Ugh

The White House Removed LGBTQ Language from Equal Opportunity Employment Statement

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On Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that the Trump administration's Department of Commerce had removed LGBTQ language from its annual statement on equal employment employment. The erasure came during Pride Month, which honors and celebrates the LGBTQ community.

When the statement was issued last year, during the Obama administration, it read that the department wouldn't tolerate discrimination "based on race, color, religion, sex...sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age...genetic information, or disability (physical or mental), including the provision of reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants and employees with disabilities or genetic information."

In contrast, as pointed out by BuzzFeed reporter David Mack on Twitter, the 2017 Secretarial Policy Statement on Equal Employment Opportunity originally omitted mention of sexual orientation and gender identity. The commerce department added this language back in, with a department spokesperson telling Buzzfeed News on Thursday that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross "directed the Department to reissue the policy statement to address any concerns and prevent misinterpretation."

The original removal of the terms didn't mean that LGBTQ employees weren't protected from discrimination, or won't be in future. However, it doesn't bode well for how the Department of Commerce and the Trump administration in general might approach protections for the LGBTQ community in future. It also doesn't bode well for Ross's relations with LGBTQ staffers, especially given reports of him being insensitive to the LGBTQ community, including him making jokes about homosexuality in the past. "It is careless bad government," Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told BuzzFeed News. "Even if the Trump administration doesn't want to enforce federal civil rights laws, we're not going to let them get away with that."

The White House has not commented on the matter. This isn't the first time the Trump administration has contributed to LGBTQ erasure: During the first week of his presidency, Trump removed almost every mention of the LGBTQ community from government websites. He also failed to proclaim the month of June as Pride Month, which Obama did each of the eight years of his presidency.


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