Q Toon: Rogerino Severino

As the wreckage of the Astronomical Health Costs Act smoldered in the foreground, Donald Joffrey Trump surreptitiously appointed anti-LGBT activist Roger Severino as head of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights last week. While Devin Nunes's Russian clown act has diverted the attention of other cartoonists, I decided that Mr. Severino deserved a little notice.

Severino most recently served as director of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. There he focused on "religious liberty, marriage and life issues" at the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. 

(Why, yes, the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society is where TrumpCorp. found Education Secretary Betsy Devos. But I digress.) ...

Severino has been vocal in his opinions about the civil rights of transgender people. He authored several reports speaking out against LGBT rights, including a 2016 report that criticized a proposed Obama administration rule to prevent discrimination against transgender patients within the healthcare system.
He's also authored multiple blog posts for the Daily Signal, where he consistently spoke out against White House provisions that protected LGBT groups from discrimination.

For example, in this Daily Signal post last year defending North Carolina's Bathroom Bill, Severino complained:

These developments prove that same-sex marriage was merely the start, not end, of the left’s LGBT agenda. The radical left is using government power to coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology over and above their right to privacy, safety, and religious freedom.

For the Trump administration, whose EPA has declared war on the environment, whose health care reform sought to deprive people of health care, and whose education policy is to defund public schools, it should surprise nobody that they would turn Civil Rights over to the Christian Taliban.