LGBTQ

Imagine Coalition Of Black Lives Matter, LGBT Equality, Fight For 15

April 7, 2015 Ian Reifowitz, www.dailykos.com Strategize! Black Lives Matter (BLM), Coalition, LGBTQ, Living Wage, Social Change

Silos are dangerous. I’m not talking about the kind that house nuclear missiles, but rather the metaphorical kind, the kind that divide people who could and should be working together toward a shared goal. Too often, progressives have found themselves divided into these kinds of silos, for example, with women—themselves typically divided by race and ethnicity—fighting for gender equality, LGBT folks fighting for gay rights, unions and workers fighting for labor rights, and on and on. To some degree, these divisions are understandable. Part of the way a marginalized group empowers itself is by creating a movement in which its members play a predominant role.

Backlash To Anti-Gay Laws Not A Movement, But The Result Of One

April 6, 2015 Kate Aronoff, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! discrimination, Indiana, Law, LGBTQ

There was a showdown this week in Indiana and it had nothing to do with the Final Four — well, almost. Last Friday, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed into law Senate Bill 101, also known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. While most of the bill’s language consisted of relatively benign legal protections for religious groups, it also would have safeguarded small businesses and corporations alike in refusing business to customers based on their sexual orientation — providing a claim, as well, in lawsuits brought by private citizens. The bill’s definition of religious freedom was so broad as to allow individuals to declare a religion of one and use it as legal grounding in court. A similar law, HB1228, was passed on Tuesday in Arkansas, and drew similar — if less acute — ire.

Building A Fusion Politics-Based Movement

April 4, 2015 Harry Targ, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com Organize! Indiana, Law, LGBTQ, Politics

All of a sudden Indiana has been thrust onto the national stage. Governor Mike Pence in a closed meeting signed the newly minted Restoration of Freedom of Religion Act (RFRA) passed by the state legislature. Despite efforts of Pence and supporters to deny that the new law allows state government support for discrimination, especially based on sexual orientation, the supporters of the law, its language, and the track record of the legislators and the governor all point to the real motivation of the law: to authorize the right to limit public accommodations to groups of Hoosiers. The outrage from well-meaning people in the state and across the country is justified and should be encouraged. The exuberance of the protests--rallies, petitions, economic boycotts--is a cause for hope for those who are concerned about deepening economic, political, racist, sexist, and environmental threats to the country and its states.

Indiana Religious Freedom Law Rewrite A Victory Over Discrimination

April 4, 2015 Zack Ford, www.thinkprogress.org Resist! Faith, Indiana, Law, LGBTQ

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) and state Republican leaders have been playing damage control this week, claiming that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not a law that enables anti-LGBT discrimination. Meanwhile, however, the conservatives who advocated for the bill have been spurning this attempted walkback, asserting in the process that the goal was ensuring discrimination all along. At the forefront of the conservative reaction is Micah Clark, who serves as executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana and who stood right behind Pence as he signed the bill. Speaking Monday to Tim Wildmon, head of the national American Family Association, Clark explained that conservatives should oppose any effort to clarify that the law does not legalize discrimination. “That could totally destroy this bill,” he explained.

Indiana Activists Protest Anti-Gay Law

March 30, 2015 Associated Press, www.theguardian.com Resist! Indiana, Law, LGBTQ

Hundreds of people gathered outside the Indiana Statehouse on Saturday, to rally against a new law that opponents say could sanction discrimination against gay people. Republican governor Mike Pence signed a bill on Thursday prohibiting state laws that “substantially burden” a person’s ability to follow his or her religious beliefs. The definition of “person” includes religious institutions, businesses and associations. The measure will take effect in July. Saturday’s crowd chanted “Pence must go” and held signs reading “I’m pretty sure God doesn’t hate anyone” and “No hate in our state”.

Human Rights Campaign Under Fire In LGBT Community

January 12, 2015 Toshio Meronek, www.truth-out.org Educate! Capitalism, LGBTQ

The HRC is the de facto organization journalists call when they need an "LGBT viewpoint" on a topic. It has the ears of high-profile politicians - even deeply conservative ones like Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, who credited an HRC postcard for causing her to vote with "The Gays." And the campaign is one of a few large LGBT nonprofits that hog political advocacy funding for the community's issues. However, lots of people from the increasingly fractured "community" (often, white, wealthy gays vs. the rest) don't want to support an organization that devotes a good deal of its resources into making certain big corporations look like they're on the right side of history.

