hate group spokesman - 'religious liberty' executive order is still coming

Editor's note - Moonlight's victory last night for 'Best Picture' at the Oscars was huge; so huge in fact that it's going to take a while for me to properly conceptualize how I feel about it. It was wild enough to finally see a movie which speaks to the experience of being a black gay man in America. Watching as said movie take a historical nod was just a bit more moving than I realized.

Blackwell
The lgbt community can't afford to let our guards down for even a minute during this Trump Administration. While he has yet to sign any anti-lgbt 'religious liberty' executive order, an official of his transition team, who is also a member of the anti-lgbt hate group the Family Research Council, told noted journalist Michelangelo Signorile that the executive order is coming:

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who has served as domestic policy chair of President Donald Trump’s transition team, told (Signorile) in an interview on SiriusXM Progress that the controversial “religious freedom” order that leaked to the press a few weeks ago is very much on the way, even though White House officials had played it down. 

According to Signorile, the worst is yet to come:

 . . . Blackwell, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council (deemed an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Policy Law Center), said in our interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend that the order is far from dead. He also confirmed that the former director of Family Research Council’s Center for Religious Liberty, Ken Klukowski, had “actually structured” the draft order as a legal advisor to Trump’s transition team. Klukowski, who is now a senior attorney at the Liberty First Institute and a Breitbart contributor, is one of the lawyers “in the process of redrafting it,” Blackwell said, hinting that the original order may have been perceived as being too vulnerable to a legal challenge.
“In the final analysis, what we want is an executive order that will meet the scrutiny of the judicial process,” he explained. “If there is no executive order, that will disappoint [social conservatives]. But a good executive order will not. So we’re still in the process.” Blackwell envisions the “anchor concept” of the order as one that will allow people with devoutly religious beliefs to turn away LGBTQ people in the course of business.
“I think small business owners who hold a religious belief that believes that traditional marriage is between one man and one woman should not have their religious liberty trampled upon,” he explained. “I would imagine that that will be, strongly and clearly, the anchor concept [of the order].” (In an interview with me at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Blackwell had explained that he doesn’t view LGBTQ people as a class of people who are discriminated against, but rather sees homosexuality as a “compulsion that can contained, repressed or changed.”) 

To recap - according to a member of the anti-lgbt hate group the Family Research Council, who is also working with the Trump Administration, a homophobic executive order will be forthcoming. And this order is being worked on by others connected to FRC to ensure that lgbts can't win in the courts should, or rather, when it is challenged.

Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like things are going to be "hopping" before the year is out.

And it's about time, too. I'm past ready to raise some hell.


1 comment:

Andrew Christopher said...

I'll be honest: I'd rather raise hell about something that's already happening than for us to backstep into something old raised up again. I'm so sick of even looking at these people who arrogantly assume their religious excuses for bigotry are somehow more important than my sense of safety and belonging in the world.

But I will. No way I'll be silent.