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Cuba has ‘come a long way’ on LGBT rights

Mariela Castro accused of manipulating advocates

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Mariela Castro Espin, gay news, Washington Blade
Mariela Castro Espin, gay news, Washington Blade

Mariela Castro Espín, right, daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, speaks with LGBT rights advocates attending the ILGA World Conference last month in Mexico City. (Photo courtesy of Francisco Rodríguez Cruz/Paquito el de Cuba)

MEXICO CITY — More than a dozen Cuban LGBT rights advocates on the morning of Oct. 30 were huddled on the floor along the wall of a large ballroom of a Mexico City hotel during the International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association’s biennial global conference.

The activists — wearing white T-shirts that highlighted Cuba’s participation in the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia earlier this year — were finalizing their presentation in support of their country’s bid to host the 2016 ILGA World Conference. They quickly walked to the front of the room once LGBT advocates from the African country of Botswana finished their own presentation.

A lesbian and transgender woman held a large Cuban flag at the front of the ballroom as Manuel Vázquez Seijido and Yasmany Díaz Figueroa spoke from the podium. Their presentation included a slideshow with pictures of hotels in Havana, the Cuban capital, and videos of events associated with the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

ILGA World Conference, Mexico City, Cuba, gay news, Washington Blade

Cuban LGBT rights advocates during their presentation in Mexico City on Oct. 30, 2014, to host the 2016 ILGA World Conference in Havana, Cuba. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

Several of the activists passed out condoms and pro-LGBT literature as many members of the audience clapped and cheered “Cuba.” Díaz even noted during the presentation that Cuban doctors have traveled to West Africa to help combat the Ebola epidemic.

“[The ILGA conference] would be a good thing for all sectors,” said Díaz.

Delegates to the ILGA World Conference ultimately choose Thailand to host the biennial gathering in 2016, but the activists’ bid underscores the progress that many feel Cuba has made in extending rights to its LGBT citizens over the last decade.

Mariela Castro seen as champion of LGBT rights

Supporters of Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro who directs the country’s National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), maintain she has spearheaded a number of pro-LGBT initiatives in recent years. These include a condom distribution campaign and prompting the country’s national health care system to offer free sex-reassignment surgery to trans Cubans.

Mariela Castro was president of the local committee that organized an ILGA conference in May that drew hundreds of LGBT rights advocates from Latin America and the Caribbean to Havana and the beach resort of Varadero.

Mariela Castro, who is a member of the Cuban Parliament, late last year voted against a proposal to add sexual orientation to the country’s labor law because it did not include trans-specific protections. She has also publicly backed marriage rights for same-sex couples on the Communist island.

Isel Calzadilla Acosta, coordinator of the Network of Lesbian and Bisexual Women in the city of Santiago de Cuba in the eastern part of the country, during an interview with the Washington Blade at the ILGA World Conference praised what she described as Mariela Castro’s advocacy on behalf of LGBT Cubans.

Calzadilla said her organization formed in 2003 in response to Mariela Castro reaching out to local activists to work for CENESEX.

“We have seen many advances,” Calzadilla told the Blade. “CENESEX supports us with capacity building and with events and we attribute everything that we are doing to them because we have a voice with Mariela Castro.”

Argelia Fellové Hernández of the Network of Lesbian and Bisexual Women in Havana agreed, noting Cuba’s gay-inclusive labor law and events that commemorated the annual International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

“Our island has come a long way in recent years, compared to many countries around Cuba,” Fellové told the Blade during an interview at the ILGA World Conference in Mexico City.

Mariela Castro took part in a legislative panel during the ILGA World Conference.

She did not respond to the Blade’s repeated requests for an interview while in Mexico City.

Gay Cubans sent to labor camps in 1960s

Mariela Castro’s efforts stand in stark contrast to the LGBT rights record of her uncle, former Cuban President Fidel Castro, in the years following the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Fidel Castro’s government in the 1960s sent more than 25,000 gay men and others deemed unfit for military service to labor camps known as Military Units to Aid Production or the Spanish acronym UMAP. Authorities until 1993 forcibly quarantined people living with HIV/AIDS in state-run sanitaria.

Cuba repealed its sodomy law in 1979.

Fidel Castro during a 2010 interview with a Mexican newspaper described the persecution of gay Cubans in the years following the revolution as “a great injustice.”

