Civil Rights and Discrimination

Mission Creep

by on

Walter Olson notes that “Climate change [is] listed as an LGBTQ issue, because in coalition politics every issue is every other issue.”

A piece from earlier this year at Huffington Post makes similar claims.

Passing legislation to require employers to provide paid family leave is also an LGBT issue, according to a Washington Blade opinion column.

Every progressive issue is now an LGBT issue, probably because the gay civil rights agenda has largely been achieved in the U.S. (leaving only transgender issues and exacting punishment on conservative Christian small businesses), and activists always need a cause.

12 Comments

The Civil Rights Act and Sexual-Orientation Discrimination

by on

The Supreme Court will ultimately make this call since there is a split among the appellate courts. But given that until very recently the view that sex discrimination should be interpreted as including sexual-orientation discrimination was, at the very least, viewed as novel makes the assertion by activists that this is yet another “anti-gay” move by the administration (rather than an example of conservative interpretation of the statute’s language) seem a stretch.

If it were so obvious that the Civil Rights Act’s ban on sex-based discrimination extends to sexual-orientation discrimination, why propose The Equality Act (to amend the Civil Rights Act and add sexual orientation) before the matter was decided by the Supreme Court? (Well, perhaps because The Equality Act also guts the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, I suppose.)

4 Comments

Transgender Service Members vs. Trump

by on

It’s an unfortunate move by Trump. I think there are legitimate differences between sexual orientation-based discrimination and transgender discrimination when the issue is sharing intimate space (barracks, locker rooms) with those who are still—and may plan to remain—physically one sex while living as the other. But blanket prohibitions aren’t the way to handle these issues.

That said, the organized LGBT movement declared a blistering war against Trump from day one, even though on sexual orientation he was the most supportive GOP presidential nominee ever. What if they had worked to persuade him instead of unleashing their unceasing torrent of hate? We may never know.

More. Yes, the candidate who said this during his convention speech accepting the GOP nomination was reachable:

As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.” [applause] “I must say as a Republican it is so nice to hear you cheering. Thank you.”

But with the LGBT activist community and LGBT media implacably opposed to him, it’s not so surprising that he would instead seek to curry favor with social conservatives.

Effective political advocates lobby both parties and hire lobbyist from both parties to do so. But the Human Rights Campaign and virtually all other LGBT groups (except the explicitly party-affiliated Log Cabin Republicans), although their mission statements aren’t officially partisan, long ago decided to be partisan Democrats first.

Another view: Trump’s military transgender ban is unfair but correct.

I think it would have been wise if all sides could make a distinction between fully transitioned, post-op transgender men and woman, who should be legally treated as members of the sex to which they’ve transitioned, and transgender people who are in the process of transitioning or (as noted above) have decided not to physically transition but to present themselves as the other sex. I could see the military making this distinction by accepting the former but not the latter.

18 Comments

Changing Times

by on

Related, this study concludes that “Consequently, same-sex marriage and similar reforms come at no “welfare” cost to society at large—if anything, the opposite appears to hold. We further build on previous research showing positive effects of economic freedom on happiness and on tolerance towards gay people and interact our rights measure with economic freedom.”

Yes, there are pockets of “resistance,” but that’s always true with social advancements. The Texas decision won’t survive appeal to the federal courts.

Sometimes, of course, we’re our own worst enemy:


1 Comment

Onward to the Supremes

by on

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, about “whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel the petitioner to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the free speech or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment.”



Not be be overlooked was the Supreme Court ruling in Paven v. Smith, summarily reversing the Arkansas Supreme Court, which had declined to order an amended birth certificate issued to a lesbian couple on the same terms on which the state would issue such a certificate for a child born via donor reproduction to an opposite-sex couple. Olson writes:

Notably, Gorsuch in his dissent took a legal technician’s cool tone that diverged sharply from what one might have expected from the late Justice Scalia: he refrained from zingers at the majority’s expense, stayed far away from culture-war implications, and emphasized that the dispute that might have been aired was over how best to implement Obergefell, not whether to retreat from it. Some voices on the traditionalist sidelines have urged the Court’s conservative wing to wage rhetorical war against Obergefell and Windsor so as to set up an eventual overruling of those decisions. But not a single justice took that approach today.

A new Pew survey, incidentally, confirms that opposition to legal recognition of same-sex marriage has extended its historic decline, and is now in a minority even among Republicans.

8 Comments

LGBTQ+++ movement characterized by racism and transphobia, it seems

by on

The AP reports:

The recent flare-up of racial tensions comes as no surprise to Isaiah Wilson, director of external affairs for the National Black Justice Coalition, one of the few national groups focused specially on black LGBT rights. He said the broader LGBT-rights movement “has been whitewashed” — dominated to a large extent by white gay men. …

He said major LGBT-rights groups need to be frank in discussing the issue of racism, as well as recruiting and supporting nonwhite leaders.

In my experience in LGBT activism in the ’80s through the early ’90s, any person of color who walked through the door was implored to take a leadership position. As for “dominated to a large extent by white gay men,” women have dominated movement leadership from the mid-80s onward.

