Trump campaign hires homophobic lawyer who called the Stonewall riots ‘a celebration of sin’
Jenna Ellis with Donald Trump. (Facebook/Jenna Ellis)
Conservative anti-LGBT+ lawyer Jenna Ellis has been hired by the campaign to re-elect US president Donald Trump.
Ellis, who has regularly appeared on Fox News, has a long history of making anti-LGBT+ comments.
These include promoting gay conversion therapy, saying gay and bisexual men have higher rates of HIV because of “Gods moral law” and saying that being transgender is “not legitimate or biologically correct”.
In 2016, when the Stonewall Inn in New York – the site of the Stonewall Uprising, commonly considered to be the birth of the modern-day LGBT+ rights movement – was designated a national monument, Ellis wrote that it was “a celebration of sin”.
Just last year she took to Facebook to falsely claim that transgender women are men. pic.twitter.com/3EkoatjTNG
— GLAAD (@glaad) January 10, 2020
Ellis’ history of making anti-gay, anti-trans and anti-Muslim remarks includes regularly sharing these publicly, on Fox News as well as on her social media.
She has said that “Islam is not freedom. It’s not peaceful. It is not Liberty. It is not American.”
In a July 2017 Facebook post, she argued that conservatives should put aside any positive personal feelings they may have toward the LGBT+ community and focus on “God’s judgment”.
“Whether or not homosexuals are nice, wise people, or misunderstood, or mean is not the issue — God’s Truth is the issue,” Ellis wrote. “Sin is always sin, even if nice people commit it.”
Also in 2017, when Star Wars director JJ Abrams sparked rumours that the next film would include a gay character, Ellis wrote on Facebook: “Why not also a Christian? Or a Muslim? Or a pedophile? Or every other representation of any subculture, belief, and lifestyle?
“This overwhelming need to have LGBT ‘representation’ everywhere shows the falsity of their cry for equality. They want absolute subjugation of culture.”
While Jenna Ellis appeared on Fox News more 30 times in the year prior to joining Trump’s campaign team in November, a Fox News spokesperson told NBC News that Ellis is “not a former Fox News commentator” and “has never been part of this network”.
