By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump began his first full day in office attending a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday and got a sermon he may not have been expecting: an appeal to protect immigrants and respect gay rights.
A day after declaring in his inauguration speech that there were only two genders in America and signing executive orders to crack down on immigrants, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde pleaded with Trump, from the pulpit, to show mercy on people who were “scared” of what is to come.
“There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives,” Budde said.
On Monday Trump launched a sweeping immigration crackdown, tasking the U.S. military with aiding border security, issuing a broad ban on asylum and taking steps to restrict citizenship for children born on U.S. soil.
Budde made an impassioned case for immigrants.
“The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat-packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they … may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” she said.
“I ask you to have mercy. Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.”
Trump did not appear happy during the remarks and dismissed them when asked for a reaction later.
“Not too exciting,” he said about Budde’s sermon.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a staunch Trump ally, also knocked Budde’s remarks in a post on his social media platform, X. “She got the woke mind virus real bad,” he said.
Musk is the father of a transgender daughter who in 2022 filed a court petition to change her name, saying: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
(Reporting by Steve Holland; writing by Jeff Mason; Editing by Leslie Adler)
