Posted on November 30, 2017
CREDO and the National LGBTQ Task Force are resisting Trump
When Donald Trump campaigned, he promised to be a different kind of Republican with regards to the LGBTQ community. He awkwardly held an upside down pride flag on stage, went to Twitter to thank the LGBTQ community and even promised to “protect LGBTQ citizens” at his party’s national convention.
Yet like most acts Trump puts on, it was nothing more than obvious pandering and dangerous lies. In the last 10 months, Trump and his bigoted administration have waged a full-scale war on LGBTQ people with orders banning transgender people from serving in the military, appointing a Supreme Court justice openly hostile to LGBTQ people, rescinding protections for transgender students and signing orders to expand discrimination against LGBTQ people.
But the resistance to Trump’s attacks is strong, in part because of the strength of CREDO members and our progressive allies like the National LGBTQ Task Force, including its executive director Rea Carey, who we were honored to welcome recently at our headquarters.
Since 1986, CREDO members have voted to donate more than $461,000 to the LGBTQ Task Force, and CREDO has been a long-time ally of the Task Force’s critical work standing up for the LGBTQ community.
During her conversation at CREDO headquarters in November, Rea explained how the Task Force is helping to lead the progressive resistance to Trump’s anti-LGBTQ agenda. The organization’s yearly “Creating Change” conference in 2018 will help train nearly 4,000 people in the community in racial, social and economic justice issues. The Task Force will frame the discussion with future leaders in the LGBTQ using their slogan, “Be you.”
As Rea put it:
“You can’t be Black one day, a mom the next and bisexual the next. You are all of those things every single day. So when we think about issues we think about the whole person.”
The Task Force’s active resistance to Trump has already had an impact. When Donald Trump planned to sign a dangerous “religious freedom” executive order designed to allow extreme discrimination of the LGBTQ community based on personal beliefs, the Task Force organized protests in opposition. As Rea said, “we saw a draft [of the executive order], and it was horrific. We organized around it, and what came out was a little less horrific.”
You can watch the whole Facebook Live conversation here.