The recently appointed senior legal adviser for the Trump 2020 campaign is a constitutional law attorney with a long history of anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim remarks.
Jenna Ellis, a frequent pro-Trump guest on Fox News, caught Trump’s attention late last year. The president was impressed by her television appearances, according to a report by AXIOS.
He invited her to attend a rally in Louisiana on Nov. 14. After that weekend, she became the “senior legal adviser to the Trump 2020 campaign and to the president,” according to AXIOS.
Last week, the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America sounded the hate alarm by publishing a report compiling a series of alarming statements, issued by Ellis, regarding the LGBTQ and the Muslim communities.
According to Media Matters, Ellis has worked against bans on the discredited and potentially dangerous practice of LGBTQ “conversion” therapy. In February 2019, working with the conservative group Colorado Family Action, she defended the ban in the state, calling the bill unconstitutional during a Colorado House committee hearing, according to The Gazette.
Her well-documented history of anti-LGBTQ remarks, however, goes back a few years.
In 2016, she was clear expressing her feelings against former President Barack Obama’s creation of the Stonewall National Monument, by calling the first national monument dedicated to the fight for LGBTQ rights “a national monument to our embrace and celebration of sin.”
She also suggested that men who have sex with other men deserve HIV because “we cannot escape God’s moral law and His supremacy,” as she wrote in a 2016 Facebook post, sharing a CDC study that highlighted the higher rate of the virus found among gay and bisexual men.
A year later, Ellis expanded on her anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, writing that “whether or not homosexuals are nice, wise people, or misunderstood, or mean is not the issue. … Sin is always sin, even if nice people commit it.”
“Christians cannot follow God and accept or condone or participate in homosexuality or adulterous behavior,” she added.
More recently, speaking about the the openly gay and Christian Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, she wrote that if he is “going to invoke the name of his Creator, he should read for himself what his Creator says about homosexuality in the Bible. Truth doesn’t change, regardless of the culture or the Dems’ identity politics.”
Ellis has also targeted Muslims in her online comments.
Following a series of shootings in the summer of 2016, which included the Pulse nightclub tragedy and the killing of the singer Christina Grimmie, she wrote that, “There is absolutely no excuse for the murders that happened this weekend. 50 people in Orlando, a young singer after concert, and the others that went underreported by MSM across the world…Islam is not freedom. It’s not peaceful. It is not Liberty. It is not American. Islam allows individuals to decide who and when and where to carry out capital punishment. Tolerance cannot be absolute because we CANNOT tolerate ideologies that give individuals the power to execute innocent people at whim,” she wrote.
A regular contributor to The Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential Blog, Ellis has previously worked as a director at the Dobson Policy Center, which is part of the James Dobson Family Institute.
The organization aims to “preserve the institution of the family, and promote biblical values and righteousness in the culture,” according to its website.
