The rumors started Sunday: President Trump would gut an Obama-era executive order
that extends workplace protections to gays and lesbians who work for
federal contractors. LGTBQ activists geared up for a fight. But by
Tuesday morning, Trump had backed down. In a brief statement, the White
House affirmed Trump’s commitment to the measure, which covers about 28 million workers.Progressives celebrated it as a surprise, and a rare bit of good news from an administration run by Mike Pence,
who signed a conservative “religious liberty” law in Indiana, supported
“conversion therapy” and suggested that marriage equality would lead
to “societal collapse.”But support for gay rights isn’t
antithetical to a populist, anti-immigrant leader. In fact, it’s very
much in keeping with the far-right strategy across Europe. In France,
the Netherlands and Germany, right-wing leaders have embraced causes
such as gay rights and feminism. Islam, they argue, is a threat to the
very people protected by these social movements.It’s a smart approach — one that serves to broaden their base. And, as Sasha Polakow-Suransky explained, it’s working. She wrote in the Guardian…
The following are comments from Steven Kenson’s FB:
This piece makes the point that support for the rights of women and
LGBTQ people on the far right is used to attack Islam as a threat to
those things, an example right out of Donald Trump’s RNC speech, where
he vowed to protect the LGBTQ community from “foreign ideologies” (and we
know which one he means). Bannon’s alt-right wants a war with Islam
badly, and will do whatever it takes to get it.Of course, the European far-right doesn’t have to deal with the demands of the American Christianists, so it’ll be a challenge for the Trump regime to both
“protect” people and allow their rights to be eroded, but I think
they’ll make use of the cause of “religious liberty” to do so, all the
while demonizing Islam (since when the right says “religion” they mean
Christianity).As Crystal ( @amazonchique ) rightly points out,
you can drop the “T” from the community Trump
“supports”. At best, the right’s supposed support in the U.S. will go to
cis white mainstream gay men, in an effort to peel them away from the
left and turn them into poster children
for “fairness and inclusivity” as they huddle behind big, strong America
to shelter them from the evil Muslims. Meanwhile, trans people get
demonized and pushed further to the margins. So, I’ll reiterate: Don’t
let them divide us! Any queer rights movement that doesn’t include
trans-people, bisexuals, queer people of color, and all of us is not
worthy of the name, and quislings who think they’re safe because they’re
“mainstream GBFs” of the GOP are in for a rude awakening when the
Religious Right gets done with the most vulnerable of us.So, yeah, any “support” Trump & Co appear to offer to the LGBTQ community is likely done solely to appeal to Islamophobic sentiments (”we *checks smudged writing on hand* love the Gays, unlike those Other people!”).
Trump’s support of gays is right out of the European far-right playbook
QueerAnarchism 