The Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver has resigned from the group after admitting to sending sexually inappropriate messages to several men online.
The veteran strategist, who has a wife and children, is accused by at least 30 young men of dangling his political connections and access to high-profile job opportunities “in an attempt to receive sexual favours,” according to aForensic News report.
Weaver later issued a statement apologising in full for his actions while coming out as gay.
“To the men I made uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations at the time: I am truly sorry,” he told Axios. “They were inappropriate and it was because of my failings that this discomfort was brought on you.”
“The truth is that I’m gay,” Weaver added. “And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonising place.
“I have the most beautiful, loving and courageous family who I deceived all these years. I don’t deserve you. But I love you with all my heart and I’m sorry that you have to suffer for my mistakes.”
The Lincoln Project started in 2019 as a coalition of Republican operatives, including Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, who united to help prevent Donald Trump’s re-election.
The group gained a reputation for its viral memes bashing Trump and his administration, including billboards in New York City mocking Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
Weaver, 61, became one of the most prominent members of the group – until earlier this week, when allegations of his inappropriate behaviour began to surface.
Forensic News claimed that at least 30 individuals had come forward, accusing Weaver of sending them unsolicited pictures, flying “politically-ambitious men to his location for massages,” and offering jobs in exchange for sexual relations.
The men were reportedly aged between 19 and 28, and most indicated that they were in college or had recently graduated and were looking for jobs in politics. The crux of the complaints levied by the men is that Weaver used his position of power to exploit them as they were beginning their careers.
While Weaver said he took “full responsibility” for the inappropriate messages and conversations, he attributed the emergence of the allegations to critics’ animosity for the Lincoln Project.
“I want to state clearly that the other smears being levelled at me by Donald Trump’s enablers as a way to get back at the Lincoln Project for our principled stand for democracy are categorically false and outrageous,” he asserted.
A spokesperson for The Lincoln Project said simply: “John’s statement speaks for itself.”
A Republican lawmaker in Montana has introduced a pair of bills targeting transgender youth.
House Bill 112, authored by state Rep. John Fuller, requires athletic teams at all public educational institutions — from elementary schools to colleges — to be designated based on “biological sex.” The measure, also known as the Save Women’s Sports Act, would prohibit transgender students from joining teams that match their gender identity, no matter how long ago they transitioned.
“Athletic teams or sports designated for females, women, or girls may not be open to students of the male sex,” it reads in part.
Fuller told Montana Public Radio that, as a former women’s soccer coach, he believes allowing transgender girls to play on women’s teams is unfair. His bill would allow students to sue if they feel they’ve been deprived or harmed in some way by a trans athlete participating in school sports.
“I want to protect and defend women’s sports,” he told the Helena Independent Record. “I believe this continued practice of allowing males to compete as females … is egregious and wrong.”
Another bill, also penned by Fuller, would bar health care professionals from providing transgender minors certain transition-related care.
Under House Bill 113, also known as An Act Providing for Youth Health Protection, physicians and other medical professionals are prohibited from treating gender dysphoria in minors by prescribing, providing or administering puberty-suppressing drugs or cross-sex hormones (including estrogen and testosterone); performing gender-reassignment surgery; or removing “any otherwise healthy or nondiseased body part or tissue.” Penalties for providers who violate the law would include fines of up to $50,000.
Fuller said it was “deeply wrong” for young people to undergo such procedures, according to Montana Public Radio. “We don’t let children do all kinds of things,” he told the Helena Independent Record. “Why should we allow this to happen? The state has a vested interest to protect children from such barbaric behavior.”
Fuller did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News.
Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that after the fallout from North Carolina’s House Bill 2, conservatives pivoted away from so-called “bathroom bills” toward legislation targeting trans youth.
“After the marriage decision, there was an immediate backlash on trans people using the bathroom — you saw dozens of these bills,” Strangio told NBC News. “Then you see the extremely affirming response — from companies, from the NCAA — and between 2017 and 2019 they lose the bathroom fight. There’s no more laws, they lose their court fights and they lose ballot initiatives.”
