The Trump administration’s latest bid to have two HIV-positive airmen discharged from service has been blocked by courts for a second time.
The two men, referred to by the pseudonyms Roe and Voe, were given discharge orders in 2017 on the basis that they couldn’t be deployed to the Middle East due to their HIV-positive status.
Both men are on antiretroviral treatment, have no symptoms, and have been pronounced physically fit to deploy by their doctors.
Their discharges were blocked by a preliminary injunction in February last year, which the Department of Defence and the Air Force appealed.
On Friday, January 10, a federal court moved to uphold the injunction, judging that the ban on deployment was based on an “obsolete understanding” of HIV/AIDS.
“[It] may have been justified at a time when HIV treatment was less effective at managing the virus and reducing transmission risks. But any understanding of HIV that could justify this ban is outmoded and at odds with current science,” said Judge James A. Wynn Jr.
“Such obsolete understandings cannot justify a ban, even under a deferential standard of review and even according appropriate deference to the military’s professional judgments.”
The servicemen, like other HIV-positive people with undetectable viral loads, have no symptoms of HIV. They take a daily medication which means they cannot transmit the virus through normal daily activities, and their risk of transmitting the virus through battlefield exposure is extremely low if at all possible.
“But the Government did not consider these realities when discharging these servicemembers, instead relying on assumptions and categorical determinations,” the ruling stated.
“As a result, the Air Force denied these servicemembers an individualised determination of their fitness for military service.”
Roe and Voe were represented by Lambda Legal, a civil rights organisation that fights on behalf of LGBT+ people. Scott Schoettes, Lambda Legal’s HIV Project director, said that the government was unable to give a reasonable justification for the servicemen’s “discriminatory treatment”.
“This is the second federal court to find that the Trump administration’s attempt to discharge these individuals is unlikely to pass legal muster,” he said in a press release.
“At the root of these discharge decisions and other restrictions on the service of people living with HIV are completely outdated and bigoted ideas about HIV.
“Today’s ruling clears the way for us to definitively prove at trial that a person living with HIV can perform the job of soldier or airman as well and as safely as anyone else.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar is facing scrutiny on the campaign trail for voting to confirm many of President Trump’s judicial nominees — and a closer look at that record reveals she backed one pick who once derided as “social policy” not only LGBTQ rights and abortion, but also school integration.
With weeks remaining before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, Klobuchar’s vote to confirm David Ryan Stras to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals could dissuade supporters of LGBTQ rights and other progressives from supporting her in the Democratic presidential primary.
Although Stras hasn’t been as viciously anti-LGBTQ as some of Trump’s other picks, his past is troubling to LGBTQ advocates. As a law professor, Stras in a 2008 legal essay was condescending toward judges’ “ventures” into LGBTQ rights, abortion and school integration.
“The court’s own ventures into contentious areas of social policy — such as school integration, abortion, and homosexual rights — have raised the stakes of confirmation battles even higher,” Stras wrote.
Additionally, as a Minnesota Supreme Court justice, Stras in 2012 joined an opinion allowing an anti-gay marriage amendment to come intact to the ballot with a title obscuring its purpose and effect. Minnesota voters ended up rejecting the amendment anyway.
Along with Sen. Doug Wilson (Ala.), Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), former Sen. Heidi Heithkamp (N.D.) and former Sen. Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Klobuchar was among seven Democrats who joined Republicans in voting for Stras. The vote in January 2018 was otherwise along party lines, 56-42.
Ironically, Klobuchar voted for Stras even though she wasn’t consulted on the judicial pick, which was a customary part of the confirmation process before the Trump era, and recommended other choices for the judicial seat.
Carlie Waibel, national press secretary for the Klobuchar campaign, put distance between Klobuchar and Stras in response to a Washington Blade inquiry on whether the Democratic hopeful stands by her vote.
“Of course Sen. Klobuchar disagrees with his comments, just as she will not agree with every one of his opinions,” Waibel said. “She has made clear that Judge Stras was not the judge that she would ever recommend to the White House. In fact, she recommended other candidates.”
Waibel also defended the senator’s vote for Stras by saying he was better than other picks Trump might have offered.
“Her vote was based on the reality that given the choices, on balance she thought he was better than the other candidates who would have been nominated from other states,” the spokesperson said. “Judge Stras was recommended by liberal Justice Alan Page, who Sen. Klobuchar has great respect for, and in the vast majority of cases on the Minnesota Supreme Court Judge Stras sided with the majority, which included several Democratic-appointed justices.”
Klobuchar’s vote for Stras was one of many in favor of judicial nominees by Trump, who set records with judicial confirmations in ways that will likely affect the courts for generations to come.
