Not a gaffe

“Since the founding of our nation, many of our greatest strides, from gaining our independence to abolition of civil rights, to extending the vote for women, have been led by people of faith and started in prayer,” the president said on Thursday. “When we open our hearts to faith we fill our hearts with love.”

Donald J. Trump, 2019 National Prayer Breakfast

The assumption is that his claim during his talk at the Prayer Breakfast that people of faith had abolished civil rights was simply another Trumpian gaffe, but this was not a gaffe, but a statement of fact.

For many religious conservatives, freedom means the right to act on their opposition to same-sex marriage and other practices that go against their beliefs.

On May, 2017, Trump signed the executive order, “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” and the following year President Trump signed an executive order revamping the White House office on faith issues that will consult with faith leaders on ways that the federal government has failed “to comply with protections of federal law for religious liberty”, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued guidelines on it in his subsequent guidance directive, “Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty.”

It is clear from these documents and Trump administration’s actions and utterances when it comes to Muslims that religious liberty only applies to conservative Christians who now have been given license to discriminate against GLBT people, women, religious minorities, and nonreligious people.

When it comes to questions related to religion, Trump relies on advice from Christian nationalists like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Paula White, Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham, and according to a report “Make America Christian Again,” Christian nationalism was the single most indicator of support for candidate Donald Trump in the 2016.

According to the Sessions guidelines,

 “Except in the narrowest circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law. Therefore, to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law, religious observance and practice should be reasonably accommodated in all government activity, including employment, contracting, and programming.”

The Alliance Defense Fund, a legal advocacy and organizing coalition for Christian nationalists, believes not only that America was founded as a Christian nation, but also that religious conservatives must save America from moral decline, and they are the ones whom Sessions consulted when coming up with his DOJ guidelines for interpreting federal religious liberty protections.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development allocates $2.4 billion of non-sectarian tax dollars annually in the form of homelessness assistance grants, but, based on someone’s claimed religious beliefs, GLBT homeless youth could be turned away from faith-based shelters that receive HUD funds.

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The guidelines also direct that the DOJ should not follow up on complaints filed by someone whose civil rights are ignored if it is based on someone else’s religion.

The Department of Education announced it would no longer pursue complaints filed by Transgender students prohibited from using bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

The department of Health and Human Services created the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division whose mission is to ensure that health care workers and health care companies are never forced to participate in particular medical services, such as abortion and assisted suicide, but the HHS director of the Office of Civil Rights has also claimed that if they object, health workers would be allowed to opt out of participating in medical procedures that could further gender transitions.

When the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights expressed its support of anti-discrimination, stating that “civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination” were of “preeminent” importance and that religious exemptions to such policies “must be weighed carefully and defined narrowly on a fact-specific basis”, and the commission chairman, Martin R. Castro, said,

“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance”,

17 faith leaders signed a protest letter saying that the commission’s report “stigmatized tens of millions of religious Americans, their communities and their faith-based institutions, and threatens the religious freedom of all our citizens.”

When Trump signed his religious freedom order that rescinded the rights of citizens replacing the Constitution with religion, there was a gospel choir, invocations from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon and Hindu faith leaders, and Vice President Pence declaring that “believers of every background have a champion in President Donald Trump.”

Nah.

Not a gaffe.

 

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