According to White House insiders, President Trump is planning to move forward with a religious liberty executive order to mark the National Day of Prayer on Thursday. The order, a draft of which was leaked back in January, will please Christian conservatives who have watched their rights deteriorate in the face of the relentless LGBT activist movement.
While officials won’t confirm or deny the language of the order, it will spark a liberal backlash if it looks anything like the earlier draft. The details of that order were published by The Nation early on in Trump’s presidency. Many critics felt that the president’s daughter herself might have been responsible for the leak; both her and her husband, Jared Kushner, are believed to oppose any efforts by the president to marginalize the LGBT community. That, of course, is just speculation.
What isn’t speculation is that liberals went nuts when they saw the draft, which would have allowed individuals, companies, and organizations to claim much wider protections when faced with accusations of discrimination. The new draft is expected to include softer language than the original, but it is, after all, the brainchild of Vice President Mike Pence, whose Christian credentials are not in dispute.
“The language is very, very strong,” one source told Politico.
In the original draft, the order stated: “Americans and their religious organizations will not be coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience.”
It went on to focus on protecting the tax-exempt status of any group that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”
As you may remember, Mike Pence first came to national prominence when his state, Indiana, passed a similar law that many LGBT activists criticized as giving Christian conservatives a license to discriminate. That he would encourage the president to sign an order of this nature is no surprise.
Trump campaigned to the left of your average Republican when it came to LGBT issues, however, so we’ll have to wait and see how far he’s willing to go in the new order. Whether or not Ivanka was responsible for leaking the first draft, she’s almost certainly in his ear on this one, trying to limit the scope of the order.
As unfortunate as the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was, its ancillary effects – some of which have cost business owners and government employees their careers – have been utterly unacceptable. If Trump can just guide us back to some form of stable sanity on these matters, many millions of entrepreneurs, workers, and everyday Americans will breath a sigh of relief.
