President Donald Trump’s nominee to be his second Secretary of State is testifying before the Senate now, and in his opening remarks revealed he is incapable of carrying out the basic tenets of the job.
Mike Pompeo, a far right wing conservative Christian Tea Party Republican, currently serves as Trump’s CIA Director. He has a horrific record on civil rights for LGBT people, women, and Muslims.
“The State Department’s workforce must, by necessity, be diverse in every sense of the word—in terms of race, religion, background, and more,” Pompeo told Senators Thursday morning. “I’ll work to achieve that diversity, just as I have successfully done at CIA, by focusing on mission and demanding that every team member be treated equally and with dignity and respect.”
Pompeo did not mention LGBT people, women, or Muslims – and has a history of not only treating them unequally, but actively working to deny them equality.
As a U.S. Congressman from Kansas, Pompeo “cosponsored the State Marriage Defense Act, which attempted to slow the spread of marriage equality, and the Marriage and Religious Freedom Act, a precursor to the current First Amendment Defense Act, which is essentially ‘license to discriminate’ legislation. He also voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act when the domestic violence law’s language was expanded to explicitly include same-sex couples,” The Advocate’s Trudy Ring reported last month.
Ring continues on Pomeo’s history:
He called the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality decision “a shocking abuse of power” that “flies in the face of centuries of shared understanding of our Constitution,” according to research compiled by GLAAD. He called earlier pro-equality rulings, gutting the Defense of Marriage Act and striking down California’s Proposition 8, “both sad and counter to the most profound tradition of our great nation.”
And then there’s this:
After the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, he said “deafening” silence from American Muslim leaders made them “potentially complicit” in terrorist acts, when in fact many of them had condemned the bombing. In his 2010 run for Congress, his campaign sent a tweet calling his opponent, an Indian-American, a “turban topper” who “could be a muslim, a hindu, a buddhist etc who knows.” Campaign staff later apologized.
That’s just a small portion of The Advocate’s lengthy look into Pompeo’s background.
It’s hard to see how he could be viewed credibly as representing the United States of America as Secretary of State.
Pompeo has a long history of partnering with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, and last year under Pompeo’s leadership – without warning, notice, or explanation – an appearance at CIA by Judy and Dennis Shepard, who founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation, was canceled just before it was scheduled to begin.
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