Gay marriage leads to “the deterioration of marriage and the family” and “societal collapse.” Keeping same-sex couples from marrying isn’t discrimination, but simply enforcing “God’s idea.” These are just a few of the ugly statements by Vice President and religious bigot Mike Pence about marriage equality.
And it doesn’t stop there. In 2015, Trump’s second-hand man signed a “religious freedom” law as governor of Indiana that gave permission to businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
During his short time in office, Trump has already come close to implementing a similar executive order, but he was forced to back down after a series of humiliating defeats on other issues and pressure from LGBTQ organizations.
With Trump and Pence controlling the White House and a Republican majority in Congress, it’s understandable that millions of LGBTQ people, their family, friends and supporters are fearful that rights won in recent years will be rolled back.
There’s no predicting what will happen in the next four years, but with LGBTQ rights under threat in the Trump era, it’s important to look back at how marriage equality was won — and generalize the lessons for the struggles ahead.
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It’s hard to overstate how profoundly social attitudes and legal rights for LGBTQ people in the US have advanced in the past 20 years. In order to understand where we’ve come from and how we’ve gotten here, some history is in order.
In 1992, in response to pressure from the gay and lesbian movement and AIDS activists, Democratic President Bill Clinton ran on a platform of supporting gay rights. But on February 1994, only a year into his first term, Clinton turned his back on the LGBT community and caved to the religious right, instituting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell policy that prohibited gays and lesbians from coming out in the country’s largest employer.
Then, in September 1996, in response to a ruling by the Hawaii Supreme Court opening the door to legalizing same-sex…