9 LGBTQ Stories From 2014

January 7, 2015 Toshio Meronek, www.truth-out.org Educate! Human Rights, LGBTQ, Media

Radical queer organizing was alive and well in the US in 2014; you just may not have heard about it in mainstream media. The mainstream "Homosexual Agenda" in 2014 revolved around conservative issues like gay marriage and transgender military inclusion. That meant lots of important queer and trans stories didn't get much of a voice. Buzz about the criminalization of trans sex workers and the horror stories of undocumented queer people in immigration detention centers may have been muted by the Big Media gatekeepers, but these issues deserve a wider audience. Here are nine stories that will no doubt reverberate in 2015. . .

Listen To Leelah Alcorn’s Final Words

January 2, 2015 J. Bryan Lowder, www.slate.com Educate! LGBTQ

The LGBTQ community is exiting 2014 on a tragic note with the death of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender teen from Ohio who, according to reports, committed suicide early Sunday morning. Alcorn’s passing has become an international story due to the public nature of the event—she was struck by a tractor-trailer on the interstate—and to an eloquent Tumblr post that she had scheduled to go live in the event of her death. In her post, Alcorn speaks of her Christian parents’ refusal to accept her trans identity and her sense that life could not get better if she had to wait to transition any longer. Alcorn’s death has brought forth an outpouring of anguish from trans writers and allies, who rightly view the incident as symptomatic of our society’s widespread transphobia, especially with regard to teens wishing to transition.

Meet The Kansans Who Bravely Fought For Gay Rights

October 27, 2014 Steven Rosenfeld, www.alternet.org Organize! Human Rights, Kansas, LGBTQ

Michael Nelson stared at the room packed with students from the University of Kansas’ various LGBT groups. The 2014 school year had barely begun and the white-haired pastor, poet and gay rights advocate had come to talk about his lawsuit challenging Kansas’ same-sex marriage ban and other discriminatory laws in state court. Nelson could not help but see his younger self in the students’ eager, contempletive and occasionally vulnerable faces. So as he started to speak, he took a personal turn, because in Kansas, as he and the students already knew, anti-LGBT discrimination runs deeper than what is written into law—or deliberately kept out of it.

How Movements Can Win More Victories Like Gay Marriage

July 10, 2014 Mark Engler and Paul Engler, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! culture, Gay Marriage, Law, LGBTQ, Movement

Not long ago, same-sex marriage in America was not merely an unpopular cause; it was a politically fatal one — a third-rail issue that could end the career of any politician foolish enough to touch it. The idea that gay and lesbian couples would be able to legally exchange vows in states throughout the United States was regarded, at best, as a far-off fantasy and, at worst, as a danger to the republic. It can be difficult to remember how hostile the terrain was for LGBT advocates in even recent decades. As of 1990, three-quarters of Americans saw homosexual sex as immoral. Less than a third condoned same-sex marriage — something no country in the world permitted. In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman and denied federal benefits to same-sex couples, passed by an overwhelming 85-14 margin in the U.S. Senate. Figures including Democratic Sen. Joe Biden voted for it, and Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the act, affirming, “I have long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”

LGBTQ Activists Protest At DNC Fundraiser

June 19, 2014 El Hispanic News, www.elhispanicnews.com Resist! Barack Obama, DNC, Immigrant Rights, LGBTQ, Protest

Today outside Gotham Hall, where the Democratic National Committee’s LGBT Leadership Committee held one of its largest fundraising events of the year, LGBTQ and immigrant rights groups GetEQUAL, Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project, a project of United We Dream, Immigration Equality, and Make the Road New York risked arrest in order to call on President Obama and the Democratic Party to stop deportations and grant administrative relief to undocumented immigrants in the United States. President Obama was on-site as the keynote speaker. Though the protesters blocked the street in front of the fundraiser as the presidential motorcade passed by, the New York Police Department refused to arrest them. Barack Obama’s administration is responsible for over two million deportations — more than any other administration in U.S. history. Many of those deportations have been LGBTQ immigrants, who face extraordinary discrimination within the detention system and who are often deported to countries in which they face harassment, abuse, violence and sometimes, death due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Nat’l LGBT Groups Demand US Stop Negotiating With Brunei

