Trump Justice
Department: Corporations can fire employees based on sexual orientation
By Eric London
28 July 2017
The Trump administration’s Department of Justice filed court
papers Wednesday night arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
does not protect homosexual people from being fired from their private sector
jobs because of their sexual orientation.
The move marks a significant attack on the rights of gays and
lesbians. By allowing businesses to fire LGBT workers, the Trump administration
seeks to reestablish their legal status as second-class citizens. The
Department of Justice brief advances the pseudo-legal argument that anti-gay
discrimination is legal as long as the corporation equally discriminates
against homosexual men and women.
The Department of Justice position is a departure from the
official stance of the Obama administration. While billing itself as a defender
of LGBT rights, the Democratic Party’s muted response to the Justice Department
move reveals the right-wing character of its pseudo-populist “Better Deal”
agenda rolled out earlier this week.
The Justice Department’s unusual decision to file a “friend of the
court” brief in a private discrimination lawsuit to which the government is not
a party is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to whip up bigoted and
homophobic elements to distract from the escalating crisis within the White
House.
Trump’s maneuver takes place as the Democratic Party continues to
escalate its anti-Russia campaign, the purpose of which is to force Trump to
take a more aggressive position against Russia at the risk of bringing the two
nuclear powers to war.
The move came the same day as Trump tweeted that he would ban
transgender people from the military. Amid a climate of crisis and disorder,
key cabinet members like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary
James Mattis have left Washington, ostensibly on “vacation,” while Trump
continues to attack his own Attorney General, Jefferson Sessions, on a daily
basis.
The discrimination lawsuit involves a New York skydiving
instructor who was fired in 2010 after telling a female client he was gay in an
attempt to avoid making her uncomfortable during their tandem jump. His
employer fired him upon learning his sexual preference.
By advancing the position that private
employers can fire employees for their orientation, the Trump administration is
attempting to undo the legal effects of a 2015 order by the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission barring such discrimination. Earlier this year, the
Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Hively v. Ivy Tech that
private employment discrimination against LGBT people is illegal in a decision
widely considered to be a turning point in civil rights statutory
interpretation.
The Democratic Party set the stage for Trump’s assault on the
fundamental democratic rights of LGBT people by announcing their “Better Deal”
program earlier this week. Absent from the program is any mention of the rights
of immigrants, LGBT people, or the right of women to abortion.
Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (Maryland) told reporters
recently that social issues like the rights of LGBT people “won’t be the focus”
of the party’s new agenda. “Essentially what we don’t want to do is distract
people…We don’t want to distract ourselves.”
These lines explode the claim that the Democratic Party can be
depended on to defend even the most basic democratic rights, including for LGBT
people, even after last year’s presidential campaign, in which the party’s
strategy was based entirely on appealing to questions of identity politics
while ignoring the fundamental issue of social inequality.
Politico noted that Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (New
York) acknowledged their program “purposefully avoids the social issues.”
Democrat Chris Van Hollen (Maryland), who leads the Democrats’
2018 senate campaign, said the party is aimed at appealing to voters in “places
Trump won.” Politico commented that “the decision to downplay social issues is
remarkable,” and is bound up with the party’s effort to “appeal to center-right
voters who may be open to Democrats’ populist economic pitch but turned off by
their liberal social plank.”
The “Better Deal” program’s economic elements are themselves right
wing. The platform includes massive tax cuts for corporations, ostensibly for
“job training” purposes, and is based on what Democratic Senator Elizabeth
Warren (Massachusetts) called “pro-market” reforms. In words that could have
been taken from the playbook of Trump’s fascistic adviser Steven Bannon, the
plan calls for enforcement of anti-trust laws and includes an appeal to
American economic nationalism through a pledge to “aggressively crack down on
unfair foreign trade.”
Several Democratic congressional representatives have expressed
concerns about the absence of social issues in the “better deal” program. There
are fears within the Democratic Party over the political implications of
allowing the Trump administration to carry out its attacks on the rights of
LGBT people, especially as Americans now overwhelmingly support the equal
rights of gays and lesbians.
Aware of this emerging division, the Trump administration’s
offensive is aimed at creating divisions within the Democratic Party, as an
anonymous official acknowledged to Axiom News. The Trump administration is
counting on the fact that significant sections of the Democratic leadership are
adapting themselves to his reactionary provocations in order to avoid
“distracting” people from their toothless economic program.
In the absence of a mass movement of the working class, none of
the social gains of the last century are set in stone.
Less than a decade ago, the Democratic Party was united in its
opposition to gay marriage. Hillary Clinton only announced her support for gay
marriage in 2013, and had previously stated her belief that “marriage has
always been between a man and a woman.” Obama was opposed to gay marriage until
the 2012 election, when he “changed his mind” in order to attract support for
his re-election campaign, noting in 2004: “What I believe is that marriage is
between a man and a woman … I don’t think marriage is a civil right.”
Embattled Trump plays
homophobia card to strengthen his fascistic base
29 July 2017
The Trump administration’s attack on the
democratic rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people is
the implementation of a reactionary political strategy. It seeks to combine
appeals to homophobic hysteria, religious bigotry, the glorification of police
and xenophobic American nationalism to encourage the growth of a fascist
movement.
