How William Barr is a problem for the LGBTQ community
President Donald Trump’s choices for his top officials have always been dangerous for the LGBTQ community and his pick for Attorney General, William Barr, is no different.
This is because Barr has had a history of attacks against the community, once describing them as “the HIV people.”
What’s more, he seems to want to impose a Christian rule on the country.
William Barr: A blast from the past
Prior to his selection by Trump, Barr had been then-President George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General in the 1990s.
But before that, as the Deputy Attorney General, he once overturned a draft rule that would allow the entry of people with HIV/AIDS to enter the US.
He even pushed for the idea that asylum-seeking refugees with HIV/AIDS not only be barred from entering the US, they should be imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
In an interview in 2001, he called people with HIV/AIDS as “the HIV people.”
Moreover, in his first confirmation hearing in 1991, Barr said he believes the right to privacy doesn’t extend to abortion.
William Barr and his beliefs
If that’s not enough, Barr has also said that he’s against the decision of Roe v. Wade.
He once said: “This moral lobotomy of public schools has been based on extremist notions of separation of church and state or on theories of moral relativism which reject the notion that there are standards of rights or wrong to which the community can demand adherence.”
In an essay he wrote for The Catholic Lawyer, he said the government should impose “a transcendent moral order with objective standards of right and wrong that…flows from God’s eternal law.”
“Decades ago, we saw the barriers to divorce eliminated. Twenty years ago, we saw the laws against abortion swept away. Today, we are seeing the constant chipping away at laws designed to restrain sexual immorality, obscenity, or euthanasia,” he wrote.
He further said the government should pass laws against “immoral” behaviour like getting a divorce and practicing “sexual immorality,” among others.
LGBTQ groups against William Barr
In a statement by GLAAD against Barr’s nomination by Trump, Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO of GLAAD, said: “Barr has a vicious anti-LGBTQ history, even suggesting that equality for LGBTQ Americans has ‘led to America’s decline’.”
“William Barr, who has wrongfully suggested that LGBTQ people—not Trump and his destructive policies—have harmed the United States, is the latest in a long line of replacements who President Trump has appointed to his Cabinet who are just as anti-LGBTQ as their predecessors,” Ellis added.
“If confirmed, there’s little doubt that William Barr would continue the Trump Administration’s objective of erasing LGBTQ Americans from the fabric of this nation,” she declared.
Barr’s nomination comes on the heels of the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the “request” of President Trump.
Faiz Shakir, national political director of ACLU, said: “William Barr’s record suggest that he will follow Jeff Sessions’ legacy of hostility to civil rights and civil liberties.”