The White House
Biden issues proclamation on 70th anniversary of Lavender Scare
Thousands of gay men and lesbians were fired from U.S. government
President Joe Biden issued a formal proclamation Wednesday on the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare, a moral panic that caused investigations and firings of thousands of known or suspected gay men and lesbians who were working for the U.S. government.
“For so many members of the LGBTQI+ community, hate, discrimination, and isolation throughout our country’s history have denied them the full promise of America,” Biden said. “The Lavender Scare epitomized — and institutionalized — this injustice.”
The president said “we must reflect honestly on the darkest chapters of our story” to continue building on the “tremendous progress” that has been made since the Lavender Scare.
At the same time, he said, “the struggle for equal justice is not over” for LGBTQ people in America, noting the “wave of discriminatory laws that target them — especially transgender children — and that echo the hateful stereotypes and stigma” encountered by gay men and lesbians during the Cold War era
Beginning with the State Department’s purge of gay and lesbian employees in 1947, which was codified across the federal government by an executive order from President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, the Lavender Scare presaged and then paralleled the anti-communist McCarthyist crusades.
The senator himself was prone to using often-unsubstantiated allegations of homosexuality or communist sympathies to smear political opponents, once proclaiming, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.”
Conflating homosexuality with communism, or with harboring sympathies to communist foreign adversaries, was common at the time. Ultimately, though, a greater number of people would be fired over their known or suspected sexual orientation.
At a time when homosexuality was considered a mental illness and most gay and lesbian Americans were closeted, victims of the Lavender Scare often took their own lives after suffering public disgrace and rejection by their families and communities.
However, the homophobic moral panic also helped to spurn a then-nascent movement for LGBTQ civil rights.
After he was fired for being gay and declared ineligible for future employment in the federal government, the late activist Frank Kameny picketed at the White House to demand rights for gay rights and lesbians several years before the Stonewall Riots.
“In 2009,” Biden said, “I was proud to meet Frank Kameny in the Oval Office as President Obama and I officially expanded many Federal benefits to same-sex partners of Government employees.”
Eisenhower’s executive order barring gay men and lesbians from employment in the federal government was not rescinded until 1995, with exemptions carved out for the U.S. Armed Forces that persisted until the 2011 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
The State Department continued investigations of employees for homosexuality into the 1990s, U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) noted in a 2016 letter calling for the agency to apologize.
A few months later, then-Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the Lavender Scare and the agency personnel who were harmed.
“On behalf of the department, I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past and reaffirm the department’s steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion for all our employees, including members of the LGBTQ community,” Kerry said.
The White House
Trump travels to Middle East countries with death penalty for homosexuality
President traveled to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates
Homosexuality remains punishable by death in two of the three Middle East countries that President Donald Trump visited last week.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among the handful of countries in which anyone found guilty of engaging in consensual same-sex sexual relations could face the death penalty.
Trump was in Saudi Arabia from May 13-14. He traveled to Qatar on May 14.
“The law prohibited consensual same-sex sexual conduct between men but did not explicitly prohibit same-sex sexual relations between women,” notes the State Department’s 2023 human rights report, referring specifically to Qatar’s criminalization law. “The law was not systematically enforced. A man convicted of having consensual same-sex sexual relations could receive a sentence of seven years in prison. Under sharia, homosexuality was punishable by death; there were no reports of executions for this reason.”
Trump on May 15 arrived in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
The State Department’s 2023 human rights report notes the “penalty for individuals who engaged in ‘consensual sodomy with a man'” in the country “was a minimum prison sentence of six months if the individual’s partner or guardian filed a complaint.”
“There were no known reports of arrests or prosecutions for consensual same-sex sexual conduct. LGBTQI+ identity, real or perceived, could be deemed an act against ‘decency or public morality,’ but there were no reports during the year of persons prosecuted under these provisions,” reads the report.
