By DAVID CRARY
NEW YORK (AP) — When Donald Trump assumed the presidency,
conservative religious leaders drew up “wish lists’ of steps they hoped he’d
take to oppose abortion and rein in the LGBTQ-rights movement. With a flurry of
recent actions, Trump’s administration is now winning their praise for
aggressively fulfilling many of their goals.
Mat Staver, president of the legal advocacy organization
Liberty Counsel, said Trump has fulfilled about 90% of the goals on a list that
Staver and other conservative leaders compiled.
“In the first two years of his administration, he’s
achieved more than all of the presidents combined since Ronald Reagan,” Staver
said. “He’s been the most pro-religious freedom and pro-life president in
modern history.”
One of the most dramatic steps — hailed by conservatives
and decried by liberals — came this week when the Department of Health and
Human Services implemented a new rule for the federal family planning program
known as Title X. Planned Parenthood, long a target of religious conservatives
because of its role as the leading U.S. abortion provider, quit the program —
walking away from tens of millions of dollars in grants — rather than comply
with a new rule prohibiting clinics from referring women for abortions.
Last week, the Labor Department proposed a rule that is
expected to shield federal contractors from discrimination complaints regarding
hiring and firing decisions motivated by religious beliefs. Critics say the
rule, if implemented, would enable employers to discriminate against LGBTQ
people.
On Friday, the Justice Department filed a brief telling
the Supreme Court that federal law allows firing workers for being transgender.
The brief is related to three cases that the high court will hear in its upcoming
term related to LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace.
Earlier this year, Health and Human Services issued a
waiver allowing a state-contracted foster care agency in South Carolina to deny
services to same-sex and non-Christian families. HHS also moved to revoke newly
won health care discrimination protections for transgender people.
These and other actions aimed at curtailing abortion
rights and LGBTQ rights have helped many conservative Christians overlook other
aspects of Trump’s presidency, such as his often-divisive rhetoric on Twitter
and at rallies.
The Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the Southern Baptist
megachurch First Baptist Dallas and a frequent guest at the White House,
predicted that Trump would win more evangelical votes in 2020 than he did in
2016, when they helped provide his margin of victory.
“When he ran in 2016 and promised pro-life, pro-religious
freedom policies, most evangelicals who voted for him didn’t know whether he
would or could fulfill those promises,” Jeffress said. “When they look back
now, they see he checked off all of those goals. ... He’ll win by an even
larger margin on basis of promises kept.”
The same phenomenon being celebrated by religious
conservatives is viewed with alarm by liberal activists.
For the religious right, “Every day is Christmas,” said
Rachel Laser, president & CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church
and State. She worries that the mantra of “religious freedom” is being used to
protect some Americans while hurting others.
“It can’t be religious freedom just for white evangelical
Christians — it has to be religious freedom for all of us,” she said. “We’re
witnessing divisiveness as Trump and his cronies and religious extremists
across the country continue to chip away at church-state separation.”
The American Civil Liberties Union is among several
organizations seeking to block some of the administration’s moves in court.
“This is essentially the wish list of groups that have a
very extreme and discriminatory perspective on what religious liberty means,”
said Ian Thompson, the ACLU’s senior legislative representative in Washington.
“It’s important not to see any one of these policies in
isolation but to see them as part of a coordinated effort by the administration
across agencies,” Thompson said. He urged the Democratic-controlled House of
Representatives to go on record against the policies, and investigate those
which seem particularly problematic.
From both the right and left, activists noted that
Trump’s numerous appointments of federal judges have been welcomed by the
religious right as a potential long-term boost to its causes.
“We are heartened by the appointment of constitutionalist
judges, including two excellent Supreme Court justices (Neil Gorsuch and Brett
Kavanaugh), and look forward to more such appointments throughout the federal
court system,” said Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family.
Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way, which is
often critical of religious conservative groups, said their Trump-supported
agenda “is bad news for women in the U.S. and around the world, for LGBTQ
people, and for the principle that taxpayer money should not be used to fund
discrimination.”
“Trump is advancing religious right priorities in the
short term through administrative actions and in the long term through his
appointment of young, right-wing ideologues to lifetime positions on the
federal judiciary,” Montgomery added in an email.
The Trump administration actions represent a sharp
turnaround from the presidency of Barack Obama, who supported abortion rights
and same-sex marriage, mandated that contraception be covered by the Affordable
Care Act, enabled transgender people to serve openly in the military, and
issued guidance to school districts that they should let transgender students
use the bathrooms of their choice.
Alliance Defending Freedom is among the conservative
legal groups that has litigated against numerous Obama-era initiatives and has
welcomed Trump’s moves to reverse them.
“The defense of life, free speech, and religious liberty
should never be subject to political and cultural whims,” said Kristen
Waggoner, an ADF senior vice president. “They are constitutional guarantees,
and we are grateful that this administration recognizes that reality and is taking
serious steps to correct injustice and protect all Americans.”
