A little more than an hour after Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, the WhiteHouse.gov site got some major renovations. This included several pages being deleted—including the one on LGBT rights.
TechCrunch reports that the original link to the page has been removed altogether. The Obama administration originally introduced the page to “highlight major legislative achievements, historic court victories and important policy changes for gay and transgender people,” as TechCrunch writes. Now, any mention of LGBT is missing from the WhiteHouse.gov site. People have been rightfully worried about how Trump’s administration will affect the LGBT community, as Vice President Mike Pence has a terrible record on LGBT rights, and Trump himself does things like hear a sermon from an anti-gay preacher on inauguration day.
Other pages, such as the one on climate change, have similarly been erased, New York Magazine reports. This is pretty alarming, as 2016 was just announced to be the warmest year ever recorded.
The removal of these pages could simply be part of the transition to the fully operational new WhiteHouse.gov site—Myth-busting website Snopes points out that all the info from Obama’s White House site has been moved to a new site, and Trump’s team still has to add a lot of content that reflects the new administration. But some people are expressing concern that this indicates President Trump’s views on these issues.
The White House removed its climate change web page. And the healthcare, civil rights and LGBT sections. Just thought you should know.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) January 20, 2017
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see whether or not these pages will be added again to the site, or whether they’ve been deleted for good.