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Pence Brags About Trump Allowing Adoption Agencies ‘Right’ to Ban LGBTQ Parents

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“We will stand for the freedom of religion,” Vice President Mike Pence said, defending the Trump administration move to allow adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Vice President Mike Pence this week attended a federal government event during which he bragged about the Trump administration’s latest attack on LGBTQ people. The vice president (video below) heralded a fast-tracked proposed policy from the Dept. of Health and Human Services that would reverse an Obama-era rule barring discrimination by adoption and foster care agencies against LGBTQ people and same-sex couples.

The proposed rollback of that rule is expected to go into effect in just a few weeks, granting government protection to religious, faith-based, or any other adoption organization that wishes to claim a moral opposition to LGBTQ people from facing a loss of federal funding.

“We will stand for the freedom of religion and we will stand with faith-based organizations to support adoption,” Vice President Pence told supporters at an HHS event Tuesday, as he pounded his fists on the podium, to cheers.

“I couldn’t be more proud that at President Trump’s direction and with the strong support of leaders across foster care, adoption, and our faith communities, we’ve taken decisive action,” Pence bragged.

That “decisive action” literally reduces the pool of prospective parents for large numbers of children who don’t have parents or homes.

“More than 100,000 foster children are awaiting adoption, according to government data, but a constellation of religious agencies refuse to consider same-sex parents when placing these children,” NBC News reports. “Shortly before the end of his second term, President Barack Obama changed nondiscrimination rules governing adoption agencies to expand the definition of groups protected against discrimination to include LGBTQ people. Trump’s proposed rule change will undo that.”

In fact, same-sex couples have far higher rates of adopting and fostering children than their different-sex couple peers.

“A 2018 report from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that 1 in 5 of the estimated 114,000 same-sex couples raising children in the United States are raising adopted or foster children — significantly higher than the 3 percent of heterosexual couples doing so,” reported NBC News.

The latest discriminatory HHS rule Vice President Pence bragged about comes from Roger Severino, HHS’s Director of the Office of Civil Rights. Severino is known as a “radical” anti-LGBTQ religious right activist who previously served as CEO and counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious right non-profit that opposes separation of church and state. He also once served as the Director of the DeVos family’s Center for Religion and Civil Society in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM. Video via Washington Blade/Facebook. Hat tip: Towleroad

UPDATE: Kenick El To Resign From Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission

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Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission member Kenick El called homosexuality “an abomination to the Human Race” and referred to trans women as “men in dresses” in a Facebook post last week, which brought widespread condemnation.

UPDATE, October 30: LaKendrick Coburn El, who also goes by Kenick El, announced Friday that he would resign from the Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission after the widespread public outcry condemning an anti-LGBTQ post he made on Facebook last week.

“Everybody’s human rights is to be respected,” El said Friday, according to WTKR. “We are to love one another, we are to show mercy and forgiveness to one another, and that’s why I am committed to resigning on October 31 at the end of the commission meeting after I share my views with my colleagues.”

The commission had scheduled a special meeting for Thursday, October 31 after news broke of El’s social media post. El says he will resign from the commission following the meeting.

During a press conference on Thursday, Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer addressed El’s comments, and called it inappropriate for him to continue serving on the city’s Human Rights Commission.

“We believe the public comments of Brother LaKendrick Coburn El are contrary to these base goals that are the core of the Human Rights Commission, and it is no longer appropriate for him to serve in this capacity,” Dyer said, according to WTKR.

The Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission also released a statement saying that El was speaking for himself, and that his words did not represent the commission. “The Human Rights Commission is a very diverse group of individuals who come together for common good and equality for all,” the statement read in part. “However, each commissioner has individual beliefs, and we do not always agree.”

Original October 24 article follows:

News broke yesterday that Kenick El, a member of Virginia Beach’s Human Rights Commission, made homophobic and transphobic comments in a Facebook post, calling homosexuality “an abomination to the Human Race” and referring to transgender women as “men in dresses.”

El’s post was in response to a news article posted in October of 2017 by Fox News, with the headline “Transgender Wyoming woman convicted of sexually assaulting 10-year-old girl in bathroom.” The incident involved a transgender woman named Michelle Martinez, who, according to the Fox News article in question, “is a family friend.” Fox News reported that Martinez “invited the girl into the bathroom of a home on March 23, and touched her breasts and genitalia before penetrating her.”

