Liberal activists use Pride Month to lie about Trump’s gay rights record

President Trump began June by tweeting out his emphatic support for LGBT Pride Month. Any level-headed gay rights supporter would have celebrated this — so naturally, liberals mostly did the opposite.

Left-wing activists decided to meet the first Republican president to ever recognize Pride Month not with praise, but fierce condemnation. They invoked a largely false narrative of anti-LGBT discrimination under the Trump administration, trying to mislead America and completely ignoring the reality that Trump’s actually been pretty good on issues of gay rights and equality.

After all, Trump is the first president in American history to take office supporting gay marriage — even former President Barack Obama opposed it for the first four years of his presidency. This alone puts Trump miles ahead of his predecessors, but the president has also appointed gay and lesbian people to high-ranking judicial positions and nominated them as ambassadors.

And when Trump was recently asked about the historic candidacy of South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, he said it was “fantastic” to see a married gay man running for president and that he “had no problem with it.” The Trump administration has even launched an international effort to fight the barbaric criminalization of homosexuality worldwide.

All in all, that isn’t the resume of an anti-gay bigot.

Nevertheless, enraged liberal activists attempted to frame the president’s tolerant Pride Month messaging as insincere. This absurd reaction is best exemplified by liberal activist Charlotte Clymer’s widely-shared list of complaints about Trump’s LGBT policies. There’s not enough space in one article to debunk every single one of her supposed examples of anti-LGBT bias, but a brief examination of just a handful shows how unsubstantiated and unserious many are.

[Also read: ‘Stunningly bizarre’: Ohio public library cancels LGBT Pride event after backlash]

Several of Clymer’s examples of “attacks on the LGBT community” are laughable or petty, such as the complaint that Trump didn’t acknowledge Pride Month in the past and that certain pages on federal websites containing information about LGBT issues have been taken down sometime during his presidency.

After this embarrassingly weak start, Clymer attempts to paint Trump as anti-LGBT because he believes in religious freedom, and supports faith-based exceptions to a variety of anti-discrimination policies.

For instance, Clymer attacks the Trump administration for seeking to allow federal funding to go to religious adoption agencies that refer same-sex couples elsewhere. Yet, gay conservatives like me have defended the constitutional right of agencies to make faith-based decisions (even if we don’t personally like it). And with many kids in need of adoption services, it’s not anti-LGBT to want to protect religious adoption agencies from being shut down altogether because they aren’t allowed to operate according to their faith.

Additionally, Clymer slams the Trump administration for supposedly trying to ensure that federal civil rights laws do not protect LGBT people from discrimination.

But this isn’t some hateful attempt to redefine the law to hurt gay people, it’s just the correct interpretation of what current law actually says, according to conservative legal philosophy. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the federal rights law in question, does not mention the words “sexual orientation” or “gender identity,” but Obama-era liberals had declared it to somehow apply to these groups.

The Trump administration isn’t trying to hurt LGBT people by contesting that redefinition, they’re simply standing up for the rule of law. If Congress were to update civil rights law to actually include this language, then the Department of Justice would surely reverse course.

Many of Trump’s other supposedly anti-gay policies are similarly inoffensive when viewed objectively.

Unfortunately, this means that when a rare liberal complaint actually has merit, many conservatives don’t notice. For example, the Trump administration’s decision to ban transgender Americans from serving in the military was wrong and discriminatory, and left-wing activists got that one right. But when you cry “bigot” at everyone who disagrees with you, reasonable people eventually stop listening — and I don’t blame them.