Hollywood wunderkind and vocal anti-Trump activist Joss Whedon offered up a lulu of a tweet a couple days ago, where he suggested that the reported kidnapping and murder of a number of gay men by authorities in Chechnya is a prelude of what will happen in America if people don’t unite and “#resist” Trump and, by extension, the GOP. While I understand the antipathy many have for the untethered orange id, I have long been puzzled by the assertion that Trump is anti-gay.
During the campaign and in the weeks after the election, many assertions were put forth that Trump’s agenda would work against LGBT interests. Among them was his plan to repeal ObamaCare. How, you might ask, does repealing ObamaCare work against LGBT interests? ObamaCare includes provisions prohibiting discrimination against gays in accessing health care. The connection is, therefore, a correlation-is-causation fallacy. No one who’s advocating the repeal of ObamaCare is doing so because this provision offends them. So, chuck that idea out the window.
Another source of concern was Trump’s pledge to undo all of Obama’s executive orders. Some of those EOs were about expanding LGBT protections, so activists were worried that those protections would go away. Still, as above, it’s hard to justify the conclusion that Trump’s pledge was based on being anti-gay, and the connection is correlative, not causative. Furthermore, Trump has strayed from the en-toto pledge, and is leaving some protections that Obama emplaced untouched.
Trump is also on record as opposing gay marriage. Guess what? So were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The latter two were never presumed to have plans to round up and execute gay people, at to the best of my knowledge. Trump’s position, that it be left up to the states, wasn’t exactly a declaration of war against the gays, and seems more political than ideological. His nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Court also raised some red flags in this regard, but again, I’d conclude that gay marriage wasn’t on the agenda when Trump made his pick. While some liberals and gay advocates fear that a conservative Court could overturn the landmark gay marriage ruling Obergefell v Hodges, I go back to the question of whether Trump nominated Gorsuch specifically to advance an anti-gay agenda, and find no evidence to affirm the idea.
I could go on to more details, but a calm assessment of the state of things supports the conclusion that LGBT issues, pro- or con-, aren’t much of a priority for Trump. He’s not, by any account, an aggressive gay-rights tub-thumper, but there’s no evidence that he wants to toss gays off buildings either. Furthermore, Trump’s a life-long New Yorker with a fashionista wife and fashionista ex-wives, so it’s hard to imagine where he’d have picked up anti-gay attitudes or homophobia.
Yes, there is some concern Vice President Pence’s possible connections to gay conversion therapy ideas and the presumption that Pence’s religious conservatism doesn’t mesh well with LGBT issue advocacy, but as before, I doubt that Trump chose Pence for the latter’s attitudes towards gays.
In sum, I don’t see evidence of anti-gay bias or an anti-gay agenda in Trump. He may not be pro-gay enough as far as activists and the Left are concerned, but that doesn’t make him a homophobe or gay-basher by any means.
So, why the hysteria? Why would someone like Joss Whedon think that Trump’s presidency will lead to the government rounding up and executing gays?
I suspect that what we’re seeing is a result of the Left’s identity politics presumptions. There are aggrieved groups, there are oppressor groups. There are those who stand with aggrieved groups, and there are those who deny the grievances. All aggrieved groups are amalgamated, and if you don’t stand with one, you’re presumed to have antipathy to all.
So, since Trump has spoken loudly against illegals (synonymous with illegal Mexicans) and against Muslim immigrants, he must be opposed to the grievances of all aggrieved groups. Guilt by association.
That’s about the only explanation I can parse. Apart from the usual “build straw men and hyperbolize about them” elements of partisan politics.
Will Trump be a champion of the LGBT community? I doubt it, mainly because “championing” nowadays is often synonymous with actively using the heavy hand of government to force an outcome. Trump promised to deregulate, and it’s evident (see above) that some pro-LGBT rules will get swept up in that deregulation. All things considered, I think Trump will (as he has) mostly limit himself to talking up his pro-LGBT attitudes, and make changes that qualify as “small,” in one direction or another. But, to think him anti-gay, especially to the degree of pursuing violence, is leftist fantasy and hysteria rooted in a more generalized hatred of the man.
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