LGBT rights advocates who oppose the government — and Mariela Castro in particular — insist authorities continue to face harassment under public assembly laws.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier were among the hundreds of people detained at a popular gay nightclub in Havana in 1997. Cuban security officials in September 2012 reportedly detained Leannes Imbert Acosta, national coordinator of the Cuban LGBT Platform, an umbrella organization of independent advocacy groups, as she left her home to deliver materials on a planned exhibit on the 1960s labor camps to CENESEX.

Cuban authorities in May reportedly arrested and “savagely” beat David Bustamante Rodríguez, an LGBT rights advocate with HIV, during a “peaceful protest” at his home near the city of Santa Clara. Neither Mariela Castro nor the Cuban government responded to the Blade’s request for comment on the incident.

A group of independent Cuban advocates criticized organizers of the ILGA conference that took place on the island in May over their decision not to invite them to the event. Mariela Castro’s supporters have repeatedly denied these claims.

Many of the Cuban advocates who attended the ILGA World Conference in Mexico City work directly with CENESEX.

‘Totalitarian regime’ leaves LGBT Cubans isolated

Ignacio Estrada Cepero, founder of the Cuban League Against AIDS, is among the independent advocates who continue to criticize Mariela Castro.

Estrada’s wife, Wendy Iriepa Díaz, is a trans woman who once worked for CENESEX.

“Mariela totally manipulates the LGBT community,” said Iriepa during a trip to D.C. in the summer of 2013 with her husband.

Cuban-born U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) remains among the most vocal critics of Mariela Castro and her father’s government.

The Florida Republican last month blasted the ultimately unsuccessful bid to hold the 2016 ILGA World Conference in the Cuban capital. Ros-Lehtinen in May 2013 sharply criticized Equality Forum, a Philadelphia-based LGBT advocacy group, over its decision to honor Mariela Castro at its annual dinner.

Ros-Lehtinen a few months later met with Estrada and Iriepa in her Capitol Hill office.

“It’s very important for the U.S. community to understand what is the status of LGBT rights and the denial of rights in Cuba,” said Ros-Lehtinen after the meeting to which the Blade had exclusive access. “Mariela Castro, as part of the regime, has been on a propaganda tour internationally and here in the U.S. especially trying to sell this facade that is really non-existent in Cuba.”

Wendy Iriepa, Ignacio Estrada, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, House of Representatives, Republicans, Florida, Gay News, Washington Blade

Cuban LGBT advocates Wendy Iriepa Díaz and Ignacio Estrada Cepero, meet with U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) in July 2013. (Washington Blade photo by Damien Salas)

Pedro Luís García Macías, a blogger and photographer who lives in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood, appeared to agree with Ros-Lehtinen during a telephone interview with the Blade on Sunday.

“The department that she directs does not do complete work,” said García, referring to CENESEX and Mariela Castro. “It does not respect the complete diversity of the human being, the diversity of thought.”

García added the government has left LGBT Cubans “very isolated.”

“Many people are afraid to think freely because of the totalitarian regime,” he told the Blade.

Cuban advocates who support Mariela Castro with whom the Blade spoke during the ILGA World Conference were quick to blast Ros-Lehtinen and others who criticize her.

“When someone offends [Mariela Castro] it is very offensive to us,” said Calzadilla. “She has been able to understand our pain, our problems and we defend her at all levels. These people who left Cuba don’t know our Cuban reality.”

Fellové told the Blade she has “never” heard these criticisms.

“They are lies,” she said.

U.S. embargo is a ‘great impediment’

Both Calzadilla and Fellové told the Blade the U.S. embargo against Cuba has adversely affected the island’s LGBT residents.

Calzadilla said she and other advocates have faced difficulties obtaining certain medical instruments. She told the Blade the embargo makes it impossible for her to travel to the U.S. with a group of women who work in Cuba.

“I, as a Cuban activist of the people, have the opportunity to go there to demonstrate to them what the women in Cuba are doing,” said Calzadilla. “It appears that in my case the embargo is a great impediment because I will not be able to express what we are doing.”

Fellové stressed the embargo continues to have a widespread effect.

“It affects our children, our neighbors, our parents in the area of medicine,” she said. “The blockade affects a lot.”

García has a far different view.

“The blockade does not exist,” he told the Blade. “An embargo is what exists; better yet what we have is a mental embargo. The mental embargo that we have as Cubans here ensures that we cannot move forward.”

