With the presidential election approaching and celebrities continuing to weigh in on the state of the country, Grammy-winning singer Kacey Musgraves has also decided to lend her voice to the anti-Trump movement.
In a tweet on Friday evening, Musgraves shared an image with a rainbow-colored background and a declaration that anyone planning to vote for President Donald Trump in November is actually committing a form of violence against the LGBT community.
“If you love an LGBTQ+ person and you’re planning on voting for Donald Trump in November, that’s an act of violence against them,” she said.
Former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who was also the first openly gay cabinet member in the Trump administration, hammered Musgraves for tokenizing people on behalf of the Left.
“Twitter should ban this piece of fake news. This isn’t remotely correct. Stop making gay rights a partisan issue, Kacey! You aren’t helping gay people one bit,” Grenell responded in his own tweet. “We aren’t tokens.”
Twitter should ban this piece of fake news. This isn’t remotely correct.
Stop making gay rights a partisan issue, Kacey! You aren’t helping gay people one bit.
We aren’t tokens. @getoutspoken20 https://t.co/acaGAfJJnK
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) August 29, 2020
When Grenell was ambassador to Germany, he spearheaded a global effort to end the criminalization of homosexuality in 70 countries, including in the handful of countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.
“Barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalized and punishable by flogging and death,” Grenell, then the ambassador to Germany, wrote in the German newspaper Bild, after a 31-year-old gay man was hanged in Iran.
Grenell also argued that “politicians, the U.N., democratic governments, diplomats and good people everywhere should speak up — and loudly” against such policies.
Prior to Grenell’s departure from the Trump administration, the Brookings Institute, a left-leaning think tank, argued that the historic nature of his appointment had been overshadowed in media coverage over concerns that he was a “political loyalist.”
Back in 2018, when then-Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo was undergoing the confirmation process, he told Senate lawmakers: “I deeply believe that LGBTQ persons have every right that every other person in the world would have,” as The Daily Wire previously reported.
In attacking the Trump administration as anti-LGBT, many Democrats will cite the conservative opposition to the Equality Act last year. However, as written, the Equality Act would have prohibited loosely defined public accommodations from discriminating on the basis of “sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity,” with no room for any religious exceptions.
As USA Today contributor Brad Polumbo noted of the Equality Act in an opinion column last year: “Our laws can mandate that secular employers and public venues treat LGBT people fairly, yet also maintain exceptions for bona fide religious claims. This is what true equality would look like — and notably, you won’t find it anywhere in the so-called Equality Act.”