According to an April 2019 article in ThinkProgress, Klobuchar voted for more than 56 percent of his judicial picks two years into his presidency. According to the Klobuchar campaign, the percentage since that time has dropped to just 33 percent.
Meanwhile, other Democratic senators who have run for president this cycle, such as Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, had a knee-jerk opposition to all of them.
Klobuchar cast a vote for Stras even though he was opposed by civil rights and progressive groups, who pointed to his statements and actions as a law professor and Minnesota Supreme Court justice. Among the groups that opposed him were Lambda Legal, People for the American Way and Alliance for Justice.
“His vision of the role of the courts as a nefarious force that seeks to block the will of the majority sends a dangerous message to vulnerable minorities that their constitutional rights are not guaranteed,” McGowan wrote. “Justice Stras’ failure to appreciate the important role that an independent judiciary plays in our constitutional democracy causes communities like ours grave concern.”
In a 2008 essay titled “Understanding the New Politics of Judicial Appointments,” Stras wrote intensified media scrutiny and organized interest groups have politicized the judicial confirmation process, which he said made lawmakers act “with a keen eye toward pleasing constituent groups and maintaining a consistent policy image.”
As an example of attempts at “pleasing constituent groups,” Stras pointed to judicial rulings on LGBTQ rights, abortion and school integration, suggesting either the decisions were best left to the political process or the courts got it wrong.
Although the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is the case most cited in the article, Stras also draws on the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, noting with a tinge of skepticism the court “struck down a Texas ban on homosexual sodomy because, according to the court, the state law violated privacy rights.”
Anthony Kreis, visiting assistant professor of law for the Chicago-Kent College of Law, told the Blade comments deriding LGBTQ rights as “social policy” are off-base.
“The problem with the notion of LGBTQ rights as being ‘social policy,’ is that viewpoint indicates that the Constitution’s protections do not sweep broadly enough to protect sexual minorities,” Kreis said. “In other words, LGBTQ people are at the mercy of legislatures to do right by them — and so then courts aren’t reliable actors to combat homophobia and transphobia.”
In written responses to questions from the Senate on his 2008 writing, Stras when asked about school integration acknowledged the Supreme Court applied the Fourteenth Amendment to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education, which he said “overruled the Supreme Court’s detestable decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.”
“When I wrote the referenced book review essay, I did so as a law professor, not as a judge,” Stras added. “I was describing the factors that have increased political polarization surrounding the judicial nomination process over the past several decades.”
Asked whether the U.S. Constitution provides a textual basis for rights to contraception, women’s access to abortion and same-sex marriage, Stras acknowledged the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of abortion rights and marriage equality, saying he’d “follow all binding precedent, including each of these precedents” on the Eighth Circuit.
Four years later, when Stras was a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court, he joined an opinion that prevented the Minnesota secretary of state from changing the ballot title on a proposed anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment from “Recognition of Marriage Solely Between One Man and One Woman” to “Limited the Status of Marriage to Opposite Sex Couples.”
Although Minnesota law dictates the secretary of state must “provide an appropriate title” for proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot, the court in the case of Limmer v. Ritchie concluded that language doesn’t enable the official to change a ballot title designated by the state legislature.
“Allowing the secretary of state, an executive branch officer with no constitutional authority over the form and manner of proposed constitutional amendments, to simply ignore the legislature’s action in proposing and passing a title to accompany a ballot question on a constitutional amendment potentially risks interfering with the legislature’s constitutional authority,” the decision says.
The decision, however, wasn’t unanimous. Minnesota Supreme Court Judge Minnesota Alan Page criticized the majority in his dissent by saying the ruling “announces a fundamentally flawed interpretation” of state law.
“Under the court’s view, a majority of the legislature could propose a constitutional amendment to, say, reinstate prohibition, propose the ballot title ‘Eliminating the Personal Income Tax,’ the secretary of state would be obligated to put the legislature’s title on the ballot, and under the standard the court announces today, this court could do nothing to prevent it,” Page wrote. “That is a result I cannot countenance.”
It should be noted that although the Klobuchar campaign defended the Minnesota Democrat’s vote for Stras by saying he was recommended by Page, the two weren’t in agreement in this instance.
Stras’s LGBTQ record was just part of the reason civil rights and progressives opposed his confirmation. A member of the Federalist Society, Stras clerked for conservative U.S. Associate Justice Clarence Justice, whom he called a “mentor” upon being sworn in to the Minnesota Supreme Court.
In Peterson v. Minnesota, which involves a police officer suing the City of Minneapolis for age discrimination, the Minnesota Supreme Court determined the 14 months the city took to investigate the case need not be applied to the statute of limitations under the law. Stras, however, joined a dissent that would have prevented the officer from bringing his case to the jury.
When the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a rape case trial judges can allow expert testimony to explain why a victim would delay in reporting the incident, Stras strikingly dissented on procedural grounds. The testimony was deemed warranted in the case because the victim had waited several hours before reporting the incident.
Stras has cultivated this record even though his own family experienced persecution as a member of a minority community. Stras, who’s believed to be the first Jewish person to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court, is the descendant of Holocaust survivors.
To be sure, Klobuchar has built a solid record in support of LGBTQ rights as a member of the U.S. Senate. She was a co-sponsor of the Respect for Marriage Act, which sought to repeal the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act before it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, voted in favor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and now co-sponsors the Equality Act. The Minnesota Democrat received a perfect score of “100” in the latest Human Rights Campaign congressional scorecard.
However, Klobuchar’s vote to confirm Stras to the Eighth Circuit despite his record on LGBTQ rights stands out.
Kreis acknowledged “there are often many reasons why senators could vote for nominees they don’t favor,” but didn’t see that at play with Klobuchar’s vote for Stras.
“It is hard to discern what reason she might have,” Kreis said. “Whatever the reason might be for the favorable vote, it was not a vote cast to help the advancement of LGBTQ rights.”
The Council of the District of Columbia on Tuesday introduced legislation that would strip gendered and “patriarchal” terms from the D.C. code and replace them with gender-neutral language.
The Gendered Terms Modernization Amendment Act of 2020 would change instances of “he” or “she” in the law books to “the individual” or “they.” The bill was introduced by David Grosso, an at-large independent member of the council who has been a leader on LGBTQ legislation during his council tenure.
“We believe very strongly that language matters, that it actually holds power, and that the language of our laws matters,” Grosso told NBC News. “And it’s incredibly important that people feel included in the District of Columbia code to the fullest extent.”
The 43-page bill contains a list of “suggested” terms, Grosso said, “because for me it’s important that we have a hearing and listen to the public fully on what they think we should change it to as well.”
“His” would become “the individual’s,” “men” would become “individuals” or “humans,” “brother” and “sister” would become “sibling” and so on.
“Although we have done a lot of research and a lot of work on this, it is not something we should put out there and say: ‘We’ve got all the answers,’” Grosso said.
Among dozens of other proposed changes, the bill supports modifying the D.C. Charter and Home Rule Act so, for example, “chairman” of the District of Columbia Council would become “chairperson.” Modifications to the Charter and Home Rule Act would need to be approved by Congress.
The bill is co-sponsored by 10 of the 13 council members, and was introduced on a tense day during which member Jack Evans offered his resignation instead of facing a disciplinary hearing over an alleged ethics violation.
D.C. is not the first city to undergo a “linguistic cleansing,” according to Fern Johnson, a Clark University English professor. In a recent interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the efforts of Berkeley, California, to make its city code more gender inclusive, she said “Albuquerque, Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis, New York and Seattle have all made language less gender-specific, but these changes are usually incremental and happen without much fanfare.”
The broadening use of gender-neutral language in everyday vernacular and official documentation is accelerating. In 2017, the Associated Press Stylebook endorsed the use of the singular pronoun “they,” and this year, “they” was Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year” because of high public interest in the word’s definition and use as a singular pronoun.
Authorities are searching for a suspect after a transgender activist was found shot and killed in McAlester, Oklahoma, while on his way to pickup a taxi fare.
Dustin James Parker, 25, was found dead Wednesday with the windows of his car shot out after a 911 caller told police they heard gunshots in the early morning, according to NBC affiliate KJRH.McAlester Mayor John Browne assured the community that law enforcement was doing all it could to locate a suspect in Parker’s death.
“McAlester lost a supremely nice person who had such a positive outlook in his life,” Browne said in a statement. “He loved his job especially that it allowed him to help people. His passing is a loss for our community.”
Rover Taxi owner Brian West, 42, told NBC News Saturday that Parker was the first employee hired for the company, which launched in September. Parker, married with four children, had struggled previously juggling multiple jobs.
“I called him and said I have this idea I want you to help me build this and he did,” West said.
The two friends knew each other for about a year and worked together to launch a McAlester chapter of Oklahomans for Equality in May. Despite their short time together, West said that Parker felt like family.
“You couldn’t ask for a better friend, you couldn’t ask for a better husband, you couldn’t ask for a better employee,” West said. “He was an all around awesome person.”
Human Rights Campaign said in statement that it suspects Parker may be the first violent death of a transgender or gender non-conforming person in the new year. HRC has tracked violent deaths of at least 25 transgender or gender non-conforming people in 2019.
The organization has documented more than 150 killings of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals since the beginning of its “Violence Against the Transgender Community” project
“We say ‘at least’ because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported,” HRC said Thursday. “These victims are not just numbers or headlines. They were real people worthy of dignity and respect, of life and love.”
A Trump-supporting Florida judicial candidate has had his law license suspended after saying that gay people will “face eternal damnation.”
Attorney Donald McBath has been suspended from the Florida Bar for violating the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct while running to become a state circuit court judge.
In a filing with the Florida Supreme Court, the Florida Bar asserted that McBath had “failed to maintain the dignity appropriate to judicial office and act in a manner that is consistent with impartiality, integrity, and independence of the judiciary” due to anti-Muslim and anti-gay messages posted to social media.
Trump-supporting attorney claimed God can ‘heal’ gay people
One message posted to Twitter states: “If the homosexual continues committing that sin of sodomy, his soul faces ETERNAL damnation. Abstain, if you really have that mental illness. It’s not love.”
Another added: “A person with homosexual tendencies that abstains from committing the sin of sodomy, is a man that is trying to live and cope with their mental illness. A person could be healed with the right help from professionals and with the Grace of God.”
McBath – who described himself in his Twitter profile as a “100% Trump supporter #MAGA; #KAG; proud DEPLORABLE; Pro-God; Christian” – sent other messages referring to Muslims as “deranged” and claiming: “Never trust a Muslim.”
According to the Miami Herald, the state Supreme Court leveraged a 91-day suspension and a $1,386 fine against McBath after he declined to contest the state bar’s claims.
The suspension of his law license will run concurrently with a preexisting, unrelated suspension for incompetence, the newspaper reports.
‘Pro-God Christian’ lawyer worked as a divorce attorney
In a statement in 2018, McBath said: “I have very strong personal beliefs about what is right and wrong.
“As a Christian, I love homosexuals. I just don’t like the sinful act of sodomy. In my personal opinion, the Bible is clear as to the sin. It is unnatural.
“It doesn’t mean that two males or two females can’t be best friends. Our Lord Jesus Christ talks about the fact we should love the sinner but hate the sin.”
Despite his apparently devout Christian beliefs, McBath has worked as a divorce attorney.
At the dawn of the year 2010, few Americans could predict that the coming decade would revolutionize the legal and cultural landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. After all, it was only in 2003 that homosexuality was decriminalized across the country, thanks to a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
Over the past 10 years, the United States saw the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage, the emergence of transgender rights as the central frontier in the LGBTQ rights battle and the introduction of PrEP to fight the HIV epidemic. The decade also saw tragedies and setbacks, like the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando and the trans military ban.
As the 2010s come to a close, NBC Out looks back to some of the decade’s many LGBTQ milestones.
Following through on a campaign promise, President Barack Obama on December 22, 2010, signed the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 1994 Clinton administration policy that banned military service by openly gay people. DADT was a compromise after Clinton failed to deliver on a 1992 campaign promise to allow gay and lesbian Americans to join the military. The repeal went into effect in September 2011.
Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law on June 24, 2011, just hours after the New York State Senate passed the Marriage Equality Act. Spontaneous celebrations erupted across the state and particularly at New York City’s Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
Hillary Clinton: ‘Gay rights are human rights’
In an echo of her iconic 1995 speech in Beijing as First Lady, where she declared that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a speech on Dec. 6, 2011, to the United Nations declaring, “Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”
Ahead of President Obama’s widely telegraphed “evolution” on same-sex marriage, Vice President Joe Biden in a May 2012 appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” announced that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage.
FDA approves Truvada as HIV PrEP
In July 2012, the Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada as HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, to prevent HIV acquisition in high-risk individuals, particularly gay men and transgender women. PrEP was controversial when approved but has grown more widely used and accepted as cities, states, and the federal government have moved to widely promote its use as a tool to end the HIV epidemic. In places like New York City that have high rates of PrEP uptake, HIV infection rates have begun to decline.
Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin became the first LGBTQ person ever elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2012. But even then, Baldwin — who was first elected to political office more than three decades ago at 24 — was no stranger to making history. In 1998, when she was elected to the House of Representatives, she became the first gay woman and the first openly LGBTQ nonincumbent elected to either chamber of Congress.
-2013-
Supreme Court axes Defense of Marriage Act
The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, passed in 1996 in response to Hawaii’s brief flirtation with legalizing same sex-marriage, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the June 2013 landmark U.S. v. Windsor decision. The ruling allowed federal benefits to flow equally to same-sex married couples in Washington, D.C., and the 12 states where gay marriage was then legal.
-2014-
Laverne Cox appears on cover of Time
Laverne Cox, best known for her role in the hit Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black,” became the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine in June 2014. A month later, she became the first trans person to be nominated for an Emmy.
-2015-
Caitlyn Jenner comes out as transgender
In a coming out heard ’round the world, Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender in a glamorous June 2015 Vanity Fair cover photo shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Citing its 2013 decision that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, the Supreme Court in the landmark June 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision found a constitutional right to marriage that included same-sex couples, legalizing gay marriage nationwide. In an iconic image beamed around the world, the White House was lit in the colors of the LGBTQ pride flag to celebrate the ruling.
A gunman opened fire in the Orlando LGBTQ nightclub Pulse on June 12, 2016, killing 49 people. The shooting was briefly the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. In a subsequent trial of the shooter’s wife, details emerged showing that the gay club Pulse was chosen randomly after heterosexual clubs appeared to be too securely guarded.
On June 30, 2016, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that transgender Americans would be permitted to serve in the armed forces, sealing President Obama’s legacy as a leader in LGBTQ equality in the military. “This is the right thing to do for our people and for the force,” Carter said.
Kate Brown elected governor of Oregon
Kate Brown, an out bisexual, made history in November 2016 when she became the first openly LGBTQ person to ever be elected governor of a U.S. state. She had become the governor by default the year prior, after the state’s longest-serving governor, John Kitzhaber, resigned amid a scandal.
-2017-
‘Moonlight’ wins Best Picture Oscar
The 2016 film tracks Chiron, a young black man, who is coming to terms with his homosexuality. “Moonlight” dazzled festival audiences and critics before becoming the first ever LGBTQ-centered film to win an Academy Award for best picture in 2017.
In a series of early morning tweets on July 26, 2017, that reportedly took the Department of Defense by surprise, President Donald Trump announced that he was reinstating the repealed ban on transgender military service.
The LGBTQ candidates who saw victory in November 2018’s “rainbow wave” included Democrat Jared Polis, who became the first openly gay man elected governor in the United States, and DemocratSharice Davids, who flipped her district in Kansas against a four-term incumbent to become the first openly LGBTQ member of Congress from Kansas and one of the first two female Native Americans elected to Congress.
I launched a presidential exploratory committee because it is a season for boldness and it is time to focus on the future. Are you ready to walk away from the politics of the past?
In a video posted to Twitter on Jan. 23, 2019, Pete Buttigieg announced the formation of his presidential campaign exploratory committee. The millennial mayor spoke to NBC News and said he once “believed that coming out might be a career death sentence.” Buttigieg is the first openly gay man to ever appear in a Democratic primary debate.
On June 28, 2019, the 50th anniversary of the New York City riot that sparked the modern gay rights movement, #Stonewall50transformed into a giant global celebration of LGBTQ rights. New York City even hosted dueling, record-breaking LGBTQ pride marches
‘They’ is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year
In a “data-driven” decision guided by internet users’ searches, the dictionary brand announced in mid-December that the word of the year is the nonbinary singular pronoun “they,” which preferred by some transgender and nonbinary people. Merriam-Webster added the entry in September.
It surveyed 866 teenage boys in community settings like after school programmes and libraries, covering 20 lower-resource neighbourhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
According to researchers it is the first study to ask teenage boys about violence and attitudes to gender in “US urban, community-based settings”, rather than schools or clinics.
Researchers found that when male high school students supported equality between genders, they were less likely to engage in violent behaviours, for example bullying or sexual violence.
Boys who had seen their peers engage in at least two different abusive behaviours towards women and girls were twice as likely to commit rape and five times as likely to bully others, regardless of gender.
However, of the 866 teenagers, 73.2 percent had engaged in homophobic teasing, for example calling other “homo” or “gay” in a derogatory way.
The study describes the result as “puzzling”, because in contrast to other violent behaviours, views on gender equality had no effect on levels of homophobic teasing, even though questions assessing their views on equality included some about homophobia.
Alison Culyba, assistant professor of pediatrics in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, told CNN: “It is so commonplace, they may see it as a form of acceptable, possibly even pro-social, interaction with their peers.”
Homophobic, biphobic and transphobic teasing and bullying severely affects teenagers around the world, and can lead to mental health problems and even suicide.
If you don’t know who Jenna Ellis is, you are hardly alone. Many officials at the upper echelons of Trumpworld don’t really know her, either.
In more than a dozen conversations with senior figures in the White House, 2020 campaign, and broader Trump orbit, barely anybody had known Ellis as more than a blip on the Fox News radar—if that—before this October. “She literally came out of nowhere,” said one person close to President Donald Trump.
And yet, Ellis, a constitutional law attorney who’d worked since last year as the public policy director at the James Dobson Family Institute, has quickly gone from relative obscurity to talking directly with the president about politics and impeachment. In recent weeks, he’s reached out to her to ask about fighting back against his Democratic enemies, and has casually analyzed and praised her TV hits when she’s not around, say two people with knowledge of the president’s conversations.
“She gets it,” Trump has privately gushed in the past month, according to one of these sources.“I’m disappointed conservatives are acquiescing to the LGBT agenda… The Orlando shooting was absolutely terrible and tragic. But the response to this tragedy should not be embracing and advocating for gay rights.”— Jenna Ellis, after the Pulse nightclub massacre
More recently, Ellis says she’s even had the opportunity to flex her influence by counseling the president on his bombastic six-page letter delivered to Capitol Hill shortly before he was impeached this month, bashing Democratic leaders and insisting that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials” in the 17th century.
“I reviewed [the letter]…but it’s 100 percent him. It’s perfect,” Ellis told PJ Medialast week. The letter’s drafting process included White House brass such as Trump’s immigration adviser and chief speechwriter Stephen Miller, though White House attorneys were largely cut off from the initial process.
As of November, Ellis has been a senior legal adviser to both the Trump campaign and the president, and she’s quickly earned accolades from Trump’s core group of political advocates, not just for her legal work but for her reliably on-message cable news appearances.
“Jenna is an accomplished legal mind and a valuable asset to the President and campaign team,” Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, told The Daily Beast in a brief statement. “She is a strong advocate for the President and provides compelling legal analysis. We are thrilled she is on the team.” (Ellis did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.)
Indeed, Ellis has earned an honor befitting the president’s favorite aides, pundits, and public advocates: being retweeted by the big man himself. Trump even promoted a whole anti-impeachment tweetstorm of hers this month to his 68 million followers.
Behind the scenes, Trump is known to seek Ellis’ counsel, recently on matters pertaining to his impeachment, which Ellis has taken to her platforms on Fox and at the Washington Examiner to deride as a legal and political sham. From September to November, the West Wing promoted no fewer than five of Ellis’ Examiner columns in official White House newsletters.
Ellis, meanwhile, has made herself seen at—where else?—the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., where she’s been pictured since November mingling with Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Fox host Jeanine Pirro, senior Trump campaign aide Mercedes Schlapp, and Marc Lotter, the campaign’s director of strategic communications.
Ellis already had some notable connections in Trumpworld that aligned her with both its public communications apparatus and the machinery it constructed to beat back the many investigations and legal challenges it’s faced since Trump took office.
Prior to her promotion to senior legal adviser, Ellis had been a member of Trump’s 2020 media advisory board, a collection of TV and radio surrogates for the president and campaign that had been overseen by Trump campaign communications hand Mark Serrano. And according to state bar records in Colorado, she has also worked for Serrano’s firm, ProActive Communications.
Serrano also ran comms for the Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust established to help pay legal bills accrued by White House aides and other Trump allies during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Ellis has also collaborating with two of Trump’s top outside allies, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. and Charlie Kirk, who leads the pro-Trump student group Turning Point USA. Kirk and Falwell have teamed up to form the eponymous Falkirk Center and Liberty, a think tank devoted, more or less, to promoting Trumpism as a political philosophy. Ellis serves as an “ambassador” to the group.
Ellis’ roots are firmly in the Christian right. Her 2015 book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, argues that progressive judicial philosophy has spawned “a culture that lacks objective morality and embraces secular ideas” and urges the country to “get back to being a biblically moral, upright society.”
“In an increasingly politically and religiously diverse America, we have been sold the idea that the political questions of government, rather than being dependent on faith, are completely separate,” Ellis argued in a 2017 column. “But the Founders saw these questions of who we say Jesus is and what we say government is [as] inextricably intertwined.”
Much of her recent fire as a legal commentator has been aimed at the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. And while she couches those arguments in legal terms, Ellis has also exhibited some general antipathy to the gay community. Her book complains that the Supreme Court “told the LGBT community that their homosexual lifestyle was not just legal privately, but morally validated openly through government recognition and social celebration and therefore equally as valued as heterosexual unions.”
In the wake of a 2015 shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 49 dead, Ellis penned a column that condemned the massacre, but bemoaned that it was being used to dignify homosexuality.
“I’m disappointed conservatives are acquiescing to the LGBT agenda,” Ellis wrote. “Let me be clear—the Orlando shooting was absolutely terrible and tragic. But the response to this tragedy should not be embracing and advocating for gay rights.” The piece was headlined, “Two Wrongs Do Not Make an LGBT Right.”
Ellis’ husband, David Rives, is also a Trump supporter who runs an online broadcast network devoted to promoting Creationism and frequently contributes video segments to the far-right conspiracy website WorldNetDaily. As his wife advised the Trump campaign over the summer, Rives signed onto a letter from a number of faith leaders calling for a “national day of prayer for President Donald J. Trump.”
Ellis’ elevation into the president’s inner sanctum comes as Trump’s historically strong support in the evangelical community has been challenged in some minor, but notable, ways.
Last week, the editor in chief of the prominent evangelical magazine Christianity Today published a scathing op-ed hammering Trump’s “profoundly immoral” conduct and calling for his removal from office. Hours later, Ellis penned Trumpworld’s rebuttal at the Examiner.
The Christianity Today op-ed “is so devoid of any pretense of understanding the Constitution I am genuinely embarrassed for evangelicals (of which I am a member),” she wrote. “Pious ‘Never Trumpers’ who feel morally justified about this impeachment charade are as morally reprehensible as Democrats.”
President Donald Trump’s Interior Department removed “sexual orientation” from a statement in the agency’s ethics guide regarding workplace discrimination.
“You shall adhere to all laws and regulations that provide equal opportunities for all Americans regardless of race, color, religion, sex, age, or handicap,” reads one of 14 principles of ethical behavior in the agency’s 2017 guidelines.
The 2009 version President Barack Obama’s Interior Department issued included the categories “race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, or disability.”
The above-linked report notes that current Interior Sec. David Bernhardt literally red-lined the phrase out of a letter sent on his first day with the agency in 2017 while serving in a lesser role. Hit the link for more.
Since they married in 2015, Jonathan Hobgood, 37, and his husband, Kerry Johnson, 36, have wanted to be dads. At first, the couple saw adoption as the best path to parenthood, but South Carolina, where they live, is one of 10 states with religious exemption laws that make it more difficult for same-sex couples to foster and adopt, and they worried that adopting would set them up for a legal nightmare down the road.
“Our concern was that if we did a private adoption and the birth mother decided a couple of years later that she wanted her child back, we would be in for a rather extensive legal battle to try to keep the child,” Hobgood told NBC News. “Most likely the courts would have sided with the biological mother, so that became a big worry for us. So we just decided, ‘Well, let’s take ourselves down the surrogacy path from there.’”
The couple did their research. The cost of hiring a female surrogate, they learned, would be steep — $120,000 to $150,000, a price that Hobgood, a project specialist for a medical insurance company, and Kerry, a management analyst with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, could hardly afford. But it did not deter them.
“I knew I wanted to be a child’s father,” Hobgood said. “I really just wanted to go through and enjoy bringing up this wonderful child who is a part of our family.”
Hobgood and his husband are among an increasing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people in the U.S. planning to have children, according to data released this year by the Family Equality Council, a national nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ families. And despite the additional financial barriers for many prospective parents in this group, this increased desire to have children was found across income levels, according to a report the council released this month, “Building LGBTQ+ Families: The Price of Parenthood.”
The Family Equality Council polled 500 LGBTQ and 1,004 non-LGBTQ adults, and found that the desire to become parents is nearly identical among both lower- and higher-income lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Forty-five to 53 percent of LGBTQ people between the ages of 18 and 35 are planning to become parents for the first time or add another child to their family (compared to 55 percent for their non-LGBTQ counterparts, a gap that has narrowed significantly compared to older generations).And those making less than $25,000 a year plan to have children at a similar rate to those making over $100,000, according to the report.
Amanda Winn, the council’s chief program officer, was surprised by the findings.
“I was expecting that folks who were living at the poverty line would report lower rates of wanting to bring children into the home knowing that finances were tight, but that’s not the case,” Winn told NBC News. “That innate, strong desire to have families exists regardless of income levels.”
LGBTQ prospective parents are more likely to face financial hurdles than their heterosexual peers, according to the report. Reasons include their relatively lower annual household incomes and the additional costs associated with having a child using an option other than sexual intercourse, which is considered by only 37 percent of LGBTQ people planning to start their families or have more children.
Assisted reproductive technology: ‘an impossible barrier’ for some
Thanks to advancements in assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, more LGBTQ people can have children through nontraditional methods, and interest is growing. Forty percent of LGBTQ people are considering such technology to conceive children, according to a Family Equality Council survey published in February — but many of these prospective parents will pay for it out of their own pockets, and the technology can be expensive.
“Most LGBTQ+ individuals will learn that their health insurance plan does not cover the cost of fertility treatments at all, and, if they do, the individual or family unit must prove that they have been ‘trying’ to conceive for 6-12 months before coverage begins,” the Family Equality Council report states. “This stipulation in the policy results in high monthly expenses for some and creates an impossible barrier for others.”
The report outlines the diverse array of options now available to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people looking to have children, and the costs associated with them, which can range from less than $300 for those using a known sperm donor to over $150,000 for those pursuing gestational surrogacy.
Same-sex female couples typically rely on artificial insemination with donated sperm to conceive children, which usually costs several thousand dollars and is not always covered by insurance. If two women choose to have a child through reciprocal in vitro fertilization, where the fertilized egg of one partner is implanted in another, the cost is higher — typically from $12,000 to $15,000 for a basic cycle, according to Internet Health Resources.
Chandra Chester, 40, and her wife, Lynn Doyle, 37, both social workers who live in Maryland’s Baltimore County, conceived two children — a daughter, 4, and a son, 1 — through artificial insemination without IVF.
Chester said their insurance covered some of the cost, but she estimated they spent about $6,500 out of pocket for their pregnancies, including one that ended in miscarriage. Additionally, the sperm, which came from the same anonymous donor for both children, cost $500 yearly to store, she said.
On top of fertility care and doctor visits, the couple pays $30,000 annually on day care for both kids. Along with food, clothing, diapers and other necessities, paying for their children consumes at least 50 percent of their gross annual income, said Chester, who works two jobs to make ends meet and will soon get a third. She said in hindsight, she wishes she had saved up more money for the fertility expenses and day care before having kids.
“I knew it was going to be expensive,” Chester said, “but I had no clue it would be this expensive.”
Impact of ‘religious freedom’ adoption laws
State laws that limit gay couples’ ability to adopt can make the process even more difficult and costly, with some prospective parents opting to relocate to more LGBTQ-friendly states to adopt or pursue fertility treatments.
Kenneth Livingston and his husband, Ashley Redmond, both in their 30s, moved from Mississippi to Boston in 2013 so they could adopt a child. Livingston said it would have been too difficult to adopt in Mississippi, where adoption agencies could legally turn them away and where their marriage wasn’t yet legally recognized.
“We moved away from Mississippi not just to adopt, but to raise our child in a state that embraces diversity and inclusion, and we would never have that in Mississippi,” Livingston said.
At least nine states permit state-licensed child welfare agencies to refuse to place children with LGBTQ families if doing so directly conflicts with their religious beliefs, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. In November, the Trump administration proposed a rule that would allow faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to continue receiving taxpayer funding even if they exclude LGBTQ families and others from their services based on religious beliefs.
Foster care is the least expensive route to parenthood for most LGBTQ people, and typically costs no more than $2,600, according to the Family Equality Council report, but many can be turned away in states with religious exemptions.
Kelly McGlasson, 43, a single lesbian in northern New Jersey, always wanted to be a mom, but she didn’t have an insurance policy that covered fertility and couldn’t afford private adoption. So McGlasson, an early childhood coach for a nonprofit that advocates for children, decided to adopt through the foster care system in New Jersey, one of seven states that explicitly prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ people in foster care and adoption.
“It was something I knew I needed, to be a mom, and time was running out,” she said. “So I made that choice.”
Helping to offset the ‘price of parenthood’
A number of programs have emerged in recent years that help LGBTQ people offset the relatively high cost of building their families.
When LGBTQ couples choose to privately adopt a child without going through the foster care system, the cost can be $20,000 to $70,000, depending on whether the adoption is domestic or international, according to the “Building LGBTQ+ Families: the Price of Parenthood” report.
Even in Massachusetts, Livingston and his husband have struggled to adopt a child. Ashley, a freelance event planner, has had difficulty finding steady full-time employment. Livingston, a contract specialist, is the couple’s main source of income. The couple, who have been waiting to adopt since January 2018, saved as much money as they could since their move, obtained a no-interest $10,000 loan through a charity that works with their Massachusetts-based adoption agency, and qualified for a $15,000 grant from Help Us Adopt, a nonprofit that helps people adopt children regardless of “race, religion, gender, ethnicity, marital status or sexual orientation.”
Livingston said adopting would be “extremely difficult” for him and his husband without the financial assistance.
“It’s just helping us avoid further debt, and helps us fulfill our wish of becoming parents, and allowing us to focus more on preparing for a child and less time worrying about finances,” he said.
Interest among same-sex male couples who wish to have biological children through surrogacy is growing, but few can afford it, according to Lisa Schuster, a program manager for Men Having Babies, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to men who want to become parents through surrogacy. Annual applications for financial assistance rose from 157 in 2014, when the grant program began, to over 450 applicants in 2019, Schuster said.
“The demand is huge, and there is also a growing trend of younger and younger men who are wanting to start families and are looking to surrogacy,” she said.
When Hobgood and his husband, who live just outside Columbia, South Carolina, learned they qualified for financial assistance to pursue surrogacy through the Men Having Babies program, they were thrilled.
“At first, I was in that shock mode,” Hobgood recalled.
The program also helped connect the couple with a surrogate, and it is helping them navigate through the complex medical and legal process of surrogacy.
Even with the financial assistance, Hobgood and his husband will pay about $70,000 — roughly half of what they would pay without the assistance, according to Hobgood. But the couple’s journey to fatherhood is far more certain than ever before, and will likely end with a trip to Iowa, where their prospective surrogate lives, to witness the birth of their child.
That’s the “most exciting part,” Hobgood said — “just having our family grow.”