OPINION | Mr Capehart, There’s Really Nothing To Be ‘Conflicted’ About LGBTQ Rights Under Trump
Gay nominee for Treasury hardly undoes the rest of harm the incoming president is doing
There’s a meme that gone viral on social media since the election.
It goes something like, “If you don't know why your LGBTQ friend is scared right now, you don’t have an LGBTQ friend. You know an LGBTQ person.”
That meme is meant to convey and express the urgent and fear that LGBTQ+ Americans feel about the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House.
These very real fears include a right-wing US Supreme Court potentially ready to overturn their landmark 2015 decision for marriage equality after upending half a century of national rights to abortion a little more than two years ago.
It includes potential attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans to adopt children, the potential for the proliferation and nationalization of “Don’t Say Gay” laws like those already seen in Florida and elsewhere.
And of course it includes the relentless attacks Trump and his allies have already unleashed on transgender Americans everywhere.
Jonathan Capehart clearly hasn’t seen that meme.
Capehart, the openly gay writer for The Washington Post and MSNBC host, called himself “conflicted” recently at Donald Trump’s nomination of hedge fund manager Scott Bessent as the next treasury secretary.
Like Capehart, Bessent is gay, married and has children with his husband.
The nomination of one LGBTQ+ American to his Cabinet cannot undo all of the real panic Trump and his fellow Republicans are instilling in LGBTQ+ Americans or the very real damage their agenda threatens to do — and is doing — to us.
It must be very nice for Mr Capehart to have the space to be “conflicted.”
That's because he will likely never have to experience the worst of the oppression of LGBTQ Americans firsthand.
Just as well-to-do women in this country will never be touched by abortion restrictions. If they need to terminate a pregnancy, they have the means to travel wherever they need to get the abortion.
Likewise, Capehart and his husband have the means to escape the worst that the LGBTQ+ community is facing.
The rest of us don’t have that luxury, of course.
And it’s that sort of disconnection from the worst of what’s coming — that “What me, worry?” — attitude is why so many Americans have been turning off the cable network Capehart works for.
That’s the big difference here.
When Jonathan Capehart looks at the incoming Trump administration, he sees the “highest ranking out LGBT person ever to serve” in government.
While the rest of us see the wrecking ball this new administration is ready to set against us.
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