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President Trump Signs Pro-Discrimination Order, Calls for Potentially Sweeping Exemptions

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Contact Name
Ash Orr (they/he)

Today, President Donald Trump issued a very troubling executive order directing the Justice Department to draft potentially sweeping exemptions for anti-LGBT discrimination by federal employees, contractors, and grantees, while also aiming to promote partisan political spending by churches and limit access to contraception.

Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, offered the following statement in response:

Thanks to the overwhelming pushback from so many communities, President Trump stopped short today of explicitly endorsing anti-LGBT discrimination. But this vaguely worded order is clearly aimed at providing a license to discriminate against LGBT people, women, religious minorities, and others—while also eroding the separation of church and state. President Trump has simply asked others in his administration to do much of his dirty work.

Like today’s Congressional vote to take away health care from millions of Americans, any effort to divide this nation is dangerous, un-American, and will ensure that those who fight for equality will do so until such efforts are dead for good. We call on transgender people and their loved ones to keep making their voices heard by their elected officials. This is our country too.

 

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