The Ulfian (The Art of Ulf): November 2016

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Trumps pick for security adviser outed her dying gay brother to his parents

KT McFarland, Donald Trump’s pick for deputy national security adviser, outed her gay bother to their parents in a letter more than three decades ago.

McFarland sent the letter three years before the brother, Michael Troia, died from AIDS.
After an initial hospital visit in the early 1990s, she did not see her brother in the final two years of his life, according to Washington Blade.
In a 1992 letter to their parents she reportedly wrote: ‘Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other? He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.’

The letter was made public in a 2006 New York Times profile on McFarland who had hoped to be the Republican Party nominee to challenge Hillary Clinton when she ran for a second term in the US Senate.
McFarland lived near her brother for 10 years and said in the article: ‘I was really living a life of going to Central Park with my kids, and he was increasingly living — there was no secret about it — he was openly gay. I had no problem with that, I loved him. But I was increasingly concerned because he talked about a very promiscuous lifestyle. And it saddened me a great deal.’
Troia was a graduate of George Washington University and was a longtime credit analyst at Merrill Lynch.
Not being with her brother as he was dying apparently did leave McFarland with some regret.

‘Do I wish I spent more time with him? Of course I do,’ she said in 2006. ‘It’s the great regret that I have of my adult life, that I didn’t spend more time with him, that I was not with him in his final months.’
After the publication of the magazine article, McFarland reportedly tried to do damage control with the following statement: ‘In seeking to put a painful past behind me, I wrote two candid letters to my parents in 1992 at the advice of a counselor. Now, in the midst of a political campaign, those letters have found their way into the hands of a magazine reporter.’

Anti-Gay Tom Price Picked To Head Department of Health and Human Services By Trump

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Rep. Tom Price, a Republican from Georgia, to helm the Department of Health and Human Services.

Trump praised Price, a vocal opponent of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as “exceptionally qualified to shepherd our commitment to repeal and replace Obamacare and bring affordable and accessible health care to every American.”

Price, 62, has helped draft several bills in the House to replace the health law. He favors converting Medicaid into block grants to the states and require “able-bodied” applicants to meet work requirements in exchange for such benefits.

Price, who strongly backed Trump's campaign, has scored poorly on the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC) Congressional Scorecard, a measure of a lawmaker's support for LGBT rights, scoring as low as zero in many sessions.

He has also criticized last year's Supreme Court finding that gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry. Price called the ruling “a sad day for marriage.”

The Senate must confirm Price's nomination.