In 2018, Montana’s own bathroom bill garnered less than half of the 25,000 signatures needed to qualify for a state referendum.
Then, in 2019, Juniper Eastwood, a student at the University of Montana, became the first transgender runner to compete at the Division I level. That, according to Strangio, is “when conservatives start shifting to sports.”
“They start forming this narrative about trans student athletes that appears on Fox News, Breitbart, the Daily Caller. It attracts some cis women groups who were worried about female athletes,” he said, using a shortened term for the word cisgender, which means nontransgender.
That same year, Strangio said, a highly publicized custody battleinvolving a 7-year-old transgender girl in Texas became “another right-wing media moment.”
“By summer 2020, you have the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation drafting these model trans-youth bills,” he added. “They’re not constituent-led. They’re put together by well-funded right- wing groups and shipped out to state legislatures. And they play on people’s fears and misconceptions.”
In 2020, the Michigan-based American Principles Project spent $4 million on political ads denouncing transgender athletes and access to gender-affirming health care for people under 18.
In addition to Montana, at least six other states — including Alabama, Indiana, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Missouri and Utah — are currently considering bills levying criminal or civil penalties for offering transition care to minors, according to the ACLU.
Lawmakers have sponsored legislation restricting transgender students from sports participation in at least 12 states, including Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Washington. Only Idaho’s bill has passed so far.
Idaho’s House Bill 500, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, was signed by Republican Gov. Brad Little last March. A month later, Lindsay Hecox, a transgender student athlete at Boise State University, filed a lawsuit challenging the law. After a lower court issued an injunction against enforcement, HB 500 is now before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, nearly 200 elite female athletes — including Billie Jean King, Megan Rapinoe and Candace Parker — argued HB 500 “flies in the face of bedrock principles of equality and diversity in sports.”
“The global athletic community grows stronger when we welcome and champion all athletes — including LGBTQI+ athletes.” King said in a statement.
Strangio said Montana’s HB 112 is practically “a carbon copy” of Idaho’s law.
Readings for both Montana bills were rescheduled from Wednesday to Jan. 20 to allow for public comment. Republicans, who currently control both chambers of the Montana state Legislature, will have until April to pass the measure this legislative session.
On Thursday, more than 150 state nonprofits, businesses and professional groups joined the organization in opposing Fuller.
“Make no mistake: these bills target and attack trans youth and will cause them serious and lasting harm,” ACLU of Montana Executive Director Caitlin Borgmann said in a statement. “We cannot let fear mongering and lies about what it means to be transgender result in laws that would stigmatize trans youth, harm families and communities, and drive businesses away from Montana.”
Bozeman restaurateur Pete Strom pointed to the economic toll HB 112 and 113 could take by recalling the fallout from North Carolina’s HB2 “bathroom bill.” In 2016, North Carolina lost an estimated $630 million in economic activity related to HB2, according to Forbes.
“Montana doesn’t need that,” he said in a statement. “It’s simply common sense to oppose these out-of-touch and harmful anti-trans bills.”
Ned Price, who had served in the Obama years in a senior communications role for the White House National Security Council, has been tapped for the role of State Department spokesperson, the Washington Blade has confirmed.
Price, who’d would be the first openly gay person to serve in the role, obtains the position as the Biden transition team announced Saturday morning a slew of foreign policy appointments, many of whom served in the Obama administration.
Among the picks were Wendy Sherman, nominated to be deputy Secretary of State, and Victoria Nuland, nominated to be under secretary of state for political affairs.
Price, an alum of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, served in the Obama administration as a CIA analyst and spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. In the Trump era, Price joined National Security Action an organization of national security experts critical of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.
Other roles for Price have been contributor for NBC News and professor at Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Trailblazing LGBT+ activist Ken Jones, who helped fund Gilbert Baker‘s Pride flag, has passed away after a battle with cancer.
Jones passed away Thursday (14 January) at the age of 70, having been diagnosed with bladder cancer in September last year.
