Federal relief workers say FEMA is moving away from helping greatest number of people— to LGBTQ ‘disaster equity’ in woke webinar

A startling 2023 FEMA webinar features federal health and disaster personnel trumpeting the urgent need to move away from policies that benefit the greatest number of people and instead turn focus toward “disaster equity” where aid is distributed based on innate characteristics like sexual orientation and gender identity.

The roundtable discussion, recorded in March last year, was titled “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters,” included panelists like Maggie Jarry of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and was moderated by Tyler Atkins, an emergency management specialist at FEMA who uses he/they pronouns.

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The panelists covered a range of topics around the notion that disaster services are shortchanging marginalized groups when it comes to relief efforts.

“LGBTQIA people, and people who have been disadvantaged already, are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with. So when you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself,” Atkins mused to the group.

“I think that is maybe the ‘why’ of why we’re having these discussions, because it isn’t being talked about, it isn’t being socialized, we’re not paying attention to this community,” he claimed.

As the remaining panelists nodded in enthusiastic agreement, Jarry made a startling revelation that federal agencies ostensibly tasked with saving as many lives as possible in a disaster should be focusing their attention elsewhere.

“The shift we’re seeing right now is a shift in emergency services from utilitarian principles — where everything is designed for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people — to disaster equity. But we have to do more,” she urged.

She then suggested that existing disaster management agency policies may have been deliberately engineered to leave out vulnerable communities.

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“The topic at hand here is, are the policies that have been developed actually biased in benign neglect or intentional erasure of the specific communities that are probably most in need of those services, and does the aid then bias toward people with assets or other types of situations that weren’t part of the norm of this industry in the past.”

Atkins, visibly moved by her oratory, capped off her words with a DEI word salad.

“The topic of preparedness and preparedness resources and the intersectionalities within equities and discrimination and hate — it’s a real thing that needs to be discussed, needs to be vocalized, and we need to start looking at how we can find solutions to this.”

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