Vice President Mike Pence and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins are two of the key players who reportedly “played a leading role” in drafting the report that led to the Trump administration’s new ban on transgender service members.
Pence and Perkins have worked together on anti-LGBT issues for years, as the above photo, taken in 2004, shows. According to Pence’s office, it was taken “at a press conference held after the House vote on the Marriage Protection Amendment,” which would have created a federal law defining marriage as only between one man and one woman.
“According to Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, Vice President Mike Pence and two prominent anti-LGBTQ activists—Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins—’played a leading role in the creation’ of a Pentagon report on the subject of transgender service that was made public along with Trump’s order,” Right Wing Watch‘s Miranda Blue explains.
“Last summer,” Blue notes, “when Trump announced via Twitter that he was planning on banning all transgender people from serving in the military, Perkins boasted of having worked behind the scenes with the White House to bring about the policy shift.”
Tony Perkins, whose leadership moved the Southern Poverty Law Center to place his organization, the Family Research Council on its list of anti-gay hate groups, is “a former Marine,” who “has long opposed allowing LGBTQ people to serve in the military,” Blue adds.
Shortly before Congress repealed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that prevented gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces, Perkins said at a Family Research Council event that militaries that allow LGBTQ people to serve are “the ones that participate in parades, they don’t fight wars to keep the nation and the world free.”
Image by Office of Congressman Mike Pence via Wikimedia