García said he wants to leave Cuba, but is unable to do so because of the cost.

“We are exhausted,” he told the Blade. “We are out of thoughts. We are out of ideas.”

Calzadilla on the other hand is far more optimistic about their future and that of their fellow LGBT Cubans.

“I am clearly optimistic,” she told the Blade. “I could say that because I have been in activism for many years and because I have seen the positive changes.”

Fellové agreed.

“We are well-respected,” she said.

ILGA World Conference, Mexico City, Cuba, LGBT, gay news, Washington Blade

Cuban LGBT rights advocates at the ILGA World conference in Mexico City. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

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Honoring the legacy of New Orleans’ 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire

Why the arson attack that killed 32 gay men still resonates 50 years later

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Fifty years ago this week, 32 gay men were killed in an arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. (Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and accommodation, in the face of institutional and official failures, are a path to healing.  

The story I related to them began on a typical Sunday night at a second-story bar on the fringe of New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1973, where working-class men would gather around a white baby grand piano and belt out the lyrics to a song that was the anthem of their hidden community, “United We Stand” by the Brotherhood of Man. 

“United we stand,” the men would sing together, “divided we fall” — the words epitomizing the ethos of their beloved UpStairs Lounge bar, an egalitarian free space that served as a forerunner to today’s queer safe havens. 

Around that piano in the 1970s Deep South, gays and lesbians, white and Black queens, Christians and non-Christians, and even early gender minorities could cast aside the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the times to find acceptance and companionship for a moment. 

For regulars, the UpStairs Lounge was a miracle, a small pocket of acceptance in a broader world where their very identities were illegal. 

On the Sunday night of June 24, 1973, their voices were silenced in a murderous act of arson that claimed 32 lives and still stands as the deadliest fire in New Orleans history — and the worst mass killing of gays in 20th century America. 

As 13 fire companies struggled to douse the inferno, police refused to question the chief suspect, even though gay witnesses identified and brought the soot-covered man to officers idly standing by. This suspect, an internally conflicted gay-for-pay sex worker named Rodger Dale Nunez, had been ejected from the UpStairs Lounge screaming the word “burn” minutes before, but New Orleans police rebuffed the testimony of fire survivors on the street and allowed Nunez to disappear.

As the fire raged, police denigrated the deceased to reporters on the street: “Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.” 

For days afterward, the carnage met with official silence. With no local gay political leaders willing to step forward, national Gay Liberation-era figures like Rev. Troy Perry of the Metropolitan Community Church flew in to “help our bereaved brothers and sisters” — and shatter officialdom’s code of silence. 

Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. “It’s high time that you people, in New Orleans, Louisiana, got the message and joined the rest of the Union,” Perry said. 

Two days later, on June 26, 1973, as families hesitated to step forward to identify their kin in the morgue, UpStairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve stood in his badly charred bar, the air still foul with death. He rebuffed attempts by Perry to turn the fire into a call for visibility and progress for homosexuals. 

“This fire had very little to do with the gay movement or with anything gay,” Esteve told a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I do not want my bar or this tragedy to be used to further any of their causes.” 

Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath — and the bar owner also remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business. 

“Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recounted Esteve’s friend Bob McAnear, a former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.” 

The next day, gay bar owners, incensed at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting. “How dare you hold your damn news conferences!” one business owner shouted. 

Ignoring calls for gay self-censorship, Perry held a 250-person memorial for the fire victims the following Sunday, July 1, culminating in mourners defiantly marching out the front door of a French Quarter church into waiting news cameras. “Reverend Troy Perry awoke several sleeping giants, me being one of them,” recalled Charlene Schneider, a lesbian activist who walked out of that front door with Perry.

(Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

Esteve doubted the UpStairs Lounge story’s capacity to rouse gay political fervor. As the coroner buried four of his former patrons anonymously on the edge of town, Esteve quietly collected at least $25,000 in fire insurance proceeds. Less than a year later, he used the money to open another gay bar called the Post Office, where patrons of the UpStairs Lounge — some with visible burn scars — gathered but were discouraged from singing “United We Stand.” 

New Orleans cops neglected to question the chief arson suspect and closed the investigation without answers in late August 1973. Gay elites in the city’s power structure began gaslighting the mourners who marched with Perry into the news cameras, casting suspicion on their memories and re-characterizing their moment of liberation as a stunt. 

