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‘Big Sick’ Star Kazan Slams Trump, GOP as ‘Murderers’

Zoe Kazan has ties to Hollywood royalty, but she’s making a name for herself thanks to an Oscar-nominated rom-com.

Kazan, the granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan, stars in 2017’s “The Big Sick.” The film follows the real-life love story between comic Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. Kazan plays Gordon in the indie film, which earned a healthy $42 million at the U.S. box office.

The Big Sick – Official US Trailer | Amazon Studios

“Sick” also snatched an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay earlier this week.

Kazan, like her peers, uses Twitter to share her cultural and political beliefs. And, like most Hollywood stars. she leans decidedly to the left. Last August she attended Michael Moore’s Broadway play “The Terms of My Surrender.” Later, she joined fellow stars Mark Ruffalo, Marisa Tomei and Olivia Wilde outside of Trump Towers in New York to protest the president.

That became clear Wednesday when she raged against the current administration about a troubling news report about an alleged spike in LGBTQ deaths.

The report in question is from Jezebel.com, a hard-left feminist culture site. It’s based on a report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) claiming 52 LGBTQ people were killed in the U.S. last year, a dramatic increase from 2016 (86 percent).

TheHill.com, in sharing the report’s findings, offered some context.

President Trump pledged to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens” in his speech to the Republican National Convention in 2016, but has largely ignored the community since taking office.

In June, Trump broke tradition from previous presidents by not issuing a statement recognizing LGBT Pride Month, which was recognized by other members of his administration including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

President Trump banned transgender military recruits during his first year in office.

The official signaled that the administration was returning to the military’s pre-2016 policy under which no transgender individuals were allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, but said Trump was giving the secretaries of defense and homeland security leeway to determine the policy on currently serving transgender troops.

Hornetapp.com, the news site connected to the gay social app Hornet, noted the report doesn’t count the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Forty nine people died in the attack on a gay nightclub.

There’s more:

The killer’s motivation becomes an important issue because the NCAVP says that they only include cases whose details indicate “a strong likelihood that the motivations behind the violence were either primarily or partially related to anti-LGBTQ bias.”

But even they acknowledge that it’s often difficult to determine a murderer’s anti-LGBTQ bias or a victim’s LGBTQ identity “because of a misidentification of victims’ sexual orientation or gender identity in media” and because “media and law enforcement are often reluctant to say that a homicide is related to bias.”

It’s a complicated, emotional issue. Kazan apparently doesn’t see it that way.

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