Worst Ever?

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Added: The Spectator USA also noted:

>>To prove its case, HRC has compiled a constantly-updated ‘Timeline of Hate’ to memorialize Trump’s ‘dangerous and discriminatory agenda’. It has yet to update one of the very first entries, however, concerning Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The jurist’s past opposition to ‘crucial medical treatment for a transgender person’, HRC declared in January 2017, led it to take the unprecedented step of opposing a Supreme Court nomination. Yet in June, Gorsuch wrote one of the most comprehensive pro-LGBT rights decisions in court history when he ruled that the workplace discrimination protections within the 1964 Civil Rights Act encompass gay and transgender people.<<

Via The Spectator USA: Worse than “Dwight Eisenhower, whose executive order preventing those guilty of ‘sexual perversion’ from holding government jobs led to the firing of an estimated 10,000 people”?

Or how about George W. Bush, who called for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage (or Bill Clinton, whose campaign commercials touted his support for the Defense of Marriage Act)?

Reagan’s legacy is more nuanced than The Spectator would have it, but still, as they write, he “waited years to even utter the name of the disease which was killing thousands of gay men during his presidential term.”

Also, the worst anti-Semite ever? Netanyahu: ‘Treaty could end Arab-Israel conflict.

Biden voters:

One Comment for “Worst Ever?”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    As the Spectator article and Stephen’s summary recap point out, Republican administrations have had a long and virtually unblemished record of opposition to equal treatment under the law for gays and lesbians, the particular issues coming and going with the times (e.g. the “Homosexual Scare” during Eisenhower years, the “Moral Majority” and all that entailed during the Reagan years, leveraging opposition to marriage equality as a reelection strategy during the Bush years, and so on). But one thing remains constant — whatever the issues at the time, Republican politicians (at both the federal and state levels) have, with few exceptions**, fought any advances toward “equal means equal” for gays and lesbians.

    It seems to me that what distinguishes the Trump administration from earlier Republican administrations is that the Trump administration went beyond the usual and expected opposition to advancing</em? "equal means equal"***, and undertook a systematic effort to roll back existing protections for LGBT citizens, protections granted by Executive Order and under federal rules and regulations during the Obama administration. The roll-back effort began almost immediately after President Trump was sworn in and, under the direction of Attorney General Sessions and other senior administration officials, permeated federal rules and regulations. It is impossible to argue, I think, that President Trump was unaware of what his administration was doing, because he directed much of what was done.

    I don’t think much of hyperbole, and it seems to me that “Worst Ever” is hyperbole, but in the sense that the Trump administration systematically sought to roll back existing protections (something that neither the Reagan nor Bush administrations attempted to do), the Trump administration has, I think, been “worse” (in that sense) than the prior Republican administrations cited in the Spectator article and Stephen’s summary recap.

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    ** In Wisconsin a bipartisan majority in the legislature enacted one of the nation’s first anti-discrimination laws protecting gays and lesbians in 1982, and in the following year, the legislature, again with a bipartisan majority, decriminalized sodomy. The 1982 non-discrimination bill was signed by a Republican governor, Lee Dreyfus, and the 1982 decriminalization bill was signed by Anthony Earl, a Democratic governor. In California, former Governor Reagan and former President Gerald Ford helped defeat the Biggs Initiative in 1978, a Republican-led effort to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. More recently, Utah, with support of the LDS, developed a 2015 compromise that granted some non-discrimination protection for gays and lesbians while exempting the LDS and other religious organizations from compliance, which is probably as far as Utah could be expected to go given the fact that the LDS holds sway over the politics of that state. But, overall, the rule-of-thumb that when Republicans are in control, gay rights do not advance has held true over the years

    *** For example, the Trump administration’s legal briefs opposing inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in Bostock, and similar briefs filed in other cases were entirely predictable.

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