When a local gay journalist asked in April 1977, “Where are the gay activists in New Orleans?,” Esteve responded that there were none, because none were needed. “We don’t feel we’re discriminated against,” Esteve said. “New Orleans gays are different from gays anywhere else… Perhaps there is some correlation between the amount of gay activism in other cities and the degree of police harassment.” 

(Photo by H.J. Patterson/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

An attitude of nihilism and disavowal descended upon the memory of the UpStairs Lounge victims, goaded by Esteve and fellow gay entrepreneurs who earned their keep via gay patrons drowning their sorrows each night instead of protesting the injustices that kept them drinking. 

Into the 1980s, the story of the UpStairs Lounge all but vanished from conversation — with the exception of a few sanctuaries for gay political debate such as the local lesbian bar Charlene’s, run by the activist Charlene Schneider. 

By 1988, the 15th anniversary of the fire, the UpStairs Lounge narrative comprised little more than a call for better fire codes and indoor sprinklers. UpStairs Lounge survivor Stewart Butler summed it up: “A tragedy that, as far as I know, no good came of.” 

Finally, in 1991, at Stewart Butler and Charlene Schneider’s nudging, the UpStairs Lounge story became aligned with the crusade of liberated gays and lesbians seeking equal rights in Louisiana. The halls of power responded with intermittent progress. The New Orleans City Council, horrified by the story but not yet ready to take its look in the mirror, enacted an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and public accommodations that Dec. 12 — more than 18 years after the fire. 

“I believe the fire was the catalyst for the anger to bring us all to the table,” Schneider told The Times-Picayune, a tacit rebuke to Esteve’s strategy of silent accommodation. Even Esteve seemed to change his stance with time, granting a full interview with the first UpStairs Lounge scholar Johnny Townsend sometime around 1989. 

Most of the figures in this historic tale are now deceased. What’s left is an enduring story that refused to go gently. The story now echoes around the world — a musical about the UpStairs Lounge fire recently played in Tokyo, translating the gay underworld of the 1973 French Quarter for Japanese audiences.

When I finished my presentation to the City Council last June, I looked up to see the seven council members in tears. Unanimously, they approved a resolution acknowledging the historic failures of city leaders in the wake of the UpStairs Lounge fire. 

Council members personally apologized to UpStairs Lounge families and survivors seated in the chamber in a symbolic act that, though it could not bring back those who died, still mattered greatly to those whose pain had been denied, leaving them to grieve alone. At long last, official silence and indifference gave way to heartfelt words of healing. 

The way Americans remember the past is an active, ongoing process. Our collective memory is malleable, but it matters because it speaks volumes about our maturity as a people, how we acknowledge the past’s influence in our lives, and how it shapes the examples we set for our youth. Do we grapple with difficult truths, or do we duck accountability by defaulting to nostalgia and bluster? Or worse, do we simply ignore the past until it fades into a black hole of ignorance and indifference? 

I believe that a factual retelling of the UpStairs Lounge tragedy — and how, 50 years onward, it became known internationally — resonates beyond our current divides. It reminds queer and non-queer Americans that ignoring the past holds back the present, and that silence is no cure for what ails a participatory nation. 

Silence isolates. Silence gaslights and shrouds. It preserves the power structures that scapegoat the disempowered. 

Solidarity, on the other hand, unites. Solidarity illuminates a path forward together. Above all, solidarity transforms the downtrodden into a resounding chorus of citizens — in the spirit of voices who once gathered ‘round a white baby grand piano and sang, joyfully and loudly, “United We Stand.” 

(Photo by Philip Ames/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

Robert W. Fieseler is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of “Tinderbox: the Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation.”

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New Supreme Court term includes critical LGBTQ case with ‘terrifying’ consequences

Business owner seeks to decline services for same-sex weddings

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The U.S. Supreme Court is to set consider the case of 303 Creative, which seeks to refuse design services for same-sex weddings. (Blade file photo by Michael Key)

The U.S. Supreme Court, after a decision overturning Roe v. Wade that still leaves many reeling, is starting a new term with justices slated to revisit the issue of LGBTQ rights.