Diversity is vital, except when it’s not.
Jewish symbols makes some people feel unsafe, whereas Islamic symbols…oh, nevermind.

The Windy City Times reports that “Supporters added that American flags were similarly not welcome as they too are considered signs of oppression. However, flags from other nations were present.”

A bad sign.


A good sign.


Finally, Fred Litwin writes:

[Activist Tim] McCaskell claims that the issues of interest to young gay people, his so-called ‘new activists’ are “police racism, HIV criminalization, corporate power, the environment, acceptance of gender fluidity, Palestine solidarity, park sex, poverty, immigration and refugees, [and] youth empowerment.” …

Once again, McCaskell and his cohorts leave out the most important issue facing the gay community today. Our gay brothers and sisters around the globe face being tossed off of buildings in ISIS territory, being hanged in Iran and being harassed in Russia. Gay remembrances of the Pulse tragedy in Orlando rarely mention the Islamist ideology that fueled the terrorist bomber. Point that out and you’ll be called a pinkwashing homonationalist.

More. James Kirchick brings it home:

Jews are not only being made to feel unwelcome in left-leaning spaces, but anti-Semitism—masked as anti-Zionism—is becoming a marker of virtue. These episodes of ostracism are almost always undertaken to appease Muslims, which makes no sense under any circumstances, least of all for the LGBT community, which is welcomed and celebrated in the world’s only Jewish country and subject to state-sponsored harassment, imprisonment, and murder in nearly every Muslim-majority one.

It’s also cruelly ironic that Jews, of all people, would be subject to this sort of discrimination, given the disproportionate role they have played in LGBT politics and culture.

11 Comments

The Rainbow Flag Isn’t Racist

by on

Point:


Counterpoint:

Meanwhile, the Washington Blade reports that at the Equality March:

Javier Cifuentes, HRC’s Youth Ambassador, and Thomas Tonatiuh Lopez Jr. of the Indigenous Youth Council gave rousing speeches that captured the theme and tone of what leaders of the Equality March said was one of their key messages—that the LGBT rights movement must work in solidarity with the nation’s other progressive movements and social causes such as immigrant rights, racial justice, transgender rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, and women’s and reproductive rights.

Left-progressives only, please. So much for “unity.”

24 Comments

Equality March: Separate Realities

by on


CNN reports:

Conservative gay Americans, for their part, view the march as a partisan event emphasizing “division far more than equality,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBT group.

“For months now we’ve heard that Trump is going to ‘roll back’ advances made by the LGBT community, and time and again those rumors were proven to be unfounded,” he told CNN. “All of this chicken-littling has turned the self-styled ‘Resistance’ into little more than a hollow cliche.”

Gay rights activists, however, say Trump’s refusal to issue an official White House statement commemorating LGBT Pride Month — chosen by advocates to commemorate New York’s Stonewall uprising in 1969 — is symptomatic of the White House’s agenda for LGBT Americans. The march on Sunday will be an attempt to the let the Trump administration know that America’s LGBT community will not be ignored, they say.

Along similar lines:


Scott Shackford offers a reasoned assessment:

But Trump has notably not espoused antigay policy stances and has, in fact, resisted efforts to do so within his administration. So far, Trump is probably the most LGBT-friendly Republican president we’ve had.

That doesn’t mean that Trump supports the same policies that progressive LGBT leaders would like. That’s really the crux of the problem: Trump’s administration doesn’t want to use the federal government to advance anti-discrimination policies that cover LGBT people. His Department of Justice has withdrawn federal guidance ordering public schools to accommodate transgender students’ gender choices for bathrooms and other facilities.

Put in historical context, that’s a relatively mild decision, though it must feel awful for transgender students who are affected (and ultimately it may be decided by the courts, not Trump’s administration, anyway). Despite LGBT activists’ fears, the administration is not scaling back executive orders forbidding government contractors from engaging in LGBT discrimination. Life is still improving for LGBT people.

More.


Given the proximity of “Remember Pulse” and “F*ck Trump” signs at the Equality March, it’s as if Donald Trump, rather than homophobic jihadi Isalmism, was behind the Pulse nightclub massacre whose anniversary the March was helping to mark.

Added. The world as the LGBT left sees it: Via a commentary in The Advocate:

Trump quickly seized on the Pulse shooting in an attempt to further isolate Muslims and LGBTQ people from one another. … But the LGBTQ community never took the bait. Instead of broadbrush blaming of an entire religion for the act of one crazed individual, it locked arms with American Muslims in an incredible sign of unity.”

One crazed individual!

James Kirchick addresses this sort of response (in discussing Linda Sarsour’s Politics of Hate and the Pathos of Her Jewish Enablers) when he writes:

One sees this mentality at play in the ADL’s skirting the question of Islam entirely in its poll on European anti-Semitism, in the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that the people murdered at a Paris kosher supermarket by an avowed Islamist in 2015 were victims of a “random” assault on “a bunch of folks in a deli….”

More. Social conservatives are none too pleased.

11 Comments