With just over a year left in President Donald Trump's first term, another late-breaking news item barely made waves: The Interior Department which manages the majority of the federal government's public lands deleted "sexual orientation" from its anti-discrimination guidelines, as HuffPost first reported last week. The removal was just the latest in a nearly three-year-long effort to strip mention of LGBTQ people from the executive branch bureaucracy.
Reports of such changes began the day Trump assumed office, when LGBTQ content was deleted from the White House, State Department and Labor Department websites within "minutes" of his having been sworn into office, according to GLAAD, a national LGBTQ advocacy group.
Since then, drip by drip, other parts of the federal government have had their online content trimmed to omit mention of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
But last week, the Interior Department's public response to the change raised eyebrows. Carol Danko, a spokesperson, reportedly said the department was following the Obama-era guidance that found that federal civil rights laws protect LGBTQ people.
"Per the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, under Title VII the term 'sex' includes gender, gender identity, transgender status, sexual orientation and pregnancy," Danko said, according to HuffPost.
Danko's response highlights the central tension in the Trump administration's LGBTQ policy: Even as Trump's Justice Department is arguing before the Supreme Court that the Obama-era EEOC guidance is incorrect, other departments are using the guidance to swat away media inquiries about why LGBTQ mentions are being stripped from federal anti-discrimination guidance.
Compounding the confusion, LGBTQ advocates sued to see Justice Department LGBTQ policy documents and a Justice Department employee resource group complained in an open letter about discrimination in the department. Soon after, in April, Attorney General William Barr demonstrated support for the Justice Department's many LGBTQ employees, even as he directed the effort to dismantle federal LGBTQ protections before the Supreme Court.