The report notes Emirati law also criminalizes “men who dressed as women or entered a place designated for women while ‘disguised’ as a woman.” Anyone found guilty could face up to a year in prison and a fine of up to 10,000 dirhams ($2,722.60.)
Trump returned to the U.S. on May 16.
The White House notes Trump during the trip secured more than $2 trillion “in investment agreements with Middle Eastern nations ($200 billion with the United Arab Emirates, $600 billion with Saudi Arabia, and $1.2 trillion with Qatar) for a more safe and prosperous future.”
Former President Joe Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2022.
Saudi Arabia is scheduled to host the 2034 World Cup. The 2022 World Cup took place in Qatar.
The White House
Trump nominates Mike Waltz to become next UN ambassador
Former Fla. congressman had been national security advisor
President Donald Trump on Thursday announced he will nominate Mike Waltz to become the next U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
Waltz, a former Florida congressman, had been the national security advisor.
Trump announced the nomination amid reports that Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, were going to leave the administration after Waltz in March added a journalist to a Signal chat in which he, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other officials discussed plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen.
“I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States ambassador to the United Nations,” said Trump in a Truth Social post that announced Waltz’s nomination. “From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our nation’s Interests first. I know he will do the same in his new role.”
Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as interim national security advisor, “while continuing his strong leadership at the State Department.”
“Together, we will continue to fight tirelessly to make America, and the world, safe again,” said Trump.
Trump shortly after his election nominated U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to become the next U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Trump in March withdrew her nomination in order to ensure Republicans maintained their narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The White House
White House does not ‘respond’ to reporters’ requests with pronouns included
Government workers were ordered not to self-identify their gender in emails
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and a senior advisor in the Department of Government Efficiency rejected requests from reporters who included their pronouns in the signature box of their emails, each telling different reporters at the New York Times that “as a matter of policy,” the Trump-Vance administration will decline to engage with members of the press on these grounds.
News of the correspondence between the journalists and the two senior officials was reported Tuesday by the Times, which also specified that when reached for comment, the White House declined to “directly say if their responses to the journalists represented a new formal policy of the White House press office, or when the practice had started.”
“Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story,” Leavitt told the Times.
Department of Government Efficiency Senior Advisor Katie Miller responded, “I don’t respond to people who use pronouns in their signatures as it shows they ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts.”
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, wrote in an email to the paper: “If The New York Times spent the same amount of time actually reporting the truth as they do being obsessed with pronouns, maybe they would be a half-decent publication.”
A reporter from Crooked media who got an email similar to those received by the Times reporters said, “I find it baffling that they care more about pronouns than giving journalists accurate information, but here we are.”
The practice of adding pronouns to asocial media bios or the signature box of outgoing emails has been a major sticking point for President Donald Trump’s second administration since Inauguration Day.
On day one, the White House issued an executive order stipulating that the federal government recognizes gender as a binary that is immutably linked to one’s birth sex, a definition excludes the existence of intersex and transgender individuals, notwithstanding the biological realities that natal sex characteristics do not always cleave neatly into male or female, nor do they always align with one’s gender identity .
On these grounds, the president issued another order that included a directive to the entire federal government workforce through the Office of Personnel Management: No pronouns in their emails.
As it became more commonplace in recent years to see emails with “she/her” or “he/him” next to the sender’s name, title, and organization, conservatives politicians and media figures often decried the trend as an effort to shoehorn woke ideas about gender (ideas they believe to be unscientific), or a workplace accommodation made only for the benefit of transgender people, or virtue-signaling on behalf of the LGBTQ left.
There are, however, any number of alternative explanations for why the practice caught on. For example, a cisgender woman may have a gender neutral name like Jordan and want to include “she/her” to avoid confusion.
A spokesman for the Times said: “Evading tough questions certainly runs counter to transparent engagement with free and independent press reporting. But refusing to answer a straightforward request to explain the administration’s policies because of the formatting of an email signature is both a concerning and baffling choice, especially from the highest press office in the U.S. government.”
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