Now, of course, that’s ugly and upsetting, and nothing any self-respecting member of the LGBTQ community would want anything to do with. However, this incident has been used by right-wing blogs like Louder With Crowder and The Daily Wire as an argument against transgender people being allowed to use the appropriate bathrooms. Those blogs tend to leave out that the incident occurred in the bathroom of a private residence, and that Martinez had been a family friend — one with a prior record of violence, as she’d previously been charged with aggravated assault in an incident in which she beat her boyfriend with a metal broomstick.

In his facebook post, El was making the same argument — that this incident had some bearing on the safety of cisgender girls and women in public bathrooms used by trans people.

“This is why we need to stop giving men in dresses passes. I have daughters and I won’t accept them sharing a restroom with a grown man suffering from this mental illness. Men trying to be women and women trying to be men is really confusing our children and I’m tired of seeing this nonsense promoted to our children,” El wrote on Facebook. “Those that don’t make children can’t relate or understand the impact this behavior has on us with children and it’s really getting out [of] hand.”

He then continued on to a general condemnation of LGBTQ people, writing, “Homosexuality is an abomination to the Human Race and it corrupts the hermetic principle of gender by interfering with the laws of nature just to gratify the lower self. Enter the correct bathroom and stop pushing this agenda on our children.”

Usage of the phrase “hermetic principle of gender” refers to the religious tradition of hermeticism, which believes that there is, according to Wikipedia, “a single, true theology that is present in all religions and that was given by God to man in antiquity.”

Kenick El’s references to religion make sense in light of the fact that he is a clergyman himself. He’s currently Grand Sheik and Divine Minister of Unity Temple No. 14 — a Virginia Beach-based temple of the Moorish Science Temple of America. This offshoot of the Islamic faith is based on the principle that African Americans are descendants of the biblical kingdom of Moab, and shares common roots with the Nation Of Islam.

El’s comments have received widespread condemnation from political leaders and organizations around the Hampton Roads area. In a statement given to Outwire757, openly gay Virginia Beach City Councilman Michael Berlucchi stated, “The comments made by a member of our City’s Human Rights Commission have hurt my heart. I was saddened and disappointed to learn about them. I served on the Human Rights Commission for four years prior to becoming a member of our City Council. The Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission was founded to institute, conduct and engage in educational and informational programs for the promotion of mutual understanding and respect among citizens, and the fulfillment of human rights. It is my hope that every member of the Human Rights Commission would commit to uphold that mission when they accept the appointment. I am currently speaking with my colleagues at City Council, the Human Rights Commission, and members of our community to resolve this matter quickly.”

Kenick El, via Facebook

LGBTQ organizations in the Hampton Roads area, including the LGBT Life Center, Hampton Roads LGBTQAI Interfaith Group, and Hampton Roads Business OutReach (HRBOR), have called for El’s removal from the Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission in light of these statements. However, El told Norfolk’s 13NewsNow that “this has been blown out of proportion” and went on to say that “I don’t intend on quitting or resigning.”

“If you were offended by anything that I said, I assure you that I didn’t intend to. I’m just expressing my faith,” El told 13NewsNow. “I love everybody. Just because I told you the truth doesn’t mean I hate you. Just because we don’t agree doesn’t mean I hate you or I’m opposing you.”

Despite El’s Facebook comments, and his insistence in 13NewsNow’s interview that his expression of said believes simply constituted him “[telling] you the truth,” he has shown support in the past for the LGBTQ community in his role on Virginia Beach’s Human Rights Commission, previously voting in favor of a resolution that asked the General Assembly to ban conversion therapy.

In a subsequent Facebook post, according to Metro Weekly, El insisted that he was merely expressing his personal views on his personal Facebook page, and that those views didn’t interfere with his work on the Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission. However, as LGBT Life Center CEO Stacie Wall told 13NewsNow, “We believe that somebody who believes that, the way that he does, is not someone who would represent all Virginia Beach citizens.”

At this point, it remains to be seen how the government of Virginia Beach will handle this situation. For now, we can only hope that El’s views do not continue to hold influence over the actions of Virginia Beach’s Human Rights Commission.

Top Photo: Kenick El, via Facebook

Chick-Fil-A’s First UK Location Announces Closing One Week After Opening

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After a massive backlash, the anti-LGBTQ fast food restaurant’s landlord in Reading, England decided not to renew Chick-Fil-A’s lease. They’ll be out of there in six months.

