LGBT activists outraged as Trump admin cuts LGBT info from gov’t websites
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services no longer hosts a webpage on lesbian and bisexual-specific health issues, a government transparency organization revealed Wednesday.
The Sunlight Foundation reports that the Trump administration has deleted from HHS’s Office of Women’s Health website a page titled, “Lesbian and bisexual health.” The original URL leads to an error message and the page is inaccessible from any other part of the site.
The page, archived here, said that while “all women have specific health risks,” lesbians and bisexual women are at greater risk for heart disease, cancer, certain sexually-transmitted diseases, depression, anxiety, and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). It further claims that lesbians and bisexuals face unique problems in the healthcare system, such as doctors who lack the training for their specific needs and health professionals who don’t believe a lesbian or bisexual woman “can be a healthy, normal female.”
A PDF document containing the same content remains online, but is not linked through the website.
In response to the controversy, an HHS spokesperson told Politico that the page was removed because it was “outdated,” and that its relevant health information has been merely “integrated into the relevant health topics pages across the website.”
Politico further notes that the office’s Twitter account has not mentioned anything LGBT-related since November 11, 2016, three days after Donald Trump won the presidential election.
Pro-homosexual advocacy groups have condemned the news in similar terms, with SAGE accusing the administration of “trying to make LGBT people invisible” and the so-called Human Rights Campaign vowing, “we won’t be erased.”
Since taking office, Vice News details, the Trump administration has removed LGBT references in a variety of government materials. In the first month of Trump’s presidency, nearly all instances of the LGBT acronym were scrubbed from the State Department’s website, last March the US Census Bureau stopped asking for survey respondents’ sexual orientation or gender identity, and last October HHS cut all LGBT references from its Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2018-2022.
HHS also removed a question about sexual orientation from the annual National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants, but restored it after homosexual activists objected.
At the time of the census controversy, homosexual Reason.com writer Scott Shackford accused homosexual activists of peddling “fake outrage” in order to “use this demographic data to get a bigger slice of federal funding.”
“What does demographic inclusion in a study have to do with whether LGBT people are treated equally under the law?” he asked. “Nothing. Rights and freedoms are not based on head counts or a demographic analysis of where people live.”
As president, Trump’s record on homosexual issues has been mixed. He has stood firm on banning “transgendered” individuals from serving in the military and ending the Department of Education’s hearing of complaints from students trying to use bathrooms for the opposite sex, and has appointed several pro-family conservatives to federal posts.
However, he has also expressed support for the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling forcing same-sex “marriage” on all fifty states, appointed a number of pro-homosexual officials, and replaced a planned executive order protecting religious liberty with a heavily diluted version.
The original draft contained very specific language protecting the conscience rights of pro-life and pro-marriage Americans from government discrimination. But according to marriage and gender scholar Ryan T. Anderson, the finalized order contained only “general language about the importance of religious liberty” that directed federal departments to follow existing laws and issue undefined “guidances” and “amended regulations” to address religious Americans’ concern