June 14, 2014 Jerame Davis, www.prideatwork.org Resist! Brunei, LGBTQ, TPP

Today, several prominent national lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality organizations released a joint letter to President Obama demanding that the US cease further negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement with Brunei after that country enacted a strict new penal code that targets women, LGBT people, and religious minorities. "Brunei's new laws are an affront to human rights and basic decency," said Jerame Davis, interim Executive Director of Pride at Work. "The United States, and every other nation considering doing business with Brunei, should immediately cease any negotiations or consideration for that country as a trading partner. Human rights abusers don't get preferential treatment."

Activists Oppose Separate Justice For Muslims

June 4, 2014 Aviva Stahl, www.thenation.com Resist! Civil Rights, Criminal Justice and Prisons, LGBTQ, Muslim, Terrorism

On a miserable Monday evening in early April, when most people were scuttling for the nearest subway, a motley group was huddled before an unremarkable grey building in lower Manhattan, declaiming into the rain. “[In 2006] we fought for Shifa’s safety, we fought for the Sadequee family’s safety, we fought for all of our safety,” said a woman standing in front of the crowd. “[Today] we must still come together across religious and spiritual traditions, across race and nations, across sexuality, across our beliefs, for our collective safety and livelihood.” The woman was Cara Page, executive director of the Audre Lorde Project and a prominent black queer activist; “Shifa” was Ehsanul “Shifa” Sadequee, a young man convicted of terrorism-related charges five years ago. The two had little obvious in common, but Page had been in Atlanta at the time of his trial and a member of the Free Shifa campaign, a coalition of supporters who argued that his prosecution and detention were unjust. It was proof, they said, that the inhumane detention of “War on Terror” suspects has occurred on American soil, too. Years later, most of the world had moved on from Sadequee’s story, but Page, like the others bundled around her, had not.

Re-Queering Pride

June 3, 2014 Ngoc Loan Tran, www.youngist.org Resist! History, LGBTQ

June was Pride month in the United States. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender folks from coast to coast celebrated the history of queer resistance led by drag queens, poor and homeless queer youth, and trans* women of color like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson… oh what? Word? That’s not what you thought Pride was? Well, maybe that’s because it isn’t what Pride looks like these days. For some members of the LGBT community, June arrives in an explosion of glitter and rainbows, complete with crowds of sweaty half naked gay men drinking Absolut Vodka and signing up for Wells Fargo savings accounts. But for others, June comes as a reminder that while Pride month is about LGBT folks proclaiming our existence, many of us – queer and trans*, disabled, fat, migrant, poor – have to try a little harder to be recognized, to have our histories remembered and our struggles made visible.

Do More Than Dedicate A Postage Stamp To Harvey Milk

May 24, 2014 Cathy Kristofferson, www.oblogdeeoblogda.me Resist! LGBTQ, Protest

Today, the White House saw demonstrators lobbying attendees gathered for the first-day-of-issue ceremony of the Harvey Milk postage stamp. Members of the LGBTQ group 1AngryOldLesbian.org urged attendees to insist President Obama sign the long awaited Federal Contractor Executive Order. That one signature would truly honor Harvey Milk, protecting 22% of the U.S. work force while making a great stride towards the goal of full federal equality. As recently as this past weekend, President Obama said in his International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT) statement: “Tomorrow, as we commemorate the 10th annual International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, we recommit ourselves to the fundamental belief that all people should be treated equally, that they should have the opportunity to reach their fullest potential, and that no one should face violence or discrimination – no matter who they are or whom they love.” We wonder how anyone will “reach their fullest potential” while hiding in the closet to retain their job. Not to mention their home, their health care, their emotional and physical well being, … It’s time for the President to step up and take the actions he can. With the Congress in gridlock, and his promise to combat their inaction with executive action during his State of the Union speech, signing the Federal Contractor Executive Order is a simple move.

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