Well… that didn’t take long. Chick-Fil-A only opened its first store in the United Kingdom less than two weeks ago, and they have already announced its closing. And it’s all because of the UK’s strong LGBTQ community. Ah, victory is sweet.

What actually happened started before the location even opened, when the very news of a Chick-Fil-A coming to the UK was greeted with outrage and hostility from LGBTQ rights advocates in Reading, England. Before it even opened, they called for a boycott, and much of the coverage from UK press centered around the notorious chicken chain’s continued support of anti-LGBTQ organizations.

“Chick-Fil-A is coming with fried chicken sandwiches and retrograde politics,” announced Eater London’s article about the chain’s plans to open a location in the UK. Meanwhile, in Reading, public opinion was sharply divided around the idea of a Chick-Fil-A coming to the area. In that way, it wasn’t too different than any American comments section’s response to any mention of the restaurant.

However, there was a difference in how Chick-Fil-A was received by owners of The Oracle shopping center in Reading, which houses the Chick-Fil-A in question. Once the controversy started up, they were quick to distance themselves, and made clear they would not be renewing Chick-Fil-A’s lease.

“We always look to introduce new concepts for our customers,” said an Oracle spokesperson, according to the BBC. “However, we have decided on this occasion that the right thing to do is to only allow Chick-fil-A to trade with us for the initial six-month pilot period, and not to extend the lease any further.”

According to Eater London’s initial coverage, Chick-Fil-A’s plan for the Reading location was to make it a one-year pop-up, expanding on the alleged success of four one-day pop-ups the chain held around the UK between 2016 and 2018. Therefore, The Oracle’s eviction notice may only bring a more abrupt end to an already-temporary UK location. It also doesn’t mean the chain won’t just find a more friendly landlord elsewhere in the country and re-open in a matter of months.

However, unlike here in the US, where Chick-Fil-A had already been a popular fast food franchise for decades before their anti-LGBTQ record was widely known, the restaurant’s controversial reputation has preceded them into the UK, and they may have a bigger struggle to establish themselves in that country than they’d expected. And that’s good news.

Photo via Reddit

Federal Judge Overturns ObamaCare’s Transgender Protections, Because Jesus

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The same judge who ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional has now ruled that religious freedom is more important than transgender people receiving medically necessary health care.

A U.S. District Court judge in Texas has overturned the protections written into ObamaCare for transgender people, ruling they violate the religious rights of healthcare providers who hold religious beliefs that oppose the existence of transgender people.

On Tuesday Judge Reed O’Connor, appointed by President George W. Bush, “vacated an Obama-era regulation that prohibited providers and insurers who receive federal money from denying treatment or coverage to anyone based on sex, gender identity, or termination of pregnancy,” The Hill reports.

That regulation also mandated healthcare providers perform medically necessary services for transgender patients.

O’Connor is known as the same federal judge who ruled the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional last year. According to The Hill, his ruling in this case is likely to be appealed.

The Trump administration is supporting a large group of Republican state attorneys general working to strip protections from people with pre-existing conditions, and ultimately, have ObamaCare voided by the courts.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

The Amazon Trail: Damned If I Know

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In this month’s Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch expresses the feelings of powerlessness and frustration the current Supreme Court wranglings over LGBTQ civil rights have inspired in many of us.

Damned if I know whether or not all the rabble rousing of the last sixty years has done us a lick of good. I thought the issue of our rights was pretty much settled, but on October 8, 2019, Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that gay employees are already protected from job discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 federal civil rights law.

Some of the Justices seemed to believe that inclusion of sexual orientation in Title VII would have appeared preposterous to the court in 1964. Yet, Ms. Karlan argued, the Supreme Court has applied twenty-first century standards to a number of prior decisions. Discrimination against a person because of gender, she stated, already covers discrimination against sexual orientation. 

A woman who dates another woman and is fired for it, is the object of discrimination by the simple fact of her gender. A man will not be fired for dating a woman. The argument is plainspoken and ironclad. Some of the judges needed it repeated many times in many ways.

I’d been out four years by the time Title VII went into effect. The practice of favoring men over women was so blatantly wrong in my mind, I couldn’t believe a law was necessary. It certainly had nothing to do, in the late 1960s, with queer people keeping our jobs. You just shut up and stayed in your closet at work.

