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Obama rejects attacks on Clement’s DOMA defense

Carney says president supports right of Congress to defend anti-gay law

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White House Press Secretary Jay Carney (Blade file photo by Michael Key)

President Obama shares the view expressed earlier this week by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that attacks on the private attorney who volunteered to litigate on behalf of the Defense of Marriage Act are “misplaced,” according to the White House.

Under questioning from the Washington Blade, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said during an off-camera press gaggle Wednesday that statements from Holder, who earlier this week rebuffed those who would vilify former U.S. solicitor general Paul Clement for taking up defense of DOMA, reflected Obama’s position.

“We do share Eric Holder’s views on this,” Carney said. “We think — as we said from the beginning when we talked about — when I did from this podium — about the decision no longer from the administration to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, that we would support efforts by Congress if they so chose to defend it. And so I have nothing to add to the attorney general’s comments.”

Following a party-line vote by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group in March, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) directed House General Counsel Kerry Kercher to take up defense of DOMA in court. President Obama had earlier announced that he determined the 1996 anti-gay statute prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and that his administration would no longer defend it in court.

On April 14, Kircher executed a contract with Clement, who was then affiliated with the firm King & Spalding, for assistance with defense of DOMA at a blended rate of $520 an hour and initial total sum cap that could reach $500,000.

Following intense criticism from the LGBT community, King & Spalding announced that it would no longer participate in defense of the anti-gay law because of an inadequate vetting process in taking up the case. Clement resigned from his position at the firm and took up a partnership at Bancroft LLC while pledging to continue to defend DOMA.

According to Politico, Holder earlier this week rejected attacks on Clement from the LGBT community during a roundtable with reporters and came to the defense of the private attorney for sticking with the case.

“Paul Clement is a great lawyer and has done a lot of really great things for this nation. In taking on the representation — representing Congress in connection with DOMA, I think he is doing that which lawyers do when we’re at our best,” Holder reportedly said. “That criticism, I think, was very misplaced.”

Holder also reportedly compared attacks on Clement to attacks on Justice Department lawyers for their past work for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“It was something we dealt with here in the Department of Justice,” Holder was quoted as saying. “The people who criticized our people here at the Justice Department were wrong then, as are people who criticized Paul Clement for the representation that he’s going to continue.”

Among the groups that joined in the outcry after the contract was executed with Clement to defend DOMA in court was the Human Rights Campaign, which pledged to launch a campaign to inform King & Spalding’s clients and potential recruits about the decision to defend DOMA. The firm announced it would drop defense of the anti-gay following HRC’s announcement.

Last week, HRC President Joe Solmonese criticized both King & Spalding and Clement for litigating on behalf of the 1996 law.

“DOMA inflicts a great cost on same-sex couples but now its defense is burdening taxpayers to the tune of $520 per hour,” Solmonese said. “The firm of King & Spalding and their attorney Paul Clement should be ashamed at every penny earned in trying to justify discrimination against American families.”

Although Solmonese identified both King & Spalding and Clement in his statement, Fred Sainz, HRC’s vice president of communications, asserted that Holder’s comments defending Clement are inaccurate because the LGBT rights group went after the firm and not the private attorney.

“We have a great deal of respect for Attorney General Holder,” Sainz said. “His comments on the particulars of our involvement are inaccurate. We never criticized Paul Clement. Our issue has been with King & Spalding, the firm that employed him. K&S espouses LGBT inclusion on their website. This engagement is completely antithetical to those values and thus our central claim has been hypocrisy. You simply can’t square espousing LGBT inclusion and defending discrimination.”

Sainz continued that Carney rightly observed that the House is fully within its rights to defend the law — now that the Obama administration has chosen to drop defense of the statute — and said HRC doesn’t disagree with the White House press secretary.

“We wish [the House] hadn’t, we don’t believe there is a necessity given the pain and suffering that it inflicts on gay and lesbian families, but we don’t disagree that they have the legal right to defend the statute given that they passed it,” Sainz said.

Richard Socarides, president of Equality Matters, said he’s unsure that Holder’s remarks should be interpreted as criticism of LGBT rights groups for attacking Clement and also maintained the House is within its rights to defend DOMA in court.

“I think that he is a lawyer of a certain political viewpoint, and he’s now at a firm that takes these cases that are highly politically charged,” Socarides said. “The case is now probably in an appropriate place. I don’t have any problems with what Holder said in so far as he’s simply stating the fact that Boehner has a right to pursue this course. No one is suggesting he doesn’t have a right to do this, and if he wants to hire Paul Clement to do it, and Paul Clement wants to represent him, that’s totally fine.”

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New York

Men convicted of murdering two men in NYC gay bar drugging scheme sentenced

One of the victims, John Umberger, was D.C. political consultant

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(Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

A New York judge on Wednesday sentenced three men convicted of killing a D.C. political consultant and another man who they targeted at gay bars in Manhattan.

NBC New York notes a jury in February convicted Jayqwan Hamilton, Jacob Barroso, and Robert DeMaio of murder, robbery, and conspiracy in relation to druggings and robberies that targeted gay bars in Manhattan from March 2021 to June 2022.

John Umberger, a 33-year-old political consultant from D.C., and Julio Ramirez, a 25-year-old social worker, died. Prosecutors said Hamilton, Barroso, and DeMaio targeted three other men at gay bars.

