Silver Linings, Dark Clouds, and Hypocrisy: DOJ Pride at the Department of Justice

DOJ Pride DOJ Pride is an organization of LGBT U.S. Department of Justice employees.  It has existed since the Clinton Administration.

I was heartened to read an Associated Press report this morning that yesterday DOJ Pride held its annual Pride event in the Main Justice Building, honoring Transgender Rights hero Gavin Grimm and the DOJ attorneys who worked on the litigation against North Carolina's H.B. 2 until the Trump Administration pulled the plug on the case.

This seemed to be progress of a sort with respect to Republican Administrations, inasmuch as in the Bush II Administration, Attorney General John Ashcroft barred all DOJ Pride activities at the Department, and this exclusion continued until the last year of the Bush II Administration.

Current Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not comment at all about the upcoming event until, according to the AP report, a DOJ intern asked about it.  Then, and only then, did Sessions say that, "We will protect and defend and celebrate that, and protect the rights of all transgender persons," noting that he had directed the Civil Rights Division to review some cases in which transgender people were killed.  "We are not going to allow persons in this country to be discriminated against or attacked in any way because of their sexual orientation." (Sessions does not appear to understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity.)

The hypocrisy of the current Attorney General's statement is palpable -- it is nice that he is against murder, but opposes all laws protecting LGBT people against discrimination.  (Similar, I suppose, to those 20th Century Southern politicians who decried lynching, but opposed all moves toward racial equality.)  But even that hypocrisy has its value, since it is a public recognition of the humanity of LGBT people -- something virtually absent from recent Republican/Trump/Family Research Council discourse.  That seems reminiscent of the Reagan Administration 1984 Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday Ceremony at DOJ.  I had just started working at DOJ, and initially was horrified that the speaker at the MLK Ceremony was Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, whose mission seemed to be to halt civil rights enforcement.  On reflection, I realized that this represented progress, because the culture had so changed that even people like Reynolds felt the political need to pay lip service to civil rights.

But upon closer reading of the AP report, I learned that the Sessions Department of Justice excluded the press from yesterday's DOJ Pride event.  And then I learned from another report that this exclusion was unprecedented.

So Sessions does not even meet the Brad Reynolds standard of decency.  Sessions allows DOJ Pride to meet, but then hopes that his homophobic/transphobic base will not notice.