In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court will return to the issue of whether or not providers of custom-made goods can refuse service to LGBTQ customers on First Amendment grounds. In this case, the business owner is Lorie Smith, a website designer in Colorado who wants to opt out of providing her graphic design services for same-sex weddings despite the civil rights law in her state.

Jennifer Pizer, acting chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, said in an interview with the Blade, “it’s not too much to say an immeasurably huge amount is at stake” for LGBTQ people depending on the outcome of the case.

“This contrived idea that making custom goods, or offering a custom service, somehow tacitly conveys an endorsement of the person — if that were to be accepted, that would be a profound change in the law,” Pizer said. “And the stakes are very high because there are no practical, obvious, principled ways to limit that kind of an exception, and if the law isn’t clear in this regard, then the people who are at risk of experiencing discrimination have no security, no effective protection by having a non-discrimination laws, because at any moment, as one makes their way through the commercial marketplace, you don’t know whether a particular business person is going to refuse to serve you.”

The upcoming arguments and decision in the 303 Creative case mark a return to LGBTQ rights for the Supreme Court, which had no lawsuit to directly address the issue in its previous term, although many argued the Dobbs decision put LGBTQ rights in peril and threatened access to abortion for LGBTQ people.

And yet, the 303 Creative case is similar to other cases the Supreme Court has previously heard on the providers of services seeking the right to deny services based on First Amendment grounds, such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. In both of those cases, however, the court issued narrow rulings on the facts of litigation, declining to issue sweeping rulings either upholding non-discrimination principles or First Amendment exemptions.

Pizer, who signed one of the friend-of-the-court briefs in opposition to 303 Creative, said the case is “similar in the goals” of the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation on the basis they both seek exemptions to the same non-discrimination law that governs their business, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, or CADA, and seek “to further the social and political argument that they should be free to refuse same-sex couples or LGBTQ people in particular.”

“So there’s the legal goal, and it connects to the social and political goals and in that sense, it’s the same as Masterpiece,” Pizer said. “And so there are multiple problems with it again, as a legal matter, but also as a social matter, because as with the religion argument, it flows from the idea that having something to do with us is endorsing us.”

One difference: the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation stemmed from an act of refusal of service after owner, Jack Phillips, declined to make a custom-made wedding cake for a same-sex couple for their upcoming wedding. No act of discrimination in the past, however, is present in the 303 Creative case. The owner seeks to put on her website a disclaimer she won’t provide services for same-sex weddings, signaling an intent to discriminate against same-sex couples rather than having done so.

As such, expect issues of standing — whether or not either party is personally aggrieved and able bring to a lawsuit — to be hashed out in arguments as well as whether the litigation is ripe for review as justices consider the case. It’s not hard to see U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has sought to lead the court to reach less sweeping decisions (sometimes successfully, and sometimes in the Dobbs case not successfully) to push for a decision along these lines.

Another key difference: The 303 Creative case hinges on the argument of freedom of speech as opposed to the two-fold argument of freedom of speech and freedom of religious exercise in the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation. Although 303 Creative requested in its petition to the Supreme Court review of both issues of speech and religion, justices elected only to take up the issue of free speech in granting a writ of certiorari (or agreement to take up a case). Justices also declined to accept another question in the petition request of review of the 1990 precedent in Smith v. Employment Division, which concluded states can enforce neutral generally applicable laws on citizens with religious objections without violating the First Amendment.

Representing 303 Creative in the lawsuit is Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that has sought to undermine civil rights laws for LGBTQ people with litigation seeking exemptions based on the First Amendment, such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

Kristen Waggoner, president of Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote in a Sept. 12 legal brief signed by her and other attorneys that a decision in favor of 303 Creative boils down to a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment.

“Colorado and the United States still contend that CADA only regulates sales transactions,” the brief says. “But their cases do not apply because they involve non-expressive activities: selling BBQ, firing employees, restricting school attendance, limiting club memberships, and providing room access. Colorado’s own cases agree that the government may not use public-accommodation laws to affect a commercial actor’s speech.”

Pizer, however, pushed back strongly on the idea a decision in favor of 303 Creative would be as focused as Alliance Defending Freedom purports it would be, arguing it could open the door to widespread discrimination against LGBTQ people.

