The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Trump steadily fulfills goals of religious right
NEW YORK — When Donald Trump assumed the presidency, conservative religious leaders drew up “wish lists’ of steps they hoped he’d take to oppose abortion and rein in the LGBTQrights movement. With a flurry of recent actions, Trump’s administration is now winning their praise for aggressively fulfilling many of their goals.
Mat Staver, president of the legal advocacy organization Liberty Counsel, said Trump has fulfilled about 90 percent of the goals on a list that Staver and other conservative leaders compiled.
“In the first two years of his administration, he’s achieved more than all of the presidents combined since Ronald Reagan,” Staver said. “He’s been the most proreligious freedom and prolife president in modern history.”
One of the most dramatic steps — hailed by conservatives and decried by liberals — came this week when the Department of Health and Human Services implemented a new rule for the federal family planning program known as Title X. Planned Parenthood, long a target of religious conservatives because of its role as the leading U.S. abortion provider, quit the program — walking away from tens of millions of dollars in grants — rather than comply with a new rule prohibiting clinics from referring women for abortions.
Last week, the Labor Department proposed a rule that is expected to shield federal contractors from discrimination complaints regarding hiring and firing decisions motivated by religious beliefs. Critics say the rule, if implemented, would enable employers to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
On Friday, the Justice Department filed a brief telling the Supreme Court that federal law allows firing workers for being transgender. The brief is related to three cases that the high court will hear in its upcoming term related to LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace.
Earlier this year, Health and Human Services issued a waiver allowing a statecontracted foster care agency in South Carolina to deny services to samesex and nonChristian families. HHS also moved to revoke newly won health care discrimination protections for transgender people.
These and other actions aimed at curtailing abortion rights and LGBTQ rights have helped many conservative Christians overlook other aspects of Trump’s presidency, such as his oftendivisive rhetoric on Twitter and at rallies.
The Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the Southern Baptist megachurch First Baptist Dallas and a frequent guest at the White House, predicted that Trump would win more evangelical votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, when they helped provide his margin of victory.
“When he ran in 2016 and promised prolife, proreligious freedom policies, most evangelicals who voted for him didn’t know whether he would or could fulfill those promises,” Jeffress said. “When they look back now, they see he checked off all of those goals. … He’ll win by an even larger margin on basis of promises kept.”