Local
Marriage, trans bills get boost in Md. House
Valentine’s Day picked for lobbying on both measures
The same-sex marriage and transgender non-discrimination bills pending in the Maryland legislature cleared another hurdle last week when the speaker of the House of Delegates appointed a majority of supporters of the two bills to the committees that must first approve them.
House Speaker Michael Busch (D-Anne Arundel County) had been expected to retain a majority on the House Judiciary Committee in favor of the marriage equality bill as he has in past years, and did so again on Dec. 29.
But officials with Equality Maryland, the statewide LGBT advocacy organization, were less certain about the makeup of the House Committee on Health and Government Operations. That panel has jurisdiction over a pending bill that would ban employment discrimination based on gender identity and expression, which would protect transgender people. In past years, the panel has not taken a vote on the transgender bill.
Equality Maryland Executive Director Morgan Meneses-Sheets said the group was delighted with Busch’s decision on Dec. 29 to also name at least 13 supporters of the transgender measure to the 23-member Health and Government Operations Committee. The action ensures that the bill will be reported out of committee for an up or down vote in the House of Delegates.
In early December, a majority of pro-marriage equality members were named to the Maryland Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee, ensuring for the first time that a same-sex marriage measure would clear that key panel and reach the Senate floor for a vote. Up until now, the Judicial Proceedings Committee has blocked the marriage bill from coming to a floor vote.
“We want to move the marriage bill first in the Senate and the gender identity bill first in the House,” Meneses-Sheets said in discussing the timetable planned for the bills among a coalition of supporters.
She said further refinement of the timetable for moving both measures was to be discussed Wednesday in a conference call between Equality Maryland officials and all seven members of the legislature’s gay and lesbian caucus.
Similar to past years, Meneses-Sheets and others advocating for the two bills believe there appear to be enough votes to pass the marriage bill in the House. Supporters in the Senate believe they have the 24 votes needed to pass the marriage bill on an up or down vote but were less certain over whether they have the 29 votes needed to stop an expected filibuster by same-sex marriage opponents.
“The question is whether we can get cloture to break a filibuster,” said Sen. Jamie Raskin (D-Montgomery County), who supports both the marriage equality and transgender non-discrimination bills.
“That’s the mystery at this point,” he said.
Raskin said he was not familiar enough with the positions of his colleagues on the transgender bill to predict its outcome other than to say he sees support growing for that measure.
Sen. Richard Madaleno (D-Montgomery County), who is gay, said on Wednesday he’s more confident in the prospects for the marriage bill.
“I have never been so optimistic about getting this done,” he said. “Today at lunch I sat quietly by myself with a list of the members of the new Senate going over again and again in my head where the votes are, and I’m feeling really good right now both for the floor vote and the cloture vote.”
Madaleno is among seven out gays and lesbians now serving in the Maryland legislature — one in the Senate and six in the House — who said they will push hard from the inside to pass both the marriage and transgender rights bill.
Meneses-Sheets said Equality Maryland has scheduled a lobby day for Feb. 14 on Valentine’s Day, where the group hopes large numbers of LGBT Marylanders and their straight supporters will come to the state capital in Annapolis to push for both bills.
She said the group is inviting LGBT people to bring family members with them to the all-day lobbying event, with the intention that they visit the offices of members of the Senate and House of Delegates from all parts of the state.
“We’re so close that it will take just a handful of votes to push this through,” she said of the marriage bill. “The electorate is with us on this. The young voters are with us on this issue.”
Concerning the transgender bill, she said its prospects “look good on the floor of the House” but “there may be challenges” in the Senate.
Among the challenges, she noted, are arguments by opponents that a transgender non-discrimination measure would enable men dressed as women to harass women in women’s bathrooms in public places.
Transgender activists have disputed the so-called “bathroom” argument, which usually surfaces when transgender non-discrimination legislation is introduced.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, has said no reports of women being targeted in bathrooms have surfaced in any of the states, cities or counties where transgender non-discrimination laws have been adopted.
“It’s a myth,” she said.
“We need to persuade people that you should be judged on the merits when it comes to your job,” said Meneses-Sheets. “It’s an economic issue.”
She said Equality Maryland is bringing on three more full-time staff members to work on the two bills beginning Jan. 12, when the Maryland General Assembly opens its 2011 session.
The session lasts for just 90 days, a development that LGBT activists say gives them only until April 11 to secure the passage of the marriage and transgender rights measures.
“We have a lot of work to do in a short time,” said Meneses-Sheets.
Madaleno said that under the longstanding practice in the General Assembly, nearly all important or controversial bills don’t come to a final vote until the last two or three weeks of the session in April.
A late passage of both the marriage and transgender rights bill would make it more difficult for opponents to collect the required signatures for a referendum to kill the bills. Nearly all observers of the General Assembly expect opponents to take out petitions to call a referendum, which would stop the bills from taking effect until after voters decide on the issue — assuming the required number of petitions is obtained.
Under the state constitution, one-third of the required number of petition signatures must be obtained by the end of May and the remainder of the signatures needed must be collected by the end of June. The gathering of petitions cannot begin until both houses of the General Assembly passes a bill being challenged. That means it would be to the advantage of supporters of the two bills to wait until the end of the session to pass them.
The number of signatures needed is three percent of the qualified voters in the state based on the total number of votes cast in the most recent election for governor.
