Mike Pence Affirms Trump Will Roll Back Obama’s Landmark LGBT Rights Protections

by The Gaily Grind Staff

10/07/2016 

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Mike Pence has offered voters the clearest indication yet that a Donald Trump administration would work hard to reverse advances in LGBT rights made by President Obama, indicating his future administration’s intent to roll back guidance issued by the Obama administration to schools that urged them not to discriminate against transgender students.

Last year, President Obama signed an executive order which protected federal contractors from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Earlier this year, the Obama administration followed the executive order with a mandate prohibiting schools from discriminating against transgender students and assuring them access to the restroom consistent with their gender identity.

Pence delivered his remarks a day after the vice presidential debate on the “Family Talk Broadcast” hosted by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. 

In the interview, Dobson asked Pence whether Trump’s administration would reverse the guidance and whether they would also reverse a rule from the Department of Health & Human Services mandating non-discrimination for transgender people in health care, including transition-related care and gender reassignment surgery.

Pence blasted the administration, saying the transgender initiatives demonstrate “there’s no area of our lives too small for them to want to regulate, no aspect of our Constitution too large for them to be willing to ignore.”

“These questions that come up, Donald Trump and I both believe not only can be resolved with common sense at the local level, but they are every single day, working with parents and administrators and teachers,” Pence said.

The Indiana governor asserted that the federal government should not have any say on whether school administrators should be able to discriminate against transgender students.

“These issues, I can tell you, are resolved in the state of Indiana whenever they come up, and they should be resolved with the safety and well-being of our children first and foremost, their privacy interests and rights and with common sense,” Pence said. “Donald Trump and I simply believe that all of these issues are best resolved at the state level by the people of communities, by the standards they want to set.”

Pence’s echoed a campaign promise Trump made to roll back the guidance during an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year.

“In the absence of the federal guidance, these issues have been addressed at the state and local level,” said Nathan Smith, director of public policy for GLSEN. “A lot of cities and a lot of localities have been very good on addressing those issues. A lot of them have also not been very good, and that’s led to really a patchwork of protections for transgender students across the country.”

Just take a look at Pence’s lengthy anti-LGBT record:

• Pence signed Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act last year, which would have given organizations the right to refuse service to LGBT people on religious grounds. “This bill is not about discrimination,” he defended at the time.

• Opposing the nationwide Supreme Court equal marriage ruling, Pence urged that Indiana amend its constitution to outlaw marriage equality.

• Pence opposed the Department of Education’s guidance that transgender students have the right to access restrooms consistent with their gender identity. “The federal government has no business getting involved in issues of this nature,” he said.

• Earlier this year, the governor simply could not answer whether or not he thought it should be legal to fire individuals based on their sexuality.

• As a member of Congress, Pence voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

• In 2000, Pence thought it would be a good idea to drain HIV prevention funding so as to instead fund state-sponsored ‘gay cure’ therapy.

• In 2015, Pence would drag his feet on supporting a needle exchange program to combat an HIV outbreak in Indiana related to needle-sharing among drug users. His decision, according to Pence, stemmed from his moral opposition to needle-exchange programs. The outbreak was later deemed “preventable”.

• Last month, an investigation found that while head of the Indiana Policy Review journal in the early ‘90s, Pence approved blatantly anti-LGBT articles. In 1993, for instance, they criticized The Wall Street Journal for participating in a job fair for gay journalists. Another issue published that year targeted Bill Clinton for reforms permitting closeted individuals serving in the army.

• Pence opposed the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,”. He said the decision would turn the military into “a backdrop for social experimentation.”

• Calling it a “radical social agenda”, Pence voted against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. On a state level, Pence has done nothing to change the fact that Indiana still lacks a hate crimes law that covers LGBT people.

 h/t: WashingtonBlade 

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