He was a pioneer who pushed for the desegregation of the LGBT+ rights movement, and worked alongside activists like Roma Guy, Sally Miller Gearhart, and Gilbert Baker in San Francisco.
Jones was the first Black chair of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee board, worked for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation from its conception, and even illegally traveled to Cuba in the 1980s to help with the AIDS crisis there.
His life was dramatised in the 2017 ABC miniseries When We Rise, and later in life he was ordained as a deacon so he could officiate weddings.
Ken Jones was a hero. He survived many struggles. He deeply loved his family and his community, and dedicated his entire…
Jones’ death was announced publicly by his close friend and fellow activist Cleve Jones on Facebook, who wrote: “Ken Jones was a hero. He survived many struggles.
“He deeply loved his family and his community, and dedicated his entire life to the movement for peace and justice.
“He was very grateful to all of you who reached out to him with messages of encouragement and love during his illness.
“Today Ken lost his fight against cancer. A memorial will be arranged when it is safe once more for us to gather. Rest in Power, Ken. I love you.”
KEN JONES 1950 – 2021 — rest in power my magnificent friend. My heart breaks at this morning’s news that you’ve left…
Screenwriter and activist Dustin Lance Black, who created When We Rise, also shared on Facebook: “Rest in power my magnificent friend. My heart breaks at this morning’s news that you’ve left this world.
“Many know Ken as one of the three main characters depicted in When We Rise. Ken was a hero and an inspiration.
“An ordained deacon, he worked to desegregate the LGBTQ movement, was a passionate HIV/AIDS activist, and even played a role in helping fund the creation of his friend Gilbert Baker’s Pride flag.
“I will never forget Ken’s beaming smile, his deep kindness, and his inextinguishable passion for fairness.”
Forty-five LGBTQ and feminist archives, museums and public history institutions from 22 countries have endorsed an open letter that outlines the best practices developed by such organizations over the past 50 years. The letter marks the first time a group of this size and geographical reach has put forward a basic charter for their work. The central point: The reconstitution of the lost and erased queer past must be entrusted to independent institutions conceived and directed by the LGBTQI community itself.
Published on Friday, January 8, in the national French newspaper Libération, the open letter calls on the French government to support the efforts of the Collectif Archives LGBTQI to establish an LGBTQ archives and public history center in Paris. Organized in 2017, the collective is a nonpartisan association that has proposed adapting the well-established international model to create a world-class queer history institution. The group has met and negotiated extensively with representatives of the City of Paris. The collective notes that such organizations have already existed for decades and receive significant resources and funding from municipal, regional and national governments in other European capitals, including Amsterdam and Berlin.
The open letter offers a forceful rebuttal to a statement released by the Ministry of Culture on December 29, 2020. Responding to a written question from a member of the French National assembly, the ministry asserted that only government officials at state-run institutions such as French National Archives should be in charge of deciding which organizational records, personal papers and artifacts from LGBTQI history should be preserved and how they should be made available.
“We’re grateful to the organizations in France and worldwide who signed the open letter to make it clear that LGBTQ people ourselves are most qualified to conceive and direct the recovery of our own history,” said Renaud Chantraine, a doctoral candidate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a founding member of the collective. “As their initiatives have so successfully demonstrated, the role of the state is not to displace community-based LGBTQ history organizations, but to serve as a respectful partner in our important cultural work.”
As a next step, the collective has submitted a formal request to meet with French Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot to make its case for support for its project to create an autonomous and independent LGBTQ archives and public history center in Paris.
The Republic of Latvia has voted to define family solely as “a union of a male and female person”, excluding the country’s countless loving LGBT+ families.
On Thursday (14 January) the Latvian parliament, or Saeima, voted 47-25 for an amendment to the constitution stipulating that a family unit consists of a marriage between a woman and a man.
Section 110 of the constitution will now read: “The state protects and supports marriage – a union between a man and a woman, a family based on marriage, blood relation or adoption, the rights of parents and a child, including the right to grow up in a family based on a mother (woman) and father (man).”