District of Columbia
Gay priest credited with boosting church support for LGBTQ Catholics
Fr. Tom Oddo’s biographer speaks at Dignity Washington event
The author of a biography of a U.S. Catholic priest said to have advocated for support by the Catholic Church of gay Catholics in the early 1970s has called Father Thomas ‘Tom’ Oddo a little known but important figure in the LGBTQ rights movement.
Tyler Bieber, author of the recently published book “Against The Current: Father Tom Oddo And the New American Catholic,” told of Oddo’s life and work on behalf of LGBTQ rights at a March 22 talk before the local LGBTQ Catholic group Dignity Washington.
Among Oddo’s important accomplishments, Bieber said, was his role as a co-founder of the national LGBTQ Catholic group Dignity U.S.A. in 1973 at the age of 29.
But as reported in the prologue of his book, Bieber presented details of the sad news that Oddo died in a fatal car crash in 1989 at the age of 45 in Portland, Ore., where he was serving as the highly acclaimed president of the University of Portland, a Catholic institution.
“He was a major figure in the gay rights movement in the 1970s, an unsung hero of that movement,” Bieber told Dignity Washington members, who assembled for his talk in a meeting room at St. Margaret Episcopal Church near Dupont Circle, where they attend their weekly Catholic mass on Sundays.
“And Dignity U.S.A. saw intense growth in membership and visibility” during its early years under Oddo’s leadership, Bieber said. “The story of Father Tom and his contemporaries is a story largely untold in the history of the gay rights movement, but one worth knowing and considering,” he said.
As stated in his book, Bieber told the Dignity Washington gathering Oddo was born and raised in a Catholic family on Long Island, N.Y., and attended a Catholic high school in Flushing Queens. It was at that time when he developed an interest in becoming a priest, according to Bieber.
After studying at the University of Notre Dame and completing his religious studies he was ordained as a priest in 1970 and began his work as a priest in the Boston area, Bieber said. It was around that time, Bieber told the Dignity Washington audience, that gay Catholics approached Oddo to seek advice on how they should interact with the Catholic Church. It was also around that time that Oddo became involved in a group supportive of then gay Catholics that later became a Dignity chapter in Boston.
In a development considered unusual for a Catholic priest, Bieber said Oddo in 1973 testified in support of gay rights bill before a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature and collaborated with then Massachusetts gay and lesbian rights advocate Elaine Noble.
In 1982, at the age of 39, Oddo was selected as president of the University of Portland following several years as a college teacher in the Boston area, Bieber’s book states. It says he was seen as a “vibrant and capable administrator who delivered real results to his campus,” adding, “His magnetism was obvious. One student described him as ‘John Kennedyesque’ to the university’s student newspaper.”
Bieber said that although Oddo was less active with Dignity U.S.A. during his tenure as UP president, he continued his support for gay Catholics and what is now referred to as LGBTQ rights.
“For those that knew him prior to his term at UP, though, he represented something greater than an accomplished university administrator and educator,” Bieber’s book states. “He was a new kind of priest, a gay man living and ministering in a world set loose from tradition by the Second Vatican Council,” the book says.
It was referring to the Vatican gathering of worldwide Catholic leaders from 1962 to 1965 concluding under Pope Paul VI that church observers say modernized church practices to allow far greater participation by the laity and opened the way for sympathetic consideration of gay Catholics.
District of Columbia
HRC to host National Rainbow Seder
Bet Mishpachah among annual event’s organizers
The 18th National Rainbow Seder will take place at the Human Rights Campaign on Sunday.
The sold out event is the country’s largest Passover Seder for the Jewish LGBTQ community.
Organizations behind the event include Bet Mishpachah, a local D.C. LGBTQ synagogue that Rabbi Jake Singer-Beilin leads, and GLOE, an Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center program that sponsors events for the queer Jewish community. The theme for this year’s Seder is “Liberation For All Who Journey: Remembering, Resisting, Rebuilding.” Rabbis Atara Cohen, Koach Frazier, and Avigayil Halpern will lead it.
The Seder will honor the late GLOE co-chair Michael Singer. Singer also served on the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center’s board.
“This Seder is both a celebration of how far we have come and a call to continue building a more just and inclusive world.” Bet Mishpachah Executive Director Joshua Maxey told the Washington Blade.
A gay man was murdered in Petersburg, Va., on March 13.
Shyyell Diamond Sanchez-McCray, who was also known as Saamel and Mable, was a drag queen who won the Miss Mayflower EOY pageant in 2015. Reports also indicate Sanchez-McCray, 42, was a well-known community activist in Virginia and in North Carolina.
Local media reports indicate police officers found Sanchez-McCray shot to death inside a home in Petersburg.
Sanchez-McCray’s brother, Jamal Mitchell Diamond, in a public statement the Washington Blade received from Equality Virginia and GLAAD, said Sanchez-McCray was not transgender as initial reports indicated.
“Our family has always embraced the fullness of who he was. He used the names Saamel, Shyyell, and Mable interchangeably, and we honor all of them. There is no division within our family regarding how he is being represented — only a shared commitment to preserving his truth with love and respect,” said Diamond.
“He was also deeply committed to community work through Nationz Foundation, where he worked and completed multiple state-certified programs to support marginalized communities,” added Diamond. “That work meant a great deal to him.”
Authorities have not made any arrests.
The Petersburg Bureau of Police has asked anyone with information about Sanchez-McCray’s murder to call Petersburg-Dinwiddie Crime Solvers at 804-861-1212.
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