not an unreasonable article, but it would be better to say "Here's how impeachment works, just as a reminder." That would be a little more objective than to say it happens, here's how it would work.

All right, they're taking your mind into the future where you're thinking about a specific president having a specific impeachment. They could have made this objective and said it's very unlikely there would be an impeachment because the Senate is never going to go for it anyway, so it's wasted time and it's politically unwise. But wouldn't you like a refresher about what an impeachment is? All right, that would be an objective way to say it. This still makes you think a little bit past the sale, but because it's framed differently — you know, you start by saying there's no way it's gonna happen, but since we're talking about it anyway, here's a refresher course on what impeachment is and how it works. All right, that would have been fair. This is just persuasion.

Okay, now here's my most fun topic of the day. I sent out a, let's say, poorly conceived tweet the day before yesterday in which I was saying that President Trump was the most pro-LGBTQ president ever. Now of course I knew when I said it that it would be provocative and would get people chattering, which was part of the fun. I mean, why use Twitter if you can't be interesting? But I got some pushback. I wanted to talk about the pushback because I thought it was pretty good. Though since it's such a rarity in this world to see anybody incorporate new information and then revise their opinion, I thought it would be useful to see me do it in public.

Right now I will confess that I was under-informed on this topic, and if you tweet something that's under-informed you will get informed very quickly. So I got quite informed, but there's still some big holes here. Maybe some of you can help me fill it in.

All right, so I'm going to give you the President Trump pro argument and then I'll give you the pushback. So the pro is that this President Trump is the first president to come into office in favor of gay marriage, or at least not having a problem with it. It's not so much in favor. It's just he didn't care one way or the other. So on that narrow point he was more advanced than every president before him, because even President Obama came in a little anti-gay marriage. So that's one thing. All right, we'll talk about the negatives in a moment, so I'm not ignoring them. We're just going to get to them second.

Secondly, he has appointed the first openly gay diplomat to a major country: ambassador to Germany. So that I think you have to give him that. Right now I'm sure there have been plenty of openly gay people of service in government, so I'm not sure that's the biggest deal in the world. It must be just specific to diplomats. So I wouldn't say that's the biggest thing in the world, but the fact that he did it at all goes in his column.

All right, now let's talk about the negatives. So here's the pushback I got. Number one, his vice president is Mike Pence, and Mike Pence could be arguably the most anti-gay politician that we've known, or he's in the top ten percent probably. So how could the president be pro while his vice president he picked is so anti? Good point. Except let's put it in context. Trump brought on Pence not because they agreed on that stuff. He brought him on to win, because he needed a certain constituency to be on his side. And so Pence, for the next four to eight years, let's say, was safe. For a period of four or eight years of the Trump presidency, what did Trump do to the most anti-gay voice in America, Pence? He completely silenced him, because the vice president doesn't have the option of having his own opinion on this, at least not one that he can say in public.

So which Democratic president never silenced the most anti-gay political voice in the country? I have never heard of any Democratic president silencing a Republican anti-gay voice. President Trump did. He took the most anti-gay guy and completely silenced him. Right? Do you remember at the Republican convention — and correct me if I'm wrong — but I believe President Trump, candidate Trump, held up a rainbow flag. That was pro-LGBT. And I believe he had a full-throated endorsement of taking care of that community.

I said this the other day, and this next part is completely invisible to the entire left. And that is this: since Trump became elected, I have never heard — I can't think of one anti-gay thing coming out of a Republican. It feels as if Trump changed the Republican priorities, maybe if not their minds, because he paced the Republicans for so long that when he gets in office — oh yeah. And then Peter Thiel spoke at the GOP convention. I thought that was important.

So it seems to me that Trump has done something that no Democrat has ever done. He completely — it seems, and again I'm gonna put this out to your opinion and or fact-checking — but it seems to me that Trump has changed the GOP platform and entire attitude about the gay lesbian population in a way that no Democrat ever did and no Republican ever did. Am I wrong about that?

I believe that Trump's sort of live-and-let-live attitude, especially — and here's the weird part. The weirdest thing about Trump is that his own personal life is, let's say, complicated. And therefore he takes a Republican group that was judgy about personal stuff — right, wouldn't you say that the GOP has traditionally been pretty judgmental about what you did in your personal life? And am I correct that that's gone? It wasn't that long ago everybody was saying, hey, get the GOP out of my bedroom. It's not even an issue anymore. It feels to me that Trump has completely taken the anti-gay, at least on the surface of the GOP. It just made it go away. I hear no anti-gay stuff from any GOP person, period.

No, but I'm not done, because as I said, my critics on this point were not without their good points. Here's the next one. Somebody said that Trump has nominated more anti-gay judges than anybody before. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if there are more anti-gay judges or if every time a Republican appointed judges they seem anti-gay. But here's the thing: what is an anti-gay judge? Is it a thing? Because the Republicans are more about just picking judges that will interpret the Constitution and not favor anybody. So I'm going to take my critic's comment that there are such things as anti-gay judges, and I'm going to give them at least a little more than partial credit. I'm not going to discount that one, because we do live in a world where judges are not really unbiased entirely. You have judges who are biased because they're human beings. And so that might be a real thing.

I would say that doesn't matter until they actually rule on something that matters. So if they never rule on something, it probably doesn't matter. There was another comment I didn't quite follow about dropping protections in the workplace, but I don't remember what the details of that were. I don't know how many people it affects, but that probably was a good point too. I just don't know the details.

