Bigots being bigots
In case you missed it, because bigoted cowards often conduct their bigotry on the weekend when fewer people are paying attention, the Trump administration made two decisions on Friday night regarding the LGBTQ community:
Trump rejected requests from U.S. embassies to fly the rainbow pride flag on embassy flagpoles during June, LGBTQ Pride Month.
No explanation. No earthly reason why this shouldn’t be allowed. Under the Obama administration, all U.S. embassies received permission to hoist rainbow flags during the month-long celebration without incident.
Just hateful bigots being themselves.
This is also not the first time that Trump rejected this request. Last year he rejected similar requests to fly pride flags at embassies, so several ambassadors found ways to light up their embassies in rainbow colors instead.
Much worse, the Trump administration announced on Friday night that it’s eliminating an Obama-era healthcare regulation prohibiting discrimination against patients who are transgender.
This particularly awful decision was made on the four-year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, in which 49 people were killed at a popular LGBTQ venue in Orlando.
So if you have a child, sibling, parent, friend, or colleague who is transgender, they can now be legally discriminated against based upon their gender in decisions related to healthcare.
Trump has deemed people of this gender are unworthy of fair and equal treatment.
Perhaps feeling that his racial bigotry wasn’t enough to satisfy himself or his base of supporters, Trump decided to extend his brand of bigotry to a new segment of American society.
Want to do something to help? Here are three things that you can do from home today:
#1. Download the “5 Calls” app and begin using it to call your Senators and members of Congress daily. The app will allow you to choose the issues that you believe are most important, provide a script of exactly what to say, and give you a one-click means of calling.
Phone calls to elected leaders make a difference.
Before quarantine, I would make my call in my car before entering the gym everyday. Since the gym has been closed, I have admittedly neglected this important means of effecting change, but I’ve decided that I’ll make my daily call at the end of every bike ride as a means of cooling down from my ride and firing up my elected leaders.
#2. Join an organization like the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, or GLADD. Make a monetary donation in any amount that you can afford or become a full-fledged, card-carrying member. The people working for these organizations fight like hell every day to make our country more just and need every dollar that they can get.
#3. Support independent journalism by subscribing to a newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post or magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Slate. These publications have repeatedly exposed and documented the lawlessness and corruption of the Trump administration, but they are under constant attack. Subscribing to one or more of these media outlets (in additional to your local newspaper) will help to fund their critical First Amendment efforts.
