Kansas Democrat Senate nominee Adam Hamilton told his church that President Trump’s rescission of Biden-era gender-identity orders caused “tears and brokenness,” casting the rollback as a loss of basic protections.
In a January 2025 sermon titled “A Message to President Trump,” founding pastor Adam Hamilton of the Church of the Resurrection read four Biden administration executive orders on gender identity and LGBTQ nondiscrimination that had just been rescinded. A gay congregant had sent him the list that morning, and Hamilton told worshippers the thought of losing those measures was painful.
Breitbart News reported that Hamilton, the Democrat challenging Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), framed the orders as “basic fundamental protections” and pledged his church would remain “a safe place” so people “don’t have to be afraid.”
Hamilton is not a fringe activist. He is a high-profile Kansas pastor who previously served on Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and donated $500 to her campaign. His sermon put the gender-identity policy fight squarely into a midterm Senate race.
Hamilton told the congregation someone had sent him the list of rescinded orders that morning.
“And somebody sent me this morning, one of our gay members sent me this morning, the executive orders that were rescinded yesterday.”
He noted that people had clapped and cheered the rescissions, then read the titles himself.
“Executive Order 14021, guaranteeing an educational environment free from discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. That’s been rescinded.”
He continued through Executive Order 14004 on military service regardless of gender identity, Executive Order 13988 on combating discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, and Executive Order 14075 on advancing equality for LGBTQI+ individuals. Each time he repeated that the order had been rescinded.
His conclusion was pastoral and political at once.
“For people who find themselves in this community, the thought that the rights that they had, basic fundamental protections that they had, have been rescinded is painful. It leads to tears and brokenness.”
He closed by promising, “We’re going to be a safe place for people, where you don’t have to be afraid. This is a safe place for you.”
EO 13988, issued January 20, 2021, set the Biden administration’s nondiscrimination policy on gender identity and sexual orientation across education, employment, healthcare, and housing. One passage stated children “should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.”
A February 2021 Heritage Foundation analysis by Sarah Parshall Perry warned that under the Biden reading of Title IX, refusing to let biological males who identify as women compete on female teams or receive athletic scholarships could “constitute a violation of Title IX, thereby disqualifying said institution from receiving certain federal funds.”
On April 27, 2021, the Department of Housing and Urban Development withdrew a proposed Trump-era rule on shelters and housing, citing EO 13988 and EO 13985, and kept the 2016 Equal Access Rule so that individuals had equal access to HUD-funded housing “regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status.”
Those were the policies Hamilton described as basic protections. Trump’s rescission returned the federal government to sex-based distinctions in sports, schools, the military, and shelters, the very distinctions progressive activists had spent four years erasing by executive fiat.
President Trump has treated Hamilton as more than a local pastor. Ahead of an October 19 rally outside Wichita for Sen. Marshall, Trump used Truth Social to call Hamilton a “Radical Left Phony” who was “pretending to be a moderate.”
Trump went further: “Adam Hamilton used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activists who openly mock Jesus. He promotes a document listing 125 different genders, and directs his followers to 7 different websites to make children transgender.”
Thousands filled every seat at the arena rally as Trump backed Marshall in the November 3 midterm contest. The contrast could not be clearer: one side treats biological sex as fixed in law and policy; the other treats its erasure as a civil right that pastors must defend from the pulpit.
That same pattern of assertive executive action has defined other Trump moves this cycle, from a new women’s health task force and NIH division to personnel decisions that left Democrats scrambling for court relief.
Hamilton has not limited his politics to gender policy. He described Trump as a “disrupter” and called January 6 a “disqualifier.” In January 2026 he said he would want to join protesters if ICE enforcement practices discussed in Minneapolis occurred in Kansas City, citing concerns about racial profiling.
His earlier service on Obama’s faith council included a recommendation to expand eligibility for presidential clemency. Several recipients of Obama-era commutations later faced criminal proceedings involving murder allegations, fentanyl-containing pills, and cocaine offenses.
Voters weighing Hamilton against Marshall can also look at how other Trump administration decisions have held up. The Supreme Court left intact Trump’s firing of an NLRB member, another reminder that personnel is policy and courts are not a blank check for the prior administration’s holdovers.
Hamilton’s sermon treated the restoration of sex-based rules as a wound. Many Kansas parents, female athletes, and service members experienced the Biden orders as the wound, locker rooms opened, scholarships diverted, and military standards rewritten by White House pen.
Marshall holds the seat. Hamilton is the Democrat nominee trying to flip it. Trump’s Wichita-area rally and Truth Social blasts make the race a proxy for the larger fight over whether federal policy will track biological reality or gender identity.
Similar flashpoints keep surfacing. Nine former FBI staff from the Trump documents probe sued over February firings, while Trump has also asserted executive privilege in a Kennedy Center management lawsuit against a Democratic lawmaker’s probe. The through-line is simple: Democrats who spent years governing by executive order now treat every reversal as cruelty.
Hamilton’s own words supply the closing exhibit. He listed the orders, called their removal painful, and offered his sanctuary as refuge. He did not grapple with the girls who lost races, the women who lost privacy, or the parents who lost the ability to keep boys out of their daughters’ sports and spaces.
Kansas voters will decide whether tears for rescinded gender-identity edicts outweigh the common-sense restoration of sex-based rules. The record is already in the sermon.