Trump Could Still Undermine the Obama LGBTQ Order He Just Reaffirmed

By Ed Kilgore

January 31, 2017
12:51 p.m.

-snip-

At Vox, German Lopez explains that another shoe may soon drop that could undermine today’s action significantly, or even effectively reverse it in many cases:



On the campaign trail, Trump said a whole lot more about protecting the right to discriminate as essential to “religious liberty” than he said about LGBTQ protections. Indeed, he received a definitive seal of approval from none other than Hobby Lobby CEO David Green, whose lawsuit defying Obamacare’s contraception-coverage mandate led to the most important Supreme Court precedent carving out an area of protected discrimination for religious individuals who run for-profit corporations. Anyone supporting that line of reasoning will certainly have no trouble exempting federal employees who claim a religious motive for disliking LGBTQ folk from the executive order allegedly protecting them.

So any celebration of Trump’s announcement today should be put on hold until we see whether it represents the president’s final word on the subject.

And keep in mind the overall context at play: Trump will tonight announce a Supreme Court nominee. “Religious liberty” enthusiasts are mostly rooting for Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neil Grouch, who is considered an important judicial champion of their cause. If Trump goes in another direction, he could assuage hurt feelings among conservative Christian activists by a complementary gesture like a “religious liberty” executive order. But odds are he’ll let the potentially false impression that he’s broken with the Christian Right on LGBTQ rights percolate for a while first.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/trump-could-still-undermine-lgbtq-order-he-just-reaffirmed.html