Trump halts visas for same-sex partners of foreign diplomats, U.N. workers

There's no word on whether Jared and Ivanka are privately appalled right now because both of them have largely stopped peddling such stories to the press, but Team Trump is taking another particularly nasty swipe at same-sex couples. This time, it's at the State Department: The Trump administration is now denying visas to same-sex partners of foreign diplomats working in the United States and foreign workers in the United Nations.

The manner in which Team Trump is doing this is particularly cruel. The premise is that since same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, visas will be granted to married same-sex couples from other countries while rejecting visas from unmarried same-sex partners. The administration has furthermore told unmarried same-sex partners that they have to get married before the end of the year or will leave the country.

See the catch yet? The unmarried same-sex partners of foreign diplomats and U.N. workers are unmarried because same-sex marriage is illegal in their home countries.

“State Dept. will no longer let same-sex domestic partners of UN employees get visas unless they are married,” [Former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power] tweeted, noting that “only 12% of UN member states allow same-sex marriage.”

The change, then, is pointlessly malicious. In many countries same-sex relationships are criminalized; in some, same-sex couples are targeted for assault. Stripping the visa status of those couples with a sniffing declaration that well if they want to keep their diplomatic status here they had better just get married is uniquely heartless in the manner only Team Trump can muster.

As we mentioned, there's no word on whether or not this is one of the decisions that supposed non-garbage people Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner are privately very distressed about, as they fret about whether any in their old social circles will invite them to a single party once the Oval Office tire fire has finally burned out. They seem to have given up on leaking statements distancing themselves from papa's unbelievable cruelty; perhaps, like with Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her disappearing press briefings, it simply got to be too much work.