The vote came in response to a pro-LGBT+ ruling last year by the constitutional court which confirmed that parents in a family can also be same-sex, and imposed on the state the “obligation to protect and support” them as well.
But National Alliance leader Raivis Dzintars declared that the court had violated its powers, creating a “definition of a family that is not acceptable to the general public in Latvia”.
“Latvia is a democratic country with a diversity of views and respect for every citizen. But at the same time, there are values that have been especially close and even sacred to our nation and its culture for hundreds of years,” he told Skaties.
“One of these values is the understanding of the family, which is based on the father and mother – man and woman – and their children. Until now, such an understanding seemed self-evident, but with the decision of the constitutional court it is questioned.”
The decision represents a huge setback for the Latvian LGBT+ community, and yet another troubling example of the anti-LGBT+ rhetoric sweeping across eastern Europe.
“Today’s vote in the Latvian Parliament threw us back to the times when being an openly homophobic politician was a thing to be proud of,” tweeted activist Kristine Garina of the European Pride Organisers Association.
“Forty-seven members of the parliament voted YES to proceed with ‘same-sex families are not families’ statement to be added to the constitution.”
Latvian politician Marija Golubeva described the move as a “call for discrimination” and an attempt to separate families into right and wrong.
“Support for these changes is a mockery of the principles of a democratic state, and I call for their rejection,” she urged the parliament.
Two years after the World Health Organization and 11 years after France, Israel has finally agreed that being trans is not a mental disorder.
New guidelines, drafted by Israel’s health ministry after three years of consulting with LGBT+ and trans organisations, set out how hospitals and healthcare facilities must treat transgender people.
The guidance directs that hospitals and healthcare facilities must have at least one staff member trained in trans awareness, use a trans person’s correct pronouns regardless of the gender on their official documents, and to provide unisex facilities where possible while allowing trans people to use gendered spaces in accordance with their gender identity.
Ministers also noted that so-called conversion therapy that tries to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity has no ethical or professional basis, as well as confirming that being trans is not a psychological disorder.
“Transgender people, or people on the trans spectrum, is an umbrella term used to describe people who span a broad spectrum of gender identities, distinctive from the one they were identified with and registered as at birth,” the guidance says, according to Haaretz.
“People from this population group are at high risk of suffering physical and verbal violence, discrimination in employment and a lack of access to public resources being treated as social outcasts, which can worsen psychological distress and lead to susceptibility to a high rate of illness relative to the rest of the population,” the guidelines continue.
“This is particularly noticeable when it comes to mental health.”
Ella Amest, co-director general of trans advocacy group Ma’avarim, said the new guidelines are “an important and significant step for the community and for the health system”.
“Many of us require psychological services due to our confrontations with transphobia, beyond the more common reasons experienced by the rest of the population, but the system doesn’t always know how to treat us,” Amest said.
She added: “The guidelines provide those who work in the field with substantive, clear tools and support from above. We hope that more and more public services will adopt this process and formulate similar guidelines together with trans spectrum organisations.”
The new guidance on how to treat trans people in healthcare settings follows joint recommendations, made in December 2020, by the Justice and Social Welfare Ministries that suggested implementing sweeping reforms to trans rights in Israel.
Deputy attorney general Dina Zilber and deputy director general of the Social Affairs Ministry Avi Motola wrote in an interim report that gender markers and names on government-issued documents should be able to be changed via self-declaration.
The policy, Haaretz reported, would have trans citizens’ declarations authenticated by a lawyer or the Administrator General’s Office. Documents and forms should also provide a third gender option, “other”, they advised.
Falsely accusing someone of being gay is no longer considered defamation per se, a New York appeals court ruled recently.
Defamation is a false statement that damages someone’s reputation. To win a defamation suit in most cases, plaintiffs must be able to show that the statement against them is false and that it caused them to suffer damages or harm, such as losing their job. Defamation per se is a false accusation that is so damaging that plaintiffs don’t have to prove that they suffered damages.
