The time to give Trump another chance has long passed, it
passed way before election day. Yet there are those out there that say now that
he has been elected it is time to give him another one. They say that because after the election he
has done some “good talking” by saying that he wants to be a president for “all
Americans” but that is just talk, if you look at the people that he is putting
in charge of his transition team, and the people that are in the front running
for his cabinet positions, you will see that he has no interest in being a
president for all people. He only has an interest in being the kind of
president for the kind of people that he spent the last year and half telling
us that he wanted to be on the campaign trail. He is not putting people into positions of
power that have any interest in uniting the country and insuring that all Americans
are represented, instead he is putting extremist politicians and lobbyist in
charge of his transition team, assigning them the job of picking out the people
that will staff his white house and the government under him. At this point I
honestly feel sorry for the people that believed he was going to “drain the
swamp” as he is filling his team with the lobbyist and donors that make up that
very swamp, just the extreme ones at that. I can more personally talk about this from
the perspective of the LGBT community because as a gay man, I keep a pretty
close tap on the LGBT news.
While there are many out there that are saying well gee you
should give trump a chance he said a couple nice things about the LGBT
community during his convention and help up a flag at one rally, plus he claims
to want to protect the community, but if you listen that “protection” is simply
is blanket discriminatory ban on Muslims and his desire to violate the basic constitutional
rights of the Muslim American community, because if you look at his polices and
the people that he is putting in charge to running those polices they are an extremely
anti LGBT group of people. First off he
has throughout the campaign through is surrogates made it clear that his vice
president will be the one that is much more into the day to day running of
domestic policies while Trump acts more as a figure head doing things that “make
America great again” So one then has to take a look at the man that he picked
to be his number two, and to in affect run national policy.
If one takes a look at Mike Pence they don’t find some one
that is a unties and wants to govern for all citizens they find someone that is
very much on the fringe right of GOP politics, someone that is rabidly anti
LGBT and as a congressmen and then governor pushed for and pursued extremely
anti LGBT legislation. (along with rabidly anti women legislation) a few big
examples come from when he was a governor in the state of Indian. During his time, he declared that funds to
treat and prevent HIV should not go to certain communities, the LGBT community,
that instead changing the ordination of those communities should be the top priority,
as governor he then cut funding to HIV prevention programs, which had the net effect
of causing new cases of HIV to skyrocket in his state. Not only did he feel that the LGBT community
should not benefit from HIV prevention programs, he then went a step further
and killed two pet project birds with one stone, he took a way funding for Planned
Parenthood (which provides much needed reproductive health care to millions of
women nationwide) in his state and then took those state funds and gave them to reparative therapy organizations that they to turn gay people straight, most
often young children that don’t have a say in the taking part in those
programs. Programs that are made up of
mental torture, and often leave their “patients” severely traumatized and often
suicidal. Pence is one that literally believes
that you can electrocute the gay out of someone and that the government should
provide funds to organizations that try to do so. Even though the American Psychiatric Association,
say that it is not possible and that LGBT people are perfectly normal but that
the practice of reparative therapy is detrimental to the patient and is totally
unethical. Yet Pence is a proponent of
and supporter of the practice to the point of giving state funds to the
practice.
Not only did he take actions to hurt the health of the LGBT community
he also took actions to hurt the fight for equality, and then to make
discrimination against LGBT citizens the letter of the law. During his time as governor
which happened to include the push for marriage rights, there was a movement
around the country by gay rights advocates to apply for marriage license
knowing that the clerk would have to turn you down and film the process as a
tactic to apply pressure to state governments and win public support. Was in 1997 Indiana had made it illegal to
lie on your marriage application, but it was a pretty minor law. We governor Pence seeing what was going on
around the country pushed for that law to be amended and it was turned into a
class 6 felony with punishment of up to 18 months in prison and $10,000 in
fines. Then after marriage equality
became the law of the land Mike Pence pushed for and then signed into law a
bill that made it explicitly legal to discriminate against LGBT people when it
came to housing, services, logging and jobs, all under the guise of Religious freedom. The Rachel Maddow Show segment on all of this.
Pence is not only the Trumps vice president which is
troubling enough, but he has been put in charge of determining which of Obama's executiveorders and guidance’s to delete once Trump takes office, and he has made it
pretty clear that any of Obama's pro LGBT executive orders and guidance’s are
going to be thrown in the trashcan as soon as him and Trump take office. Like
protections for LGBT works with in the federal government or working for contractors
contracted to the federal government, or protections for Trans Students in
schools all across the country, among many others that will put thousands of
people at risk. Not only that but trump
has staffed his team with Lobbyist from the American Family Association a group that is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti LGBT hate group, as well as working closely with lobbyist from the National Organization for Marriage. Both groups that are fervently
anti LGBT rights and Anti-Gay marriage, and both who now have a powerful say in
the staffing of trumps white house and the policies that it will carry
out. Polices that promise to be very destructive
to the LGBT community.
Then there are the policies that Trump himself has said that
he supports like the federal “First Amendment Defiance Act” which would not
only make it legal to discriminate against LGBT people but would make it illegal
for the government to step in and prevent such actions. This is a bill that Trump himself has pledged
to sign when he comes into office and it is a bill that is designed with
nothing more in mind then to allow discrimination against the LGBT
community. In addition to this he has promised
that as president he will stack the courts with judges that will not only overturn
Roe V Wade but that will also over turn marriage equality. Even though he said on 60 minutes that it was
settled case, but by his logic so is Roe V Wade, and his promised judges are
promised to be against both legal findings.
This is also the position of those that he is appointing to his transition
team and the anti LGBT lobbyist that are working so closely with his campaign. They want to stack that court with justices
that will overturn marriage equality nationwide, so that they can then overturn
it state by state. Those groups are just salivating at the thought of being
able to bring the right case before the courts and having marriage equality undone,
and they will stop at nothing to do so.
So I say it is time to stop giving Trump another
chance, he has already been given too many and with each one that he is given
he shows through ether his worlds and now increasingly his actions that he is
not going to change and that he is going to do the very things that he has promised
his follower that he was going to do the entire time he was on the campaign
trail, and what he is going to “make America great again” but destroying the
lives of any one that is not a cis straight white male, and by dragging the
country back to the 1950’s when women did not have rights, when LGBT people did
not have rights and had to fear even more discrimination then they do now, and
when minorities had no rights and where abused by the government (and the
general public) even more then they are now.
This has always been what trump has promised, and one other clue at that
is that he has put Steve Bannon the leader of the Alt Right white nationalist news
out let Britbart News as his White House senior counsler. If that does not tell
you that he deserves no more chances that his words of being a president for
all, are just pretty words to try to cover the festering cesspit that are
Trumps polices then I fear nothing will.
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