“Look no further than the folks he wants to put on the Supreme Court,” Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney warned about Donald Trump and LGBT rights in an interview with me on SiriusXM Progress at the Democratic National Convention last week in Philadelphia. “He’s told us who he’s going to appoint, and they will eviscerate all of the rights we’ve won at the Supreme Court.”
Maloney, an openly gay Democratic member of Congress from upstate New York, has been battling with GOP House members in recent months over attempts to repeal President Obama’s executive order banning workplace discrimination against LGBT people among federal contractors.
“[Trump] will repeal the president’s executive orders,” he said, noting that a new president can do so without Congress passing any legislation. “Those federal contractors employ 28 million Americans. So this is significant workplace protection for a large part of the American workforce – those are gone [under Trump]. All of the other things the president has done over the last 8 years, not just on our rights but really everything else, from health care to the climate change action, to the immigration issue we all care about as well – all of that stuff is out the window.”
Maloney sounded the alarm for LGBT people who might not see the stark contrast between Trump, who has portrayed himself as a friend to LGBT people though his positions are anti-LGBT, and Hillary Clinton.
“We are talking about a very dramatic fork in the road here,” he said. “And for those of us who have maybe gotten a little complacent with all the progress we’ve made: Look, we don’t have any workplace protections in 29 American states. You could be fired for being LGBT any day of the week. There is no legal recourse. So it is very important that we get legislation on the federal level. But here’s the good news: There is a majority even in the Republican-controlled House for LGBT equality. What they’re doing now is they’re rigging the process so we can’t get votes.”
“If you have Hillary Clinton in the White House,” Maloney continued, “and you get more Democrats in the House and we take the Senate, they’re not going to be able to rig that process. We actually have the votes and what we showed is that you can’t bring this anti-gay stuff on the floor anymore and get away with it. And so, they’ve had to retreat into this rigging the process, where they won’t let us have amendments. They won’t let us have votes because they know we’re going to win on them. With a fair vote we can pass the Equality Act. We can protect people in their workplaces. We can make sure you don’t get discriminated against in housing, accommodations and restaurants and the rest. Just as we’ve had in the civil rights context.”
None of that, however, will happen, Maloney underscored, if Donald Trump gets into the White House.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.