Peter LaBarbera, the head of the extremist group Americans For Truth About Homosexuality and a writer for LifeSiteNews, reported yesterday on an April 11 interview he conducted with former Trump transition team official Ken Blackwell.
Blackwell, a Family Research Council senior fellow and Ohio’s former secretary of state, was the head of domestic issues for the new president’s transition team.
He told LaBarbera that the president will likely sign an executive order on religious liberty—which, given the Right’s ongoing distortion of religious liberty laws, could be a cover for legalizing anti-LGBTQ discrimination—and boasted that “we have a great plan to attack the administrative state.”
With Donald Trump, Blackwell said, the Obama administration’s “aggressive LGBT agenda will be unhinged,” and the administration will be stacked with officials bent on “uprooting the Obama apparatus.”
The Trump administration, of course, has already taken steps to undermine LGBTQ equality.
Ken Blackwell, a former Trump transition adviser and nationally respected pro-family leader, told LifeSiteNews that he believes President Trump will issue a strong executive order to protect the religious liberty of Americans.
“My anticipation is that we will see an Executive Order and it will be more than window dressing,” said Blackwell, senior fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council, in an April 11 phone interview.
He predicted that the Obama administration’s “aggressive LGBT agenda will be unhinged” under Trump, piece by piece, across governmental agencies.
“We have a great plan to attack the administrative state,” he said, adding that Obama saddled Trump with a vast, liberal “infrastructure that is trans-agency.”
“We will have to be very meticulous in how we dismantle it,” he told LifeSiteNews.
Part of that involves Trump issuing a pro-religious liberty executive order with teeth, Blackwell said, “just as we are doing to reduce the regulatory burdens imposed by the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency].“ Economic conservatives are applauding Trump for shrinking the EPA’s clout.
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Blackwell, a former Ohio Secretary of State and a former undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President George W. Bush, urged social conservatives to be patient with Trump, noting that he still “does not have his full team in place.”
Blackwell, echoing other pro-family advocates, hailed as a “super appointment” Trump’s choice of conservative Heritage Foundation writer and attorney Roger Severino to head up the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Civil Rights. Severino now works under pro-life former Georgia congressman Tom Price, whose appointment by Trump as HHS Secretary has also earned plaudits from conservatives.
“Slowly and steadily, Tom is putting together a team,” said Blackwell, who described himself as an unofficial adviser to the new administration after being chosen — to the consternation of leftists — to lead Trump’s domestic transition team. He said conservatives working with Trump have created a “policy blueprint” for “uprooting the Obama apparatus.”
Rooting out Obama’s pro-LGBT network in the massive federal bureaucracy will be painstakingly difficult because Obama left a lot of “trap doors” in federal agencies like the State Department that have “gummed up the works” for Trump, Blackwell said.
