Attorney General Loretta Lynch shared her thoughts on what the Trump era could mean for LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups in a lengthy, no-holds-barred interview with Rachel Maddow on Tuesday.
Appropriately, Maddow caught up with Lynch, who has been an outspoken queer rights advocate during her time in office, at New York’s Stonewall Inn, which is historically considered the birthplace of the LGBTQ movement. While Lynch understood why minority groups were concerned about their future once President Barack Obama leaves office, she stressed that, ultimately, “history is on the side of marginalized people.”
“Obviously, a lot of things change with the turn of the electoral wheel. But history is bigger than just the electoral wheel,” she told Maddow in the interview, which can be viewed above. “History encompasses all of the change and the progress that we’ve made.”
Later, Maddow pressed Lynch on the homophobic views of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as well as prospective Attorney General Jeff Sessions, wondering if their rise to power was, in some way, a “backlash to the progress that was made” on LGBTQ rights under the Obama administration.
“Whenever you look at history... you do see periods of progress, followed by periods of repression of those particular rights that were advanced,” Lynch said. “While people may fear a backlash, the issue is: are we going to allow it to occur?”
Here’s hoping that enough of the energized resistance to Trump and his views carries over past Jan. 20 to make sure that doesn’t happen.