GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) have come out against the nomination of William Barr to head
the Department of Justice (DOJ), saying that he – much like his
predecessor, Jeff Sessions – is opposed to LGBT rights.
President Donald Trump on Friday
announced his intention to nominate Barr to the post, saying he's
“one of the most respected jurists in the country,” according to
media reports.
Barr previously served in the post from
1991 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush. He served as a deputy
and an assistant attorney general before heading the DOJ.
“William Barr, who has wrongfully
suggested that LGBTQ people – not Trump and his destructive
policies – have harmed the United States, is the latest in a long
line of replacements who President Trump has appointed to his Cabinet
who are just as anti-LGBTQ as their predecessors,” Sarah Kate
Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, said in a statement. “If
confirmed, there’s little doubt that William Barr would continue
the Trump administration’s objective of erasing LGBTQ Americans
from the fabric of this nation.”
David Stacy, HRC's director of
government affairs, said that Barr was “ill suited” to head the
department.
"The Trump-Pence White House and
the Justice Department have been pursuing a policy agenda to
undermine the legal rights of LGBTQ people since day one," Stacy
said in a statement. "From his views around HIV/AIDS during his
tenure as attorney general to his more recent writing promoting
extreme views around religious exemptions, William Barr looks ill
suited to be our country's top law enforcement officer. The Senate
has a solemn responsibility to advise and consent on this important
nomination and his troubling views on LGBTQ equality and the law must
be thoroughly vetted."
Barr has been outspoken in his belief
that the “homosexual movement” threatens the rights of people of
faith.
“It is no accident that the
homosexual movement, at one or two percent of the population, gets
treated with such solicitude while the Catholic population, which is
over a quarter of the country, is given the back of the hand. How
has that come to be?” he wrote in a
1995 article lamenting Catholics adopting “secular” values.
Faiz Shakir, national political
director at the ACLU, said that Barr's “record suggests that he
will follow Jeff Sessions' legacy of hostility to civil rights and
civil liberties.”
The U.S Senate must confirm Barr's
nomination.