Former Massachusetts congressman Barney
Frank said in an interview this week that he's “worried” about
LGBT rights under the Trump administration.
Frank has the distinction of being the
first openly gay member of Congress and the first to enter a marriage
with a member of the same sex. He married Jim Ready in 2012. He
left Congress in 2013 after a decades long and distinguished
political career.
Speaking with Michelangelo Signorile on
his SiriusXM radio program, Frank discussed LGBT rights under the
presidency of Donald Trump.
“I am worried,” he said.
“They're smart enough once again to
know that an all-out assault on our rights wouldn't work. Reality
has beaten bigotry. Everything they said was going to cause disaster
– same-sex marriage, LGBT openness in the military … didn't
happen.”
“They aren't going to make a broad
assault [on LGBT rights],” Frank
continued. “Since they got [Neil] Gorsuch as a Supreme Court
justice, what they plan to do is increase the right of people to say,
'I'm religiously opposed to this' … to recognizing our rights.”
“In their view, they can go beyond
participating in a marriage. They can refuse to hire you, et cetera.
So that's the scary part, and that's the part we're going to have to
fight.”
Frank also criticized claims made by
supporters of laws that prohibit transgender people from using the
bathroom of their choice. Supporters claim that the laws are needed
to keep women and children safe from predators.
“They talk about the terrible things
that are going to happen when these men put on dresses just to stalk
the bathrooms, and there are no examples of that. You know that if
that had been happening, if people had been using the transgender
rights issue to be abusive, we'd know it. There are zero examples of
anything like that happening,” Frank said.