When I became a vocational counselor a few years later, my focus was on getting people employed, anywhere, anyhow. There was no question of finessing hires. Women became sewing machine operators at the clothing manufacturers of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Men delivered the raw materials, carted away the completed garments, and, for maybe ten cents an hour more, maintained the sewing machines. To have questioned the part I played in matching the unemployed to jobs by gender was to let my principles — and the law — come between desperate women, destitute men, and their survival. To invoke, or even be aware of, their newly stated rights, was irrelevant for most minimum wage workers.

Hearing Title VII invoked in defense of gay workers in 2019 was an eye opener. Ms. Karlan offered the Supremes, and Congress, an out. New, excruciatingly drawn-out legislation is not needed. If a man is fired because he loves another man, and a woman is not fired because she loves a man, then the original man was fired because he’s a man. Period.

These arguments come up, not because the fired individual is a bad employee, but because the employer has a prejudice, an historical, religious, or personal belief about gay people. In other words, because the employer has the power. Just like the women ruining their eyes and hands sewing, the men destroying their back and knees carting, the fired gay person is a victim of someone who has more power: in these cases, the employer.

The United States was not created to disenfranchise people, although we do a lousy job of respecting the rights of Native Americans and other people of color. When the worker is powerless, the employer can dictate who feeds their families and who doesn’t. Laws have always been bandied about, reinterpreted, applied rightly or wrongly, bent and ignored, depending on who is in power. 

And that’s where the activism of the last sixty years does make a lick of sense. We-the-people must stand against courts which would sustain the imbalance of power, and we must stand for the use of law to protect workers from prejudice, to protect veterans who live in the streets with their war nightmares, to protect women battered into submission by employers and partners, to protect queer people whose existence is an offense in the eyes of all-powerful beholders.

I no longer believe we can stop war, erase bigotry, take power and use it for only good. I no longer suit up with a wet bandana headband for tear gas, carry a rolled-up newspaper for protection, stay ever on the lookout for escape routes should the march, the rally, the sit-down, turn dangerous. I know now that the rabble-rousing must go on and on, if only to keep the lid on the inhumanity of humanity.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2019. Photos via Human Rights Campaign/Facebook

HUD Employees ‘Shell-Shocked’ After Ben Carson Makes Transphobic Remarks

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Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development has been making anti-LGBTQ remarks to HUD staff on a regular basis, according to a Washington Post report.

Secretary Ben Carson has been making vile, unprompted, transphobic remarks to Housing and Urban Development employees, some of whom were “shell-shocked” by the brain surgeon’s bigotry, according to a report published last Thursday in the Washington Post. Agency officials also say Carson repeatedly mocks transgender people.

Carson, who frequently presents himself as a deeply Christian man of faith, called transgender women “big, hairy men,” and claimed they are trying to access women’s homeless shelters to cause occupants harm.

“While visiting HUD’s San Francisco office this week, Carson also lamented that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women, two of the agency staffers said,” according to an extensive report in Thursday night’s Washington Post. “Carson’s remarks visibly shocked and upset many of the roughly 50 HUD staffers who attended Tuesday’s meeting, and prompted at least one woman to walk out in protest, the staffers said.”

Carson, during the San Francisco meeting, addressed HUD employees in “a rambling hour-long speech about HUD initiatives that they described as ‘stream of consciousness.’”

During that speech Carson said  “transgender people should get the same rights as everyone else, but they don’t get to change things for everybody else.” Those remarks echo ones he has made before.

He also told San Francisco HUD employees women’s shelters should turn away transgender women. One staffer told the Post, “this sounded like a slur to me.”

Carson’s talk became even more disturbing, two of the staffers said, when he started waxing nostalgic about the past when, in the words of one staffer, there were “just women and just men.” The HUD staffers said he sounded incredulous when he mentioned that people no longer know the difference between genders.

“His tone was kind of like ‘how crazy is that?’” another staffer said.

“For him to come to San Francisco and say this, it was unbelievable. People were just shell-shocked,” one staffer added.

One HUD official described Secretary Carson’s comments about transgender people as “dismissive and joking,” and called it “disrespectful of the people we are trying to serve.”

The Post’s lengthy report includes actions Carson has taken against transgender people during his tenure at HUD, and transphobic comments he has made in the past as well.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM