Michelangelo Signorile

Opinion contributor

Last week President Donald Trump took another hostile action against LGBTQ people.

But you wouldn’t know that from many of the headlines.

“Trump Administration Strengthens ‘Conscience Rule’ for Health Care Workers,” read the headline in the New York Times about a bill that would allow doctors, nurses, physicians, pharmacists, nurses, teachers and others to discriminate based on their religious beliefs. National Public Radio’s web site went with “New Trump Rule Protects Health Care Workers Who Refuse Care For Religious Reasons.”

It’s true that someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity are only two among several reasons such workers, under an expanded Department of Health and Human Services rule, may deny care to people based on religious grounds. And most reports did discuss the threat to LGBTQ people, in addition to the threat to other groups, such as women seeking reproductive health care.

But the coded language used by the Trump administration, couched in protecting religious beliefs rather than permitting discrimination against LGBTQ people and other groups, is being allowed to frame the discussion. Using this coded language to attack LGBTQ rights has benefited this administration as it continues to galvanize conservative evangelicals — who know exactly who is being targeted — while not alienating people who might see these efforts as an attack on civil rights.

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But make no mistake: LGBTQ people are among the primary targets if not the main target of such efforts. It's part of religious conservatives' strategy to chip away at marriage equality and LGBTQ rights much as they have done on the issue of abortion rights for many years.

Back in 2014, I interviewed Frank Schubert, the mastermind strategist behind California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in that state, and who went on to work with the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage as it unsuccessfully fought marriage equality all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Schubert, sitting on a panel with other anti-LGBTQ religious leaders at the annual Values Voter Summit as they mapped out strategy to fight LGBTQ rights, had just explained that the battle against marriage equality would mirror the battle against legal abortion if his side lost at the high court. The following year his side did in fact lose, when the court handed down the historic Obergefell ruling.

LGBTQ discrimination recast as 'freedom'

“In a broad sense, it will be similar to the pro-life movement after Roe v. Wade,” Schubert told me, claiming that “religious liberty issues will be very much in the crosshairs” if marriage equality prevailed. “An example would be protecting the right of a believer in traditional marriage from being punished by the government. Conscience protections — those sorts of things,” Schubert said.

The effort to recast discrimination against LGBTQ people, and roll back rights that were hard won, has indeed been successful. The debate has shifted to issues such as “religious liberty” and “conscience.”

This has even enabled some cynical politicians to argue that they support the rights of LGBTQ people — such as when Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016 that he will “protect our LGBTQ citizens” — while simultaneously making promises to anti-LGBTQ evangelical leaders to push policies that will ultimately unravel LGBTQ rights.

Coded anti-LGBTQ language must be exposed

That’s why it’s important that the agenda of anti-LGBTQ forces, including the coded language they use, be fully exposed. Some of the Trump administration’s hostile actions, such as the president’s Twitter announcement in 2017 that’d be banning transgender people from the military, are so overt they can’t be papered over. But others are disguised as protecting religious freedom.

At February’s annual National Prayer Breakfast, Trump defended a state-funded Michigan adoption agency’s efforts to ban gay and lesbian couples from adopting children, for example. “We will always protect our country’s long and proud tradition of faith-based adoption,” Trump said, without uttering the words “gay” or “lesbian.”

When Vice President Mike Pence spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in March, he claimed that “freedom of religion is under attack in our country.” He then portrayed himself and his family as among the victims.

“My own family recently came under attack just because my wife Karen went back to teach art to children at a Christian school,” Pence said. He didn't mention that the Virginia private school in question bans LGBTQ students and employees and labels being LGBTQ as “moral misconduct.” The school’s employment application equates homosexuality and transgender identity with polygamy, extramarital sex, pornography and “sexual immorality.”

Brutal hostility is Trump's real record

In Virginia and more than half the states, absent a federal law such as the Equality Act recently re-introduced in Congress, there are no protections for LGBT people against such discrimination in employment and education. And yet, in polls Americans express broad support for these protections. Most Americans don’t see this as an issue of “religious liberty” — and many of them are people of faith themselves — but rather as one of flat out discrimination.

It’s for that reason that Trump, Pence and others in the GOP speak in inexplicit ways to play to the evangelical base, while keeping the anti-LGBTQ agenda below the radar for anyone who would be turned off by blatant bigotry. But when you're the target, you get it. Many of us in the LGBTQ community understand their code and why their intent must be made clear.

Trump's brutal record of hostility to LGBTQ people, and his bowing to those determined to roll back LGBTQ rights, must be fully laid bare to voters before the 2020 election. As long as the administration is allowed to get away with vague statements and code language, it won't be.

Michelangelo Signorile is a radio host on SiriusXM Progress 127. Follow him on Twitter: @msignorile