If there's anything the GOP obviously has a poor track record on, it's LGBT+ rights. (Another would be too much blindness to real racial injustices, and that includes their hypocritical support for (predictably?) failed big-government "drug-war" policies that have disparate racial impacts. Not that this vindicates the left all that much; they're the ones hypocritically pointing out the failures of big-government policies in only this one area, immediately crying racism whenever an "unarmed black teenager" is killed by police (e.g.), etc.)
From what reporting I've been seeing, the Trump administration is arguing in front of the Supreme Court against standard Civil Rights protections for LGBT+ people. Here's something I find revealing in this context: while there's no shortage of Fox News links on any number of Google News topics, there aren't any on this subject, not on the first two pages of results, anyway. If Fox News isn't reporting on it, chances are good that the activities involved are really too shameful for them to direct its audience's attention that way and to really air the Cultural-Political Right's laundry on this.
The Congress is chock-full of selectively attentive cowards who refuse to do the right thing when it comes to (a) ending federal cannabis prohibition (consider, e.g., the callousness and willful cluelessness involved toward medical cannabis users), and (b) updating the Civil Right act to include the same protections for LGBT+ people. These are such no-brainer issues that it's not hard to figure out what the "right side of history" position is. (Although see my tentatively-proposed position as a libertarian below.) And it's GOP politicians who (on average, of course) are more toxic on these issues than those across the aisle. (It's just too bad that the Demo rats bring so much credibility-destroying toxicity to just about any issue; see below, for example, on their anti-libertarian attitudes toward Christian bakers. And good luck getting them to couch their arguments for weed legalization in the language of freedom rather than racial equity or [their perennial addiction] tax revenues.) While it's believable that a Democrat-controlled Congress would do the right thing on these issues at some point in the not-distant future, I have a hard time believing that a GOP-controlled Congress would ever get around to doing so (unless they faced severe political repercussions for their shameful inaction). [Edit: on a related note, would states like Texas ever have gotten around to repealing their sodomy laws (which are premised on the patently evil idea that people's lives are the state's and not their own to dispose of) on their own accord, absent SCOTUS intervention?]
If it were merely about the right of a baker to refuse baking a cake for a same-sex wedding, then we have an apparent clash of deep constitutional values. (I say it's "apparent" because I don't see any warranted presumption that a business "open to the public" must do things that violate the religious convictions of the business-owner. Also, the libertarian principle involved becomes more clear-cut when "bake my cake, bigot" morphs into "wax my balls, bigot.") I don't see what clash of deep constitutional values is involved in the right of a business to fire someone on the basis of their sexual preference or gender identity when there are other relevantly-similar protected classes under prevailing law. (Again as a libertarian, I say the presumption should be in favor of the right of a business to discriminate as long as it openly advertises its bigotry. But I'm tentatively saying that it's a presumption, and that context matters in reasonably delimiting the scope of property rights. No doubt some asshole business-owners would abuse this presumption to the maximal extent if given the chance....)
If you don't think anti-intellectualist, anti-liberal strains of religious dogma don't have something to do with this, then I would urge a look into attitudes toward LGBT+ rights in the Bible Belt. Just because those attitudes aren't as shitty as they were a few decades ago, doesn't mean they still aren't shitty.
Have a look at Trump's shameful, anti-evidence behavior and policies (which go beyond the usual distractions associated with Trumpspeak) in this and some related areas. Not only isn't he friendly toward LGBT+ rights as advertised, but he's also clearly blanket-Islamophobic. (From what I can tell, you might as well treat his and Pamela Geller's views on Islam as interchangeable). (And while we might treat his 2016 campaign-season proposal to ban all Muslims entering the country as the usual casual-relationship-to-truth Trumpspeak which had little to zero chance of ever being implemented, along with his quickly-abandoned campaign-season proposals to kill the families of terrorists and bring back torture of terror suspects, the sentiment behind it is unquestionably Islamophobic.) It isn't just a matter of the usual blustery things he says, but what he has done policy-wise.
And whether or not it affects his policy decision, when Trump contradicts himself from one time period to the next, as he has done most obviously on the cannabis-legalization issue, and doesn't explain himself, then that is evidence of bad faith and/or cynical pandering. "It's just Trumpspeak" doesn't help when he unaccountably contradicts himself. (Likewise, "Trump's saving grace is his ridiculous/unhinged/dishonest opposition," while quite arguably true, doesn't transform him into a non-asshole.) (Likewise, one doesn't have to be one of these toxic-af radical trans activists - too toxic even for many on the "progressive" left - to recognize how transphobic and/or downright ignorant of transgenderism so many on the Cultural Right are; "God created two biological sexes" won't erase the distinction between sex and gender, for example. How about this: there's plenty of toxicity to go around on this subject, coming from any number of directions.)
I'd just like to know, what these GOP people think is the upside to upholding (whether actively or by omission) the putative right of businesses to fire people for being gay, given their not upholding the right to do so in the case of biological sex, race, or religion. And the philosopher's question: just how far, exactly, are they willing to go on this, before even they get ashamed and disgusted with themselves? (My first philosopher's question for leftists would be: just how egregious, exactly, does a distortion or smear of Ayn Rand have to be, before even the leftists start calling foul? They've been real lowlifes on this subject, as it is....) Something specific, please.
[Addendum: An extension of the philosopher's questions: for those who aren't outright assholes, just how far, exactly, do their colleagues on their own side of the aisle have to go in being assholes, before the non-assholes start calling the assholes out? (Or: how far, exactly, does the non-called-out asshole behavior have to go, before those failing to call out the assholes start becoming assholes themselves? Something specific, goddammit.)]
[Addendum 10/12: Some common sense reasoning requiring little to no mental gymnastics in either (left/right) direction: Sexual orientation and gender identity are in the same category of 'immutable characteristics' that make sex, race, and religion protected classes under the Civil Rights Act. How much, exactly, ahem does one need to read into the Civil Rights Act to see that it is about protected classes based on immutable characteristics and not only about those classes concretely enumerated in the Act? Congress refuses to do the right thing here, after all....]
