LGBT Protest at Stonewall Inn Takes On Edge Amid Possible Blow to Gay Rights

By Joanna Walters, Guardian UK

04 February 17

 

Crowds head to the gay rights landmark as fears mounts over a leaked executive order draft that would enable discrimination in the name of religious freedom

ustralia Kimbrough planned to go to the Stonewall Inn in New York twice this weekend.

The first time was Friday night for a casual drink with her girlfriend as it is, after all, a bar.

The second will be on Saturday afternoon when this reliably-shabby little watering hole transforms into its other role as a US national monument, the most famous landmark for the gay rights movement in the world and a rallying point for what could be as many as 20,000 demonstrators protesting against the policies of Donald Trump.

The stated goal of the event outside the Stonewall Inn on Saturday afternoon is to be a solidarity rally for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community to stand with immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers outraged by the president’s executive order banning refugees and travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.

But the protest is likely to gain a new edge and several thousand extra participants from the emergence into the public domain this week of a leaked draft of an executive order revealing what would be a sweeping federal authorization of discrimination against gays in the name of religious freedom.

While the White House has declined to say when and whether it would sign such an order, the document’s very existence within the administration’s inner circle has rattled many in the community.

“We are going to go there and fight about this, I’ve been trying to block out what Trump’s been doing because it’s so depressing, but they are trying to legalize discrimination and that really makes me sad and angry, there has been so much bad news when he has been in office for such a short time,” said Kimbrough, a 26-year-old New York-based clothing designer and assistant for an app company that provides services to entrepreneurs.

Kimbrough first spoke to the Guardian last spring in celebration of the news that then-president Barack Obama planned to declare the Stonewall Inn a National Monument to mark it as the place where riots over a police raid on the gays, drag queens and transgender patrons gathering there in 1969 turned into a movement.

She had just met her girlfriend and the US had not long ago made same sex marriage legal nationwide.

“Now I’m so nervous about the next four years, even here in New York City I’m scared,” she said.

Still together, she and her girlfriend will attend Saturday’s rally, which starts at 2pm outside the Stonewall Inn.

It has been organized by a loose coalition of pro-immigration, refugee support and pro-gay groups. There has been talk on social media of smaller events provisionally taking place in Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, but New York’s is so far billed as the leading event.

New York City council member Corey Johnson, whose district includes the neighborhoods of the West Village and Chelsea, is a key organizer and told the Guardian that he was shocked by the wording of the leaked draft of the executive order.

“He may not have come out yet and said he wants to persecute gay people but Trump has appointed senior people and cabinet members who are anti-gay and his collusion with the religious right is the equivalent of making a pact with the professional anti-gay forces,” Johnson said.

He added that if the draft order were to be signed by the president it would be “disastrous”.

The document seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations claiming religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and transgender identity, and it aims to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act, according to a version leaked to the Nation.

Johnson said any such order would face strong legal claims to be unconstitutional, similar to the host of legal challenges to last week’s travel ban, which he described as “undemocratic and un-American”.

Floyd Rumohr, executive director of the city’s Brooklyn Community Pride Center, said he expected thousands of patrons of the center to turn out on Saturday and that the events, such as the large demonstrations against the travel ban last weekend and the women’s march were “galvanizing”.

But he added: “We have to be very specific about the greater goal of getting progressives elected at the mid-terms in 2018 and we need to be careful not to use up our limited resources in too many diffuse directions – the administration is aiming to distract us so we get lost in the chaos and exhaust ourselves.”

In another roller-coaster week in Washington, the day before the leak, the White House announced that the executive order protecting federal employees from anti-LGBT discrimination that was first signed in 2014 by Barack Obama would continue in place.

Then on Thursday Trump vowed to overturn a law restricting political speech by tax-exempt churches, delighting evangelicals and the religious right.

Gregory Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national Republican organization representing gay conservatives, praised Trump for continuing Obama’s anti-discrimination order and mocked Saturday’s protest event as a knee-jerk reaction from the left to a draft order that has yet show any sign of becoming an order.

“Donald Trump is the first Republican president to affirmatively mention the LGBT community. He’s attended a same-sex wedding, praised Elton John’s wedding, welcomed gay members to his Mar-a-Lago club when many minority groups were being denied admission to other prestigious private membership clubs in Florida, and his foundation has donated to LGBT and HIV/Aids causes – it’s historic for a GOP president,” he said.

Angelo said, however, that should the leaked draft order end up being signed by Trump: “We will certainly speak out against that.”