Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
For the second year in a row, the White House has refused to issue a proclamation recognizing the month of June as “Pride Month,” not because the president has an animus toward the LGBT community, but because he is looking out for the rights of all Americans.
According to LifeSiteNews, President Donald J. Trump has chosen not to officially recognize June as “Pride Month.” Even though the president promised on the campaign trail that he would do everything in his power to “protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of the hateful, foreign ideology . . .” he has not shown the same enthusiasm for the LGBTQ agenda as his predecessor, Barack Obama, who went so far as to have the White House lit in rainbow colors.
LGBTQ activists are expressing their displeasure with the president’s continued silence on the issue. The Human Rights Campaign sent out a tweet on June 1 in which they noted the absence of a Pride Month proclamation and asked, “Why are Trump and Pence so insistent on erasing us?”
As LifeSite’s Doug Mainwaring writes, “Through their criticism of the White House’s inattention to their preferred agenda, LGBT activists appear incapable of drawing a distinction between the robust protection of human rights and disagreement on policy issues geared toward a small cohort of citizens. They seem to mistakenly perceive all their policy pursuits as human rights issues, and so they interpret rejection of their agenda as anti-gay and discriminatory.”
The reality is that Trump’s administration is not anti-gay, it’s merely intent on leveling the playing field and putting a stop to the rampant bullying that has made life so difficult for people who do not embrace the LGBTQ agenda.
As Mainwaring states, “President Trump fights for the rights that all human beings share in common, while declining to promote the agenda items of LGBTQ activists and their progressive allies.”
For example, during his first year in office, Trump overturned an Obama-era rule, known as the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Order, that required businesses doing contract work for the government to prove that they were in compliance with federal rules regarding the hiring, firing, and promotion of LGBT employees.
This rule, which forbids discrimination in the workplace, was amended in 2014 by Barack Obama who added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of protected classes. Because there was no exemption for religious employers, the fallout from the rule put religious contractors such as Catholic Charities and other faith-based groups at a disadvantage because it required them to violate their religious beliefs in order to win contracts.
As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) said at the time, “In the name of forbidding discrimination, this order implements discrimination. With the stroke of a pen, it lends the economic power of the federal government to a deeply flawed understanding of human sexuality, to which faithful Catholics and many other people of faith will not assent. As a result, the order will exclude federal contractors precisely on the basis of their religious beliefs.”
They also protested the inclusion of gender identity rights, which was predicated “on the false idea that ‘gender’ is nothing more than a social construct or psychological reality that can be chosen at variance from one’s biological sex.” Enforcing this aspect of the rule would not only cost religious contracts much needed government funding, it would also “jeopardize the privacy and associational rights of both federal contractor employees and federal employees. For example, a biological male employee may be allowed to use the women’s restroom or locker room provided by the employer because the male employee identifies as a female,” the USCCB stated.
Trump’s action overturned this unjust Order, as well as the Obama-era guidelines recommended by the Department of Education that dealt with preferred pronoun usage and access to preferred restrooms and locker rooms for transgender students. The Trump Administration’s Education Department recently told a news agency that it will no longer take action on complaints filed by transgender students who allege discrimination because they were being denied the use of a bathroom that did not correspond with their biological gender.
Even though the Trump Administration chose not to recognize Pride Month, U.S. agencies are free to celebrate their LGBT workers this month. Although Cabinet leaders were often speakers at these events during the Obama Administration, Trump’s Cabinet will not be attending any of these celebrations.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did issue a statement in which he said the U.S. joins people around the world who are recognizing June as LGBT Pride Month. He reaffirmed our country’s commitment “to protecting and defending the humans rights of all, including LBGTI persons.”
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