The Trump White House will not pressure African countries to repeal anti-LGBTQ laws, according to Mick Mulvaney.
Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman and current Director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, made the statement while speaking at the State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington, DC.
Mulvaney said that the Obama administration had gone too far in trying to promote equal rights, such as President Barack Obama saying he would put an emphasis on the importance of LGBTQ rights in a visit to Kenya in 2015. Kenya currently punishes homosexuality with up to 14 years in prison.
“Our US taxpayer dollars [were] used to discourage Christian values in other democratic countries, he said. “It was stunning to me that my government under the previous administration would go to folks in sub-Saharan Africa and say, ‘We know that you have a law against abortion, but if you enforce that law, you’re not going to get any of our money. We know you have a law against gay marriage, but if you enforce that law, we’re not going to give you any money.’
He added: “That’s a different type of religious persecution. (…) That is a different type of religious persecution that I never expected to see. I never expected to see that as an American Christian, that we would be doing that to other folks. I am here to let you know there are many people in our government who care about [these issues.] There are a lot of people in this government who want to see things done differently. They want to do something.”
Mirroring many members of the Trump Administration, Mulvaney has opposed LGBTQ rights multiple times, scoring him zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard.
He was also a co-sponsor on the First Amendment Defense Act, which would have permitted religiously motivated LGBTQ discrimination.
Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court has ordered a local civil registry to record the marriage of a Polish same-sex couple who wed in Germany in 2018.
The case involved JC-T, who holds both Polish and German citizenship, and MT, a Polish national. The couple married in Germany while living there under EU free-movement rules. When they later returned to Poland, local authorities refused to register their marriage, citing the constitution’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.
The couple challenged the decision, and after exhausting their appeals in Polish courts, the case went to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The court was asked to clarify whether EU law -- including free-movement rights and the EU Charter’s ban on discrimination -- requires countries that do not allow same-sex marriage to recognize valid marriages from other member states.
Republican lawmakers in Kansas have voted to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's veto of a sweeping anti-transgender bill.
The measure, approved by both chambers earlier this month, invalidates driver's licenses and birth certificates that reflect a transgender person's gender identity rather than their assigned sex at birth. It also bars people from using restrooms that do not align with that assigned sex and bans multi-stall unisex bathrooms.
While the original House bill focused on prohibiting gender markers that align with a person's gender identity on identification documents, Republicans employed a procedural maneuver known as “gut and go” -- inserting the House language into a previously approved Senate bill -- to add the restroom restrictions.
The U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal from a conservative legal group, blocking enforcement of a California law that prohibits teachers and school staff from outing transgender or gender-nonconforming students to their parents.
Under the state's anti-"forced outing" law, teachers are barred from notifying parents without a student's permission when that student asks to change their pronouns or gender expression at school.
The plaintiffs include religious parents and educators, among them two sets of Catholic parents represented by the Thomas More Society, who claim the prohibition on parental notification misled parents and helped facilitate their children's social transition in defiance of their religious beliefs.
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