Memo to the LGBT community: Donald Trump is not your enemy

Donald Trump had no sooner delivered his victory speech and my Facebook page — LGBTrump (the largest gays for Trump Facebook page) — was inundated with messages from LGBT Americans fearful that the president-elect would take away their rights.

Why were so many messages pouring in? The LGBT Left was off the rails telling the LGBT community that its rights — especially marriage — were on the chopping block under President-elect Trump.

{mosads}“This morning, LGBTQ people — particularly young people and their parents — woke up scared and filled with questions about our country and their place in it,” Sarah McBride, national spokeswoman for the LGBT Left Human Rights Campaign, said. McBride added that “much of our community’s progress over the last eight years is at risk after yesterday’s election.”

But what progress was McBride talking about? What exactly would a President Trump take away from the 14% of LGBT citizens that voted for him, this author included?

There are no signs that the LGBT community will be in the crosshairs of a Trump administration. In fact that evidence is just the opposite.  

In the 1980s & 1990s Trump donated heavily to charities that focused on the AIDS outbreak. When he floated a third party presidential run in 1999 he went on record saying he would consider adding sexual orientation to the Civil Rights Act. Trump is also believed to be the first private club owner in Palm Beach — in this case Mar-a-Lago — to admit a gay couple. This is not the resume of an LGBT foe.

Fast forward to the 2016 election and Trump’s view of the LGBT community remained unchanged. In June 2015 he forcefully condemned the terror attack at Pulse nightclub, a LGBT club. In condemning this attack, Trump bravely spoke an ugly truth many in the elite dare not speak – radical Islam and the LGBT community do not mix. Trump took this truth to Cleveland when he vowed to protect the LGBT community.

“Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted LGBTQ community,” Trump told the Republican delegates. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

During the same convention, Trump asked gay Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel to address the Republican delegates. Thiel accepted then and is now a part of Trump’s transition team. And now Trump is said to be considering Richard Grenell, an openly gay man, to be his ambassador to the U.N.

Trump, therefore, does not fit the LGBT Left narrative about Republican politicians. This narrative holds that since the Moral Majority of the 1980s the entire Republican Party is connected to the bromance of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

The shelf-life of this logic has now expired with the Christian Right’s influence pertaining to same-sex marriage shrinking in GOP circles and the election of Trump’s, the first post-culture war GOP president.

“It’s irrelevant because it was already settled. It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it’s done,” Trump told Lesley Stahl when the CBS reporter asked the president-elect whether he supported marriage equality. 

Trump doubled down and suggested he would not appoint judges that would seek to overturn the ruling. “It’s done. It– you have– these cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And, I’m fine with that.”

“I’m fine with that” surely does not fit the talking points being promulgated by the LGBT Left. Here was the president-elect, a man who has long been compared to Hitler by progressives, saying he was fine with marriage equality. What did the LGBT community have to fear if their right to marriage was safe? 

Even more telling, Trump made it clear that there was one case he would work to overturn — the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion. Even though that was “settled” law, Trump stated he would appoint Supreme Court justices to return the issue back to the states.

“The judges will be pro-life,” Trump said while advocating a state-by-state approach to abortion. When Stahl pointed out under such an approach some women might be denied an abortion, Trump stated, “Yeah, well, they’ll perhaps have to go, they’ll have to go to another state.” 

Translation — Trump has no qualms seeking to overturn Supreme Court precedent, but he has no desire to do so when it comes to marriage equality. Trump, thus, was telling evangelicals he was with them on the issue of life — our most fundamental right — but was not willing to do battle over civil marriage. This was the surest signal to the LGBT community that Trump was not a foe, but a friend.

If one needs further proof, look no further to my former employer, the American Family Association. Spokesperson Bryan Fischer, hearing the news of Grenell, tweeted: “Heads up to conservatives: we’ll have to fight Trump as hard on the homosexual agenda as we would have had to fight Hillary.” Fischer knows he and AFA are toast; political dinosaurs that are so marginalized on LGBT issues that they are political parodies born of a sad joke.

So if the Christian Right is so impotent that no amount of blue pills can help them and Trump is not a foe to the LGBT community, where does the great LGBT threat reside? That would be with a LGBT Left that must keep the gay community in a perpetual state of culture war to raise indefinite amounts of cash.

If equality is achieved and the current GOP president unequivocally stated he will protect that equality, why do we need groups like HRC? We don’t and that is why the claws are out. 

Joseph R. Murray II, is administrator for LGBTrump, former campaign official for Pat Buchanan, and author of “Odd Man Out”. He can be reached at jrm@joemurrayenterprises.com.