Another Terrible Trump Appointment

Priebus is at least mainstream, although, like his boss, he has no experience in government. Pompeo, while a right-wing nut, is a reasonably mainstream appointment that could have been made by Cruz or Kasich. As for the rest -- abysmal. And so is the latest, Ken Blackwell, Ohio secretary of state from 1999 to 2007, now with the Family Research Council, a wingnut group led by president Tony Perkins. According to Wikipedia: "It opposes and lobbies against LGBT rights (such as same-sex marriage, same-sex civil unions, and LGBT adoption), abortion, divorce, embryonic stem-cell research and pornography." The SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) has declared it an anti-gay hate group. Blackwell is Trump's latest appointment -- though just for the transition team -- as domestic policy advisor.

Click here for an article at The Washington Post, by Amy Ellis Nutt, entitled "Gays can be reformed, just like arsonists, Trump’s new domestic policy adviser has said."

The Ohio politician has long endorsed a controversial mental health practice known as conversion therapy or reparative therapy. The goal is to cure a person of his or her homosexuality, and in the case of transgender people, to reaffirm the gender into which they were born.

Here's Blackwell:

Two years ago, in a radio interview with Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, which has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Blackwell appeared to blame the deaths of six individuals in a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, Calif., on the LGBT rights movement, saying it undermined "natural marriage."

"When these fundamental institutions are attacked and destroyed and weakened and abandoned," said Blackwell, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, "you get what we are now seeing, and that is a flood of these disturbed people in our society that are causing great pain."

And:

“I think it's a transgression against God's law,” he told the Columbus Dispatch at the time. “And I think you make good choices and bad choices in terms of lifestyle. Our expectation is that one's genetic makeup might make one more inclined to be an arsonist or might make one more inclined to be a kleptomaniac. Do I think they can be changed? Yes.”

And in 2009, on Michelangelo Signorile's radio show, Blackwell reaffirmed his stance, saying, "People choose to be who they are, as they choose to break civil law and God's law. ... I think you can choose not to be homosexual."

I'm straight, but I can't remember the day when I chose not to be homosexual.