GLAAD CEO: “The fact that President Trump is taking counsel from known anti-LGBTQ activists like Ginni Thomas regarding policies that could impact LGBTQ people should have Americans gravely concerned about the foundations of our government.”

The New York Times reports meeting included: “members of the group denounced transgender people” […] “someone said that gay marriage was harming the fabric of the United States”

NEW YORK – GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, today called on the White House to release official bookkeeping notes from President Donald Trump’s meeting with Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and her anti-LGBTQ group Groundswell last week. 

According to news reports, Ms. Thomas led a meeting with President Trump at the White House where participants denounced transgender Americans and claimed the historic, nationwide marriage equality ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court was “harming the fabric of the United States.” The Supreme Court is expected to take up Trump’s ban on transgender service members sometime in the near future, and Ms. Thomas’s husband will vote on this critical case.

“The fact that President Trump is taking counsel from known anti-LGBTQ activists like Ginni Thomas regarding policies that could impact LGBTQ people and families should have Americans gravely concerned about the foundations of our government, and they deserve to see the official notes that came from that meeting,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO at GLAAD. “LGBTQ people know President Trump wants to roll back their hard-fought progress, but this clear display of coordination between the Executive Branch and the wife of a U.S. Supreme Court justice shows Americans the Trump Administration will do anything to push an agenda – even if it means shredding the checks and balances system. The White House has a responsibility to release official notes from the meeting and provide context in the violently anti-LGBTQ work that Thomas and her organization lead.”

Today GLAAD added Ginni Thomas to its Trump Accountability Project, a list of administration officials and related individuals with anti-LGBTQ activist records. According to GLAAD’s Trump Accountability Project (TAP), President Trump and his administration have been the most anti-LGBTQ in recent history, authorizing attacks on the LGBTQ community more than 92 times. For more about these, go to www.glaad.org/trump.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: Ginni Thomas’s Anti-LGBTQ Past 

• Founding member of secretive far-right group Groundswell, which lobbies against LGBTQ rights. 
• Wrote a column for The Daily Caller that promoted viciously anti-trans activist Stella Morabito. In the article, the two insisted that transgender rights are part of a ‘politically correct propaganda tool’ that is ‘manipulating the masses.’
• Proudly supports “public schools who have bathroom and locker policies that common sensically link to biologically as opposed to their progressive agenda that there is no difference between a man and a woman, and a gender that can change from day to day.”
• Used her Daily Caller column to promoted an author who claims trans rights are part of an agenda to negatively transform America: “To [author Dr. Kim Holmes], the transgender issue uses a small number of “victims” to demonstrate who can make laws. By expanding an administrative interpretation of “civil rights,” without Congress, the federal state solidifies its capacity to dictate American law – even if it’s public school bathroom policies. Most Republicans fail to step up and fight, he says, because they fear a popular culture that is against them and are exceedingly shallow.”
• Included “the emergence of transgender rights” as one of the host of horribles that left wing activists are supposedly imposing on America: “So help people connect the dots in America. There’s so much going on. Whether it’s suddenly the emergence of transgender rights, or the downing of statues or ESPN suddenly becoming left wing commentators instead of sports people, or the closing down of free speech on college campuses, or the censorship that’s happening by media providers to conservative or pro-American voices.”
• Promoted Sam Sorbo, an anti-trans activist who claims that trans-inclusive public school policies “bully” other students.

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