Trying to figure out where you really stand on LGBT issues, or any issue for that matter, is a vexing process.
You say on 60 Minutes, for example, that marriage equality is settled law, yet every name you have mentioned as a possible nominee to the Supreme Court views our community as perverted and deserving of no rights to anything except perhaps to conversion therapy paid for with funds diverted from HIV treatment programs.
David von Storch — File photo
Your Cabinet choices almost to a man (there are a few women — Senator Mitch McConnell’s wife was a smarmy homage to that shining example of cooperation and character that now presides over the U.S. Senate) abhor according any rights to our community or respecting those rights we have fought for far too long to achieve. So while you’re busy tweeting the nonsense that has earned you the distinction as the most unpopular incoming President in modern U.S. history, your Cabinet will no doubt be creating and implementing policies that are likely at every corner to attack us, marginalize us and and demean who we are as human beings. As such I don’t believe anything you say, except for some reason I can’t quite explain, I do believe that your 3 a.m. tweets reflect the inner-workings of your third-grade bully’s soul.
So, while I could go on and on pleading for you to stand up for what you’ve said about those LGBT rights you believe are fair and just, I won’t bother. You’ve shown us who you are by the company that you keep. You are no friend of ours, Mr. Trump, and anyone who says otherwise is buying the orange fool’s gold that you are peddling in the form of $26 cocktails at your new Trump Hotel in my hometown.
Every single day when I get out of bed, I will do my best not to get distracted by your childish prattling and insidious gas lighting. At times my better angels will try to find something positive in the words you read from the TelePrompTer that Kellyanne Conway so artfully crafts. Yet while you and the Republicans in control of Congress drink from that false cup of mandate that makes you drunk with power and hubris, the seeds of our discontent have been firmly sown.
I do have just one request. Please don’t come to Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Shaw, NE, SW, SE or anywhere adjacent. We will try to be civil but it’s a really big ask. When you go out, I’d recommend Georgetown. It’s not Mar a Largo, but it’s the best we can offer.
Enjoy your stay in our town. We are ever-hopeful that in no time you will return full-time to your gilded tower of excess in New York in whose escalators you descended from the heavens to burnish your brand and somehow, through no fault of your own, landed in the most powerful seat in the land.
Welcome to D.C.!
David von Storch
President, UA Companies
VIDA Fitness, Bang Salon, Capitol City Brewing Co. @davidvons
The opinions expressed in these letters are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of their organizations and this magazine, its staff and contributors.
The Turning Point USA co-founder, who once declared Pride a “sin” and opposed LGBTQ rights, was killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed by an assassin's bullet during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Wednesday, Sept. 10.
The 31-year-old was the co-founder of Turning Point USA, an organization advocating for conservative politics and education on high school and college campuses.
At the time of the shooting, Kirk, who appeared on campus as part of his "American Comeback Tour," was taking questions from people in the crowd while seated at a "Prove Me Wrong" table in the Sorensen Center courtyard on campus, according to The Associated Press.
"I was really into politics at a very young age," says Tim Miller, host of The Bulwark Podcast and an MSNBC political analyst. "I can't remember what they were called, but you'd get those kid magazines about politics that would come to your school, and I remember always really being drawn to them, and reading them and wanting to know more. I always knew lots of weird facts about politics and geography as a little middle school nerd."
Raised in St. Louis until fourth grade, when his family relocated to Littleton, Colorado, Miller became enmeshed in conservative politics at a young age, taking various campaign jobs throughout his career as a former Republican strategist. He jokes that his success at handicapping political races dates back to the 1992 election, when he won a $1 wager after betting his grandmother that then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton would unseat sitting president George H.W. Bush.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has reposted a CNN clip featuring Doug Wilson, leader of the Christian evangelical movement he follows, in which the pastor calls for making gay sex illegal.
“In the late ’70s and early ’80s, sodomy was a felony in all 50 states. That America of that day was not a totalitarian hellhole,” Wilson says in the seven-minute segment, reports the Daily Beast.
Wilson goes on to say he wishes the United States would revive anti-sodomy laws, which criminalized same-sex relations -- and, in some states, even certain non-vaginal sex acts between consenting heterosexual partners.
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