Embroiled in perpetual crisis, the Trump
administration is attempting to establish a base of political operations
centered around the demagogic president and outside the existing structure of
the two-party system. By firing former Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus
as chief of staff and replacing him with Department of Homeland Security
Secretary John Kelly, Trump has taken another step toward his goal of
establishing a personalist executive comprised of a close group of fascists,
generals, family relations and billionaire oligarchs.
The pattern of Trump’s maneuvers this week
proves the attack on LGBT rights is central to this strategy.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed an
advisory “friend of the court” brief in a private New York lawsuit arguing that
corporations can fire LGBT people because of their sexual orientation on the
pseudo-legal grounds that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not
protect LGBT people. After half a century marked by growing social acceptance
and advances in the legal rights of LGBT people, millions of LGBT workers are
again at risk of immediate firing because of their second-class legal status.
Earlier on Wednesday, Donald Trump tweeted an
announcement that his administration would bar transgender people from military
service “in any capacity” on the reactionary grounds that transgender people
cost the military too much and because of the “disruption that transgender in
the military would entail.”
The same day, Trump announced the nomination of
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback as the State Department’s ambassador at large for
international religious freedom. This move is aimed at bringing the evangelical
and Catholic organizations that bankrolled Brownbank’s short-lived 2008
presidential campaign into a bloc with Trump. After the Supreme Court legalized
same-sex marriage in 2015, Brownback issued an executive order prohibiting the
state government from suing or punishing churches that refuse to provide
marriages and other social services for LGBT people.
White House sources told
the Daily Beast that Trump and Bannon are working closely with
Vice President Mike Pence, who has the closest ties to the evangelical establishment
and who personally orchestrated the transgender ban tweets. According to the
unnamed sources, Trump, Pence and Bannon thought that the move would be popular
“with his base.” The fact that military advisors said they were not consulted
about the tweets confirms the fact that Wednesday’s policy announcements were
conceived within the West Wing.
Wednesday’s policy announcements were bookended
by two major speeches, the first on Tuesday night in Youngstown, Ohio, which
set the political tone for the moves. Paying tribute to “our values, our
culture, our borders, our civilization and our great American way of life,”
Trump told a raucous crowd that “family and faith, not government and
bureaucracy, are the foundation of our society." He continued: "In America,
we don’t worship government, we worship god.” This out of the mouth of a man
who has never worshiped anything but money and himself.
Speaking yesterday in Long Island, New York,
Trump addressed another of his key constituencies: police and immigration
officers. He announced a major escalation of immigration raids to be carried
out under the pretext of fighting the El Salvadoran gang MS-13.
“We have blood-stained killing fields,” Trump
said, describing in gruesome detail the violent tactics of the gang. Police and
immigration officials “are liberating our American towns,” he added, and told
officers he loved watching criminal suspects “get thrown into the back of a
paddy wagon.” He appealed to the country’s over 1.1 million full-time police
officers in the United States, 50,000 border patrol agents, and 20,000 ICE
officials: “Please don’t be too nice.”
The official response of the Democratic Party
has been remarkably restrained, with criticism limited to arguing that Trump’s
transgender ban would weaken the military.
Given the significance of Trump’s attacks, the
muted character of the Democratic Party’s response contains a real warning.
None of the democratic rights gained over the last century are secure so long
as their enforcement is left in the hands of one or another faction of the
ruling class, and are therefore vulnerable to shifts in the political winds.
The Democratic Party has dropped all references
to democratic questions such as immigration, LGBT rights and abortion in its
new “Better Deal” agenda, announced last week. Defending the new program,
Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer told reporters that social issues such as
the rights of LGBT people and immigrants “won’t be the focus” of the new
agenda. “Essentially," he added, "what we don’t want to do is
distract people… we don’t want to distract ourselves.” In other words, the
Democratic Party leadership is appealing to social reaction and religious
bigotry to win votes in the 2018 midterm elections.
Several Democratic leaders have expressed
concerns over the "Better Deal" program's failure to mention any
democratic or social questions, and many will oppose the Trump administration’s
attack on LGBT rights. But the decision to promote a policy based on a pledge
to “aggressively crack down on unfair foreign trade” (as the program states)
will only fan the flames of nationalist chauvinism and further strengthen
Trump’s maneuvers.
The fight to defend democratic rights is urgent:
Trump’s efforts to establish a fascistic movement based on nationalism and
religious bigotry threaten the social rights of hundreds of millions of people,
not only immigrants and LGBT people. But to fight political reaction, one must
understand its objective roots.
Political reaction draws its strength from a set
of economic and social relations that have arisen on the basis of the dramatic
expansion of social inequality and wealth concentration under capitalism. After
more than 15 years of permanent war fought for the profits of American
corporations, the military and intelligence agencies control the elected
officials and dictate the policies of the government. Faced with growing social
polarization, the police are armed with military weapons left over from the
wars waged in the name of the "war on terror." They have been granted
a license to kill by the courts.
Since the growth in the
power of the military, the police, the churches and the deportation agencies is
the product of the growth of inequality, the fight for democratic rights must
be based on the struggle for social equality. Such a struggle must
involve the political activation of the working class, the powerful social
force that produces all of society’s wealth under capitalism, but which is
exploited by the capitalists regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation
or gender identity.
Genuine democracy can be achieved only by
abolishing capitalism, the system of economic relations that gives rise to
political reaction in all its interrelated manifestations. Only on the basis of
the unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism can democratic
rights be won and preserved.
Eric London
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