Department of Obliteration

On Monday I wrote about how webpages with information about LGBT rights, civil rights, health care, and climate change were removed from the White House website by the new Trump administration (link here).

Now The Advocate is reporting (link here) how webpages on LGBT issues have disappeared from both the Department of State and Department of Labor webpages.

Arguably the most painful removal was the erasure of the information and apology pages about the so-called Lavender Scare on the State Department website.

The Lavender Scare occurred from the later 1940s into the 1950s when gay and lesbian foreign service employees were outed and fired from the State Department. Some were even prosecuted and imprisoned.

And who was one of the primary gay persecutors during the Lavender Scare? None other than Donald Trump's good friend and mentor Roy Cohn, who I wrote about last Friday (link here).

During the campaign, some Trump supporters said he would be great for LGBT rights. Based on what we've seen so far, they were either lying or hopelessly naive. The new Trump administration has not done one thing to advance LGBT rights beyond what President Obama did, although there's been some significant reversals since last Friday.