All right, so the next one is the interesting one. It's about transgenders, trans and gender folks in the military. And on that point, absolutely true that the president is not the most pro-transgender president we've ever had. That would have been Obama. And Obama was more permissive of transgender in the military. The president's orders or his administration apparently is less so. I think the current situation is that if you're already in the military you can stay, which is not really a very friendly policy. So that's sort of anti-transgender, just to say all right, you can stay if you're already here, but we can't let any more like you in.

All right, so I would say that the critics are correct when they say that's more anti-transgender. But I would add this context: the military is the one place where discrimination is expressly allowed, if not encouraged. So if you try to take the military use situations and lump it in with any civilian situations, it just becomes nonsense. It's sort of nonsense to say that the way we treat the military tells us something about the way we treat the rest of life, because the military is a discrimination organization by design and by universal preference.

Let me give you an example. If I went to join the military, would they let me in? No. They'd say you're a certain age. We cannot let you in. When my father went to join the military before World War II, or I guess the war had just started, my father was not allowed to join because he had an unusual deformity in his chest, something he was born with. And the doctor said no, we can't let you in the military because you've got this chest deformity thing and we don't know how that will affect your health. Now it turns out he lived to 86 or something, whatever he was, 83, 86. So it didn't really affect his health in any way that we ever determined. But they discriminated against him for a medical condition.

So the military is where we ask people to discriminate. We don't stop it. We just make sure that they don't discriminate for stupid reasons, right? So discriminating against Black folks would be a bad reason because there's all the evidence suggests that everybody's fine in the military. It doesn't matter what your ethnicity is. That doesn't make any difference. We want the best fighters.

Now, so the question on transgenders is whether they fall into the category that I do or my father did, which is that there's something about us that from a standpoint of looking at the averages that you don't want people like me. You don't want people who are too short, too heavy, unhealthy, etc., because it's expensive and they might affect the readiness.

Now my understanding of transgender in the military is that if you've had your surgeries and you're all good and your health is good, it probably doesn't make much difference at all. But there must be people who are in different stages where they have greater military risks and costs. I think that's the argument. But I would not claim that to be true because I'm not the expert on the medical conditions of transgender.

But here's the point. If the decision about whether they can serve or not is based on medical expense, even if it's just the average — meaning that there could be plenty of transgender who just don't have that problem. They're stable. They don't have a medical problem. They're fit for service. They're A-plus. That could be true. And still it would be okay for the military to discriminate because they discriminate against all kinds of classes: old people, short people, etc. And surely there are short people who could be good soldiers. Surely there are old people who could operate a drone or do some paperwork or shoot a two or be a pilot, I suppose.

So the question on any fact basis is, is the military discriminating in a way that's similar to the other ways they're allowed to discriminate? If they are, then they're doing the right thing. If they're discriminating without the benefit of fact, well then it's just wrong and that should be changed. But I don't know which is the case.

So to my critics who said hey, the president is not the most pro-LGBTQ president because transgenders don't have as much rights as they did for the military as they did under Obama, I rank that criticism true. Absolutely true. Good pushback and an accurate correction. And I have to admit that when I sent the tweet I often forget about the T in LGBTQ.

But I also have to ask myself, why are they lumped in there? Why do you throw transgender in with gay and lesbian? Like who decided that that's where they belong? Isn't that by itself a little discriminatory? If you were transgender, would you be delighted that you are thrown in with the gay and lesbians who you might love? I'm not saying that you would dislike that, but from a political perspective if you're transgender, is that your team? Your team, the people who are not transgender? Because gay people are not transgender. Straight people are often not transgender. So I don't know how LGBTQ makes sense. I get gay and lesbian. That makes perfect sense why you would lump them in a politically active group. But I don't know how T belongs in there.

But that said, my tweet that this president was the best to all the LGBTQ is false. False in the transgender category. And then with the judges and when the selection depends, you definitely have some eyebrows going up and that's fair. I would say Pence is irrelevant. He's been silenced. I'd say the entire Republican Party has been silenced on at least gay and lesbian stuff. The transgender stuff ends up being a little bit about the budget, and we could be wrong about that or we could be right about that. And it would be terrible to be wrong about it, but it's not the wrong question because the military does get to discriminate.

All right, then there's one other issue in the same topic, which is there's some problem or there's some issue with this administration has reduced access for HIV testing of some kind because of access to stem cells or something like that. And if that makes a difference, then I would say that would also be a good criticism for something that would look anti-LGBTQ. In this case anti-gay and lesbian. Yes, I again, let's say primarily anti-gay mostly. So if that's true, I don't know. That's a good point. But here's my question.

A lot of what the Trump administration does is get rid of regulations and things that just weren't helping. So it could be true, for example, that climate change is a problem. While it could be also true that getting rid of getting out of the Paris Accord agreement was still the right thing to do. So you have to distinguish between the problem and what we're doing about it. Because if what we're doing about the problem doesn't help, getting rid of that doesn't mean you don't believe in the problem anymore.

All right, likewise if whatever the government was doing before — and I don't know the details — was really helping and then we stopped doing it, that would be bad. But I don't know that's the case. It could be the case that whatever we were doing with allowing people access to stuff, they have another way to get it so the government doesn't need to be involved, etc. So I don't know the details of that, but I'm open to the criticism.

All right, so I take my criticism seriously when it's actually fact-based. So the criticism I got in this were all fact-based, and I take them all seriously. So I apprec