Under New York law, examples of defamation per se include falsely accusing someone of a heinous crime or having a “loathsome disease.” Falsely claiming that someone is homosexual had also been lumped in.
“It meant that it was so shameful and such a disgrace that it was just assumed that obviously your reputation has been injured and you don’t have to prove that element” of damages, Eric Lesh, executive director of the LGBT Bar Association of New York, told NBC News.
“Yes, this is kind of an obvious decision, but the law moves slowly, and society usually pushes it forward.”
ERIC LESH, LGBT BAR ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK
In late December, however, the Supreme Court of the State of New York’s Second Department — one court below the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court — overturned that decades-old precedent when it ruled that a false claim of homosexuality is no longer defamation per se. Such a false claim can still be considered defamatory, but plaintiffs will have to prove that they’ve been damaged by it.
The case, Laguerre v. Maurice, began in 2017, when Jean Renald Maurice, a pastor at the Gethsemane Seventh Day Adventist Church in Brooklyn, publicly claimed at a church meeting of 300 people that a church elder, Pierre Delor Laguerre, “was a homosexual” and that he “disrespected the church by viewing gay pornography on the church’s computer,” according to the court opinion. The allegation led to Laguerre being relieved of his responsibilities and thrown out as a member of the church.
The Second Department court ultimately dismissed Laguerre’s defamation claim, citing Yonaty v. Mincolla, a 2012 ruling by the Supreme Court’s Third Department that found that previous decisions labeling false claims of homosexuality as defamation per se were “inconsistent with current public policy and should no longer be followed.” That decision also ruled that “it cannot be said that current public opinion supports a rule that would equate statements imputing homosexuality with accusations of serious criminal conduct or insinuations that an individual has a loathsome disease.”
The Second Department agreed, writing that the “profound and notable transformation of cultural attitudes and governmental protective laws” for LGBTQ people influenced its decision. The court cited a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which found that laws criminalizing homosexual conduct were unconstitutional, and the court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges establishing the right to same-sex marriage throughout the country.
“Based on the foregoing, we conclude that the false imputation of homosexuality does not constitute defamation per se,” the Second Department wrote in its Dec. 23 decision.
Lesh called the ruling a “no brainer,” but said it is an important way to evaluate how far we’ve come on LGBTQ equality.
“It took a long time for New York law to catch up to where we were public-policy wise,” he said. “Yes, this is kind of an obvious decision, but the law moves slowly, and society usually pushes it forward.”
The Second Department’s decision doesn’t set precedent for the entire state of New York, Lesh noted. The court is based in Brooklyn and its jurisdiction includes Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island and parts of Staten Island and the Hudson Valley, while the Third Department is seated in Albany and includes the Capitol District and part of Central New York. The other departments in New York’s Appellate Division — the First, which covers the Bronx and Manhattan, and the Fourth, which includes the western and part of the central area of the state — will have to rule independently on the issue. When given the opportunity, Lesh said they will likely rule the same way the Second and Third Departments have.
Across the United States, whether false claims of homosexuality are considered defamatory per se is dependent on the state and, often, on the court.
Historically, many states considered false accusations of homosexuality to be defamation per se, because their state law criminalized homosexual conduct. However, after the Lawrence v. Texas ruling, which struck down the country’s remaining sodomy laws, this started to change. Several courts have ruled similarly to New York’s Second Department since that landmark 2003 ruling.
Defamation lawsuits resulting from false accusations of being LGBTQ — like the one brought before New York’s Second Department — are less common than they once were due to increasing acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, according to Brad Sears, executive director of the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. But when the issue does come up, Sears said the general trend courts have followed is to rule that it is no longer defamation per se.
There are places where being LGBTQ could, for example, cause someone to lose their job due to bias, and when false accusations are made in those cases, someone could still sue for defamation. But unlike a suit for defamation per se, the plaintiff would have to prove financial or other damages.
Sears said last month’s New York decision and others like it make an important statement about how LGBTQ people are viewed and treated in society: “I think what’s important is this kind of bias no longer has the backing of the law.”
