The Trump administration signaled through three separate actions that it would use the powers of the federal government to roll back civil rights for gay and transgender people.
Without being asked, the
Justice Department intervened in a private employment lawsuit, arguing that the
ban on sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect
workers on the basis of their sexual orientation. The friend-of-the-court
brief, filed at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in
New York, was a striking shift in tone from the Obama administration, which had
shied away from that question.
Earlier that day President
Trump tweeted and announcement banning transgender people serving in the
military, surprising Pentagon leaders and reversing a year-old Obama
administration policy.
The same day Mr. Trump
announced that he would nominate Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas and a
vocal opponent of gay rights, to be the nation’s ambassador at large for
international religious freedom.
The constellation of events
raised alarm among gay rights advocacy groups, which portrayed the moves as a
concerted effort to limit advancements in gay rights.
James D. Esseks, director of
the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV
Project responded by saying, “Yesterday was this administration’s anti-L.G.B.T.
day.” “Whether coordinated or not, to have it all happen on the same day
certainly brings into focus the profoundly anti-L.G.B.T. agenda of
this administration.”
Administration officials
insisted that the timing of the three actions was coincidental. Wednesday just
happened to be the deadline for the Justice Department to submit briefs in the
employment discrimination case and Mr. Trump’s tweets about transgender troops,
unexpectedly skipped past lawmaker’s ad the military brass that were
considering the issue.
Whether by accident or
intent, the result was a striking reversal from Mr. Trump’s predecessor, who
repeatedly used administrative actions and legal arguments to press for protections for gays and lesbians.
Taken together, the
administration’s actions are a prize for religious conservatives who backed Mr.
Trump during the 2016 campaign but were far more enamored of his
vice-presidential pick, Mike Pence.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a group that advocates socially conservative and Christian causes, applauded Mr. Trump’s decision to bar transgender people from the military. He said in a statement, the president should be praised for “rescuing our troops from the grip of the Obama years and restoring a sense of true pride to a military devastated by two terms of social engineering.