“One way to put it is art tends to be in the eye of the beholder,” Pizer said. “Is something of a craft, or is it art? I feel like I’m channeling Lily Tomlin. Remember ‘soup and art’? We have had an understanding that whether something is beautiful or not is not the determining factor about whether something is protected as artistic expression. There’s a legal test that recognizes if this is speech, whose speech is it, whose message is it? Would anyone who was hearing the speech or seeing the message understand it to be the message of the customer or of the merchants or craftsmen or business person?”

Despite the implications in the case for LGBTQ rights, 303 Creative may have supporters among LGBTQ people who consider themselves proponents of free speech.

One joint friend-of-the-court brief before the Supreme Court, written by Dale Carpenter, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who’s written in favor of LGBTQ rights, and Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues the case is an opportunity to affirm the First Amendment applies to goods and services that are uniquely expressive.

“Distinguishing expressive from non-expressive products in some contexts might be hard, but the Tenth Circuit agreed that Smith’s product does not present a hard case,” the brief says. “Yet that court (and Colorado) declined to recognize any exemption for products constituting speech. The Tenth Circuit has effectively recognized a state interest in subjecting the creation of speech itself to antidiscrimination laws.”

Oral arguments in the case aren’t yet set, but may be announced soon. Set to defend the state of Colorado and enforcement of its non-discrimination law in the case is Colorado Solicitor General Eric Reuel Olson. Just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would grant the request to the U.S. solicitor general to present arguments before the justices on behalf of the Biden administration.

With a 6-3 conservative majority on the court that has recently scrapped the super-precedent guaranteeing the right to abortion, supporters of LGBTQ rights may think the outcome of the case is all but lost, especially amid widespread fears same-sex marriage would be next on the chopping block. After the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against 303 Creative in the lawsuit, the simple action by the Supreme Court to grant review in the lawsuit suggests they are primed to issue a reversal and rule in favor of the company.

Pizer, acknowledging the call to action issued by LGBTQ groups in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, conceded the current Supreme Court issuing the ruling in this case is “a terrifying prospect,” but cautioned the issue isn’t so much the makeup of the court but whether or not justices will continue down the path of abolishing case law.

“I think the question that we’re facing with respect to all of the cases or at least many of the cases that are in front of the court right now, is whether this court is going to continue on this radical sort of wrecking ball to the edifice of settled law and seemingly a goal of setting up whole new structures of what our basic legal principles are going to be. Are we going to have another term of that?” Pizer said. “And if so, that’s terrifying.”

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Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman, named president of Human Rights Campaign

Progressive activist a veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund

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Kelley Robinson (Screen capture via HRC YouTube)

Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman and veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, is to become the next president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ group announced on Tuesday.

Robinson is set to become the ninth president of the Human Rights Campaign after having served as executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and more than 12 years of experience as a leader in the progressive movement. She’ll be the first Black, queer woman to serve in that role.

“I’m honored and ready to lead HRC — and our more than three million member-advocates — as we continue working to achieve equality and liberation for all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people,” Robinson said. “This is a pivotal moment in our movement for equality for LGBTQ+ people. We, particularly our trans and BIPOC communities, are quite literally in the fight for our lives and facing unprecedented threats that seek to destroy us.”

Kelley Robinson IS NAMED as The next human rights Campaign president

The next Human Rights Campaign president is named as Democrats are performing well in polls in the mid-term elections after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving an opening for the LGBTQ group to play a key role amid fears LGBTQ rights are next on the chopping block.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reminds us we are just one Supreme Court decision away from losing fundamental freedoms including the freedom to marry, voting rights, and privacy,” Robinson said. “We are facing a generational opportunity to rise to these challenges and create real, sustainable change. I believe that working together this change is possible right now. This next chapter of the Human Rights Campaign is about getting to freedom and liberation without any exceptions — and today I am making a promise and commitment to carry this work forward.”

The Human Rights Campaign announces its next president after a nearly year-long search process after the board of directors terminated its former president Alphonso David when he was ensnared in the sexual misconduct scandal that led former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign. David has denied wrongdoing and filed a lawsuit against the LGBTQ group alleging racial discrimination.

Kelley Robinson, Planned Parenthood, Cathy Chu, SMYAL, Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders, Amy Nelson, Whitman-Walker Health, Sheroes of the Movement, Mayor's office of GLBT Affairs, gay news, Washington Blade
Kelley Robinson, seen here with Cathy Chu of SMYAL and Amy Nelson of Whitman-Walker Health, is the next Human Rights Campaign president. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
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