President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice will work “hand-in-hand” with the LGBTQ community as a response to Republican-led legislation and “threats” tied to “hate groups and domestic violent extremists,” the White House announced on Thursday.
The administration’s new action to “protect LGBTQI+ communities from attacks on their rights and safety” specifically cites Republican-sponsored legislation that bans biological males from women’s sports, protects children from irreversible sex-change procedures, and bans discussions of sexual and ideological topics in the classroom.
The White House framed those bills as “anti-LGBTQ+” and called them “cruel and callous to our kids, our neighbors, and those in our community.” And as a response, the White House said, the Biden administration is partnering with federal law enforcement agencies to launch a new LGBTQI+ Community Safety Partnership.
The move is sure to draw the attention of Republican lawmakers and conservative activists, who have accused the Justice Department of ideologically targeting perceived opponents of the Biden administration, such as pro-life activists and parents concerned about ideology in schools.
Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, will be the DOJ’s point person on that project. Clarke, a vocal abortion proponent, has disproportionately targeted pro-life activists in her prosecutions of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
“LGBTQI+ communities face a surge in violence against individuals and community spaces,” the Biden administration claimed. “Federal threat monitoring shows that these threats are increasingly tied to hate groups and domestic violent extremists. LGBTQI+ individuals—especially transgender women and girls of color—have experienced disproportionately high rates of violence and hate crimes for decades.”
Republicans have accused the Biden DOJ of investigating parents as “terrorist” threats—parents all across the nation who are concerned about ideology in schools. Those investigations were a direct result of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4, 2021, directive to the FBI to investigate threats to school boards, Republicans said.
One investigation involved a mother who belonged to a “right-wing moms’ group” called Moms for Liberty, Fox News reported, and another involved a dad who was opposed to COVID-19 masking and owned a lot of guns.
“The Partnership will work hand-in-hand with LGBTQI+ community organizations to provide critical safety resources to ensure these organizations can remain safe spaces for the community,” the White House said. “In acknowledgement of the mistreatment that LGBTQI+ communities have often faced in interactions with law enforcement, the Partnership will also work to build trust between LGBTQI+ organizations and federal law enforcement agencies.”
The White House fact sheet specifically notes that the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services (HHS) will “work with health care providers and medical associations to provide access to safety trainings and improve threat reporting to support doctors, clinics, and children’s hospitals that face increasing threats when they care for LGBTQI+ patients,” apparently in reference to outrage and backlash against gender clinics across the nation pushing irreversible procedures on children.
The FBI, U.S. Attorneys’ offices, the DOJ and its Civil Rights Division will also “undertake targeted engagement with community groups from the LGBTQI+ community and other communities victimized by hate crimes to increase understanding about how to report hate crimes,” the fact sheet said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
In December, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta admitted that the DOJ had been targeting pro-life activists through the FACE Act as a response to the overturning in June 2022 of Roe v. Wade, describing the overturning of Roe as a “devastating blow to women throughout the country” that took away “the constitutional right to abortion” and increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work—including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”
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