Erase Another Trump Horror

For everything there is a season, and for many the Time of Trump is the season for perpetual outrage.

The latest horror is over President Trump’s supposed “erasing” of the LGBT community, because the 2020 Census isn’t asking any questions about sexual orientation or gender identification.

Yet the Census has never asked about either — and all decisions are still being made by Obama appointees.

Not that facts can be allowed to stand in the way of social-justice fury, which erupted everywhere from a GQ column, “The Trump White House Is Quietly Destroying That ‘LGBT-Friendly’ Agenda It Loves To Talk About,” to a Daily Beast rant, “This Is Why The Erasing of LGBT Americans On The 2020 Census Matters.”

And don’t even think about the outraged tweets hashtagged #CantEraseUs.

In the Beast piece, Tim Teeman storms that “erasure is not an uncommon thing for LGBT people to experience” and that “initially, LGBT people were to be part of the 2020 Census.” He asks: “Why did census organizers at first plan to include LGBT Americans in the Census, and then — suddenly, and so far without explanation — decide not to?”

It turns out the Census Bureau has only started to study the issue. The only hint that it might put LGBT questions in the next Census came in the appendix of a report to Congress — which accidentally used text from an early draft, while the main report accurately suggested no such possibility.

As Reid Wilson reported in The Hill, “The Bureau takes years to test new topics to be included among their questions, and while the agency has been researching sexual-orientation questions, they may not have finalized that research or figured out just how to phrase the questions they ask.”

Makes sense: The horse does go before the buggy, after all.

Ben Casselman of the site Five Thirty Eight talked to demographer Gary Gates, a longtime advocate for asking LGBTQ questions who actually served on the Census Bureau’s scientific advisory committee until last year. “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that there was never a plan to add sexual orientation or gender identity to the 2020 Census,” Gates said. “That just wasn’t happening. It wasn’t even being considered.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a wave of corrections on this fake news; instead, get ready for the next outrage-that-really-isn’t.