With little more than a week left to the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services has finalized a rule permitting social-service providers that receive government funds to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Critics claim the new guidance could have wide-ranging implications for agencies that address adoption and foster-parenting, as well as homelessness, HIV prevention, elder care and other public services.
“Even as Trump administration officials abandon ship, HHS has announced yet another dangerous rule that invites discrimination against the very people federal grant programs are meant to help,” Sasha Buchert, senior attorney for the LGBTQ civil rights group Lambda Legal, said.
According to the 77-page release, published Tuesday in the Federal Register, Obama-era requirements that agencies refrain from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity and recognize same-sex marriages as legally valid violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“Given the careful balancing of rights, obligations, and goals in the public-private partnerships in federal grant programs, the Department believes it appropriate to impose only those nondiscrimination requirements required by the Constitution and federal statutes,” the rule states.
Slated to take effect on Feb. 11, the rule change is targeted at child welfare organizations, according to Julie Kruse, director of federal policy for LGBTQ advocacy group Family Equality. Whether private adoption agencies receiving taxpayer money can deny services to same-sex potential parents is at the heart of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, now before the Supreme Court.
Kruse said both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have made allowing discrimination in adoption and foster care a priority over the last four years.
At the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2019, Trump bemoaned that St. Vincent Catholic Charities in Michigan was facing legal action“for living by the values of its Catholic faith” and turning away same-sex prospective parents. The president vowed that his administration was “working to ensure that faith-based adoption agencies are able to help vulnerable children find their forever families, while following their deeply held beliefs.”
That same year, HHS issued a waiver allowing a Protestant foster care agency to turn away Jewish foster parents and stopped data collection on LGBTQ youth in adoption and foster care.
In November 2019, HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced the agency would stop enforcing anti-discrimination protections against federal grantees, prompting a lawsuit by Lambda Legal and Democracy Forward on behalf of the LGBTQ social services groups Family Equality, True Colors United and SAGE. HHS has also ordered recipients of federal funding to accept employees’ religiously based refusals to perform job duties, including denying contraception to women and medical treatment to transgender patients.
According to Kruse, Tuesday’s final rule could also allow a homeless shelter to turn away a queer teen and a senior center to refuse to drive an elderly gay man to his doctor’s appointment. She’s confident it will be overturned by the incoming Biden administration, calling it a “nasty parting shot that won’t stand.” But she admits “it does clog up the works; it does delay protections.”
HHS was among nine federal agencies tasked by the Trump administration to draft guidelines safeguarding “religious freedom,” along with the Departments of Justice, Education, Labor, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Those orders spun out of a White House faith and opportunity initiative launched in 2018 “to remove barriers which have unfairly prevented faith-based organizations from working with or receiving funding from the federal government.”
The Department of Education issued its final rule last September, determining religious universities and student groups were exempt from sex-discrimination statutes in Title iX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos stated the change would “protect First Amendment freedoms on campus and the religious liberty of faith-based institutions.”
Dena Sher, associate vice president of public policy at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the DoE guidance “discrimination underwritten by tax dollars and tuition fees,” Inside Higher Ed reported.
HHS’s regulation change was announced the same day the Department of Labor’s own final rule took effect, expanding exemptions to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to any contractors — for-profit or nonprofit — who “hold themselves out to the public as carrying out a religious purpose.”
“Religious organizations should not have to fear that acceptance of a federal contract or subcontract will require them to abandon their religious character or identity,” Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia said in a statement on Dec. 7.
President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team declined to comment on whether it would overturn the new HHS rule. But, in a statement, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., vowed to work with the incoming administration “to restore humanity to HHS.”
“From Day One, the Trump administration has been determined to roll back essential protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, religious minorities and other vulnerable communities,” Wyden, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, stated.
“It’s no surprise that in its last days the Trump administration has delivered a devastating blow to try and permanently greenlight taxpayer-funded discrimination and put the health and well being of children and families across the nation at grave risk,” he added.