Author Is Former Anti-LGBT Hate Group Attorney
Earlier this month a four-page draft detailing President Donald Trump’s plans to install so-called “religious freedom” by giving people and corporations the “right” to discriminate against LGBT people leaked. The White House refused to confirm or deny its existence, saying only there are many executive orders in the works. That anti-LGBT order is far from dead, according to Michelangelo Signorile at The Huffington Post.
“Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who has served as domestic policy chair of President Donald Trump’s transition team, told me in an interview on SiriusXM Progress that the controversial ‘religious freedom‘ order that leaked to the press a few weeks ago is very much on the way, even though White House officials had played it down,” Signorile reports.
The draft itself was described by The Nation’s Sarah Posner as one that “seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act.”
Blackwell for years has served as a senior fellow at the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council.
“He also confirmed that the former director of Family Research Council’s Center for Religious Liberty, Ken Klukowski, had ‘actually structured’ the draft order as a legal advisor to Trump’s transition team,” Signorile reports. He notes that Klukowski, is a senior attorney at the First Liberty and a contributor at Breitbart, is one of the lawyers ‘in the process of redrafting it,’ Blackwell tells Signorile Klukowski is “in the process of redrafting” the order, “hinting that the original order may have been perceived as being too vulnerable to a legal challenge.”
“In the final analysis, what we want is an executive order that will meet the scrutiny of the judicial process,†he explained. “If there is no executive order, that will disappoint [social conservatives]. But a good executive order will not. So we’re still in the process.â€Â
So, President Trump is expected to sign an anti-LGBT “religious freedom” order drafted by Klukowski, an attorney whose résumé includes the home of the “alt-right,” an anti-LGBT hate group, a Christian law firm, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
This news comes the week after Trump signed an executive order revoking President Barack Obama’s guidance to schools on how best to protect the civil rights of transgender students, effectively telling school districts the Justice Dept. will look the other way and not enforce Title IX, a civil rights law.
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