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 His Department of Justice has withdrawn federal guidance ordering public schools to accommodate transgender students’ gender choices for bathrooms and other facilities.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.