Days after telling a meeting of anti-LGBT activists that he is with them “100 percent,” Donald Trump sent a tweet today thanking the LGBT community for what he apparently thinks is its uniform support for his presidential candidacy.
Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2016
Trump is trying to use the massacre in Orlando to win support for his cause of attacking all Muslim-Americans, including LGBT Muslims.
We know that Trump is pretending to be a friend to LGBT people in order to justify his discriminatory proposals, such as his proposed ban on the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims from stepping foot in the U.S., because his own words and actions make clear that he is no ally of the LGBT community.
He has sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling and pledged to appoint judges “as close to Scalia as you could find,” referring to the late justice known for his broadsides against gay people and the “homosexual agenda.”
Not only would Trump radically reshape the judiciary, where many key LGBT issues are decided, but he has also vowed to sign anti-LGBT activists’ top legislative priority, the misnamed First Amendment Defense Act, which would give legal approval to discrimination against LGBT people, and gave his blessing to Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’ attempt to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
And that’s not to mention the fact that his attacks on women, Latinos and immigrants are also attacks on many LGBT people.
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Frank Amedia, a pastor who serves as Trump’s “liaison for Christian policy,” describes HIV/AIDS as “a disease that comes because of unnatural sex.” Trump’s frequent campaign surrogate Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist preacher, has blasted gays for living a “filthy,” “miserable” and “perverse” “lifestyle” that he says encourages child abuse and the coming of the Antichrist.
One of Trump’s top advisers, Ben Carson, made waves during his unsuccessful presidential bid with his bizarre, ludicrous and offensive diatribes against gay rights.
Trump has also partnered with Harlem’s notorious 'stone homos' pastor James David Manning and far-right radio show host Alex Jones, who thinks the LGBT rights movement is a “suicide cult” bent on the destruction of humanity.
Trump is not interested in promoting LGBT rights. He is simply opportunistically trying to use a community hit by tragedy as cover for his own bigotry.
