Monday, August 07, 2017

Groups planning to sue Trump Administration over possible ban of transgender people from military


According to LGBTQNation, should Trump's ban of transgender men and women from the military go into effect, there will be a lawsuit:

With formal guidance released by the White House Friday calling for a purge of transgender people from the US military, Lambda Legal and OutServe-Servicemembers Legal Defense Network announced that they would file a lawsuit.  
 “This mean-spirited and discriminatory attack on our community is capricious, irrational and clearly driven by anti-LGBT forces in the administration who care more about harming transgender people than keeping our nation safe,” Lambda Legal’s Sasha Buchert said on the organization’s blog. “It is clearly unconstitutional.”

And according to Newsweek, ever since Trump sent the initial tweet out banning transgender service members, there was already speculation that such an order would be illegal:

 Josh Block, an attorney for the ACLU’s LGBT Project, said his inbox was “completely flooded” with messages from transgender people and their relatives and friends after Trump’s tweets. But he cautioned that it is extremely unclear if and how the Trump administration is going to move forward. “There are still a lot of question marks on how literally and seriously to take this tweet,” he said. “If they take the really shocking step of pulling people off the battlefield and kicking them out because they are trans, they absolutely have to see us in court.” If the tweets turn into policy, Block believes it would violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause and the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA protects individuals from “arbitrary or capricious” actions. “I can’t think of anything that is more arbitrary or capricious than what Trump did today,” he said. “In any separation procedure, they could make that argument and raise it in federal court as well.” 
 Jon Davidson, Lambda Legal’s legal director, said if Trump issued an executive order, demanded the Department of Defense change regulations or got Congress to change the law, Lambda Legal would partner with Outserve-SLDN, a military-specific LGBT advocacy organization, and “immediately” sue. “The fact he tweeted this does not change the current military regulations that allow transgender members of the military to serve openly, and that was based on extensive study that undercuts, totally, his unfounded assertions that allowing transgender people to serve would be disruptive or costly,” Davidson said.

Trump's attack on transgender troops is not popular. The only thing he has to stand on is support from the religious right and their reasoning as to why the ban is a good idea.

And based on how easy it was to expose the lies that one of the group put forth in its reasonings, one has to wonder will Trump be successful in implementing the ban?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And it bears mentioning in every discussion of a trans troop ban why exactly Hair Furor suddenly threw trans service members under the bus: as a bargaining chip to fund his wall.

Trump Banned Transgender Troops for 74 Miles of Border Wall Funding: Report
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-transgender-ban-wall-642456