The jury convicted Hamilton and DeMaio of murdering Umberger. State Supreme Court Judge Felicia Mennin sentenced Hamilton and DeMaio to 40 years to life in prison.

Barroso, who was convicted of killing Ramirez, received a 20 years to life sentence.

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National

Medical groups file lawsuit over Trump deletion of health information

Crucial datasets included LGBTQ, HIV resources

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HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Nine private medical and public health advocacy organizations, including two from D.C., filed a lawsuit on May 20 in federal court in Seattle challenging what it calls the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s illegal deletion of dozens or more of its webpages containing health related information, including HIV information.

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, names as defendants Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS itself, and several agencies operating under HHS and its directors, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.

“This action challenges the widespread deletion of public health resources from federal agencies,” the lawsuit states. “Dozens (if not more) of taxpayer-funded webpages, databases, and other crucial resources have vanished since January 20, 2025, leaving doctors, nurses, researchers, and the public scrambling for information,” it says.

 “These actions have undermined the longstanding, congressionally mandated regime; irreparably harmed Plaintiffs and others who rely on these federal resources; and put the nation’s public health infrastructure in unnecessary jeopardy,” the lawsuit continues.

It adds, “The removal of public health resources was apparently prompted by two recent executive orders – one focused on ‘gender ideology’ and the other targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) programs. Defendants implemented these executive orders in a haphazard manner that resulted in the deletion (inadvertent or otherwise) of health-related websites and databases, including information related to pregnancy risks, public health datasets, information about opioid-use disorder, and many other valuable resources.”

 The lawsuit does not mention that it was President Donald Trump who issued the two executive orders in question. 

A White House spokesperson couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit. 

While not mentioning Trump by name, the lawsuit names as defendants in addition to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., Matthew Buzzelli, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health; Martin Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Thomas Engels, administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration; and Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. 

The 44-page lawsuit complaint includes an addendum with a chart showing the titles or descriptions of 49 “affected resource” website pages that it says were deleted because of the executive orders. The chart shows that just four of the sites were restored after initially being deleted.

 Of the 49 sites, 15 addressed LGBTQ-related health issues and six others addressed HIV issues, according to the chart.   

“The unannounced and unprecedented deletion of these federal webpages and datasets came as a shock to the medical and scientific communities, which had come to rely on them to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, assist physicians and other clinicians in daily care, and inform the public about a wide range of healthcare issues,” the lawsuit states.

 “Health professionals, nonprofit organizations, and state and local authorities used the websites and datasets daily in care for their patients, to provide resources to their communities, and promote public health,” it says. 

Jose Zuniga, president and CEO of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC), one of the organizations that signed on as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement that the deleted information from the HHS websites “includes essential information about LGBTQ+ health, gender and reproductive rights, clinical trial data, Mpox and other vaccine guidance and HIV prevention resources.”

 Zuniga added, “IAPAC champions evidence-based, data-informed HIV responses and we reject ideologically driven efforts that undermine public health and erase marginalized communities.”

Lisa Amore, a spokesperson for Whitman-Walker Health, D.C.’s largest LGBTQ supportive health services provider, also expressed concern about the potential impact of the HHS website deletions.

 “As the region’s leader in HIV care and prevention, Whitman-Walker Health relies on scientific data to help us drive our resources and measure our successes,” Amore said in response to a request for comment from  the Washington Blade. 

“The District of Columbia has made great strides in the fight against HIV,” Amore said. “But the removal of public facing information from the HHS website makes our collective work much harder and will set HIV care and prevention backward,” she said. 

The lawsuit calls on the court to issue a declaratory judgement that the “deletion of public health webpages and resources is unlawful and invalid” and to issue a preliminary or permanent injunction ordering government officials named as defendants in the lawsuit “to restore the public health webpages and resources that have been deleted and to maintain their web domains in accordance with their statutory duties.”

It also calls on the court to require defendant government officials to “file a status report with the Court within twenty-four hours of entry of a preliminary injunction, and at regular intervals, thereafter, confirming compliance with these orders.”

The health organizations that joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs include the Washington State Medical Association, Washington State Nurses Association, Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Academy Health, Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, Fast-Track Cities Institute, International Association of Providers of AIDS Care, National LGBT Cancer Network, and Vermont Medical Society. 

The Fast-Track Cities Institute and International Association of Providers of AIDS Care are based in D.C.

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U.S. Federal Courts

Federal judge scraps trans-inclusive workplace discrimination protections

Ruling appears to contradict US Supreme Court precedent

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Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Screen capture: YouTube)

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas has struck down guidelines by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission designed to protect against workplace harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The EEOC in April 2024 updated its guidelines to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which determined that discrimination against transgender people constituted sex-based discrimination as proscribed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

To ensure compliance with the law, the agency recommended that employers honor their employees’ preferred pronouns while granting them access to bathrooms and allowing them to wear dress code-compliant clothing that aligns with their gender identities.

While the the guidelines are not legally binding, Kacsmaryk ruled that their issuance created “mandatory standards” exceeding the EEOC’s statutory authority that were “inconsistent with the text, history, and tradition of Title VII and recent Supreme Court precedent.”

“Title VII does not require employers or courts to blind themselves to the biological differences between men and women,” he wrote in the opinion.

The case, which was brought by the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, presents the greatest setback for LGBTQ inclusive workplace protections since President Donald Trump’s issuance of an executive order on the first day of his second term directing U.S. federal agencies to recognize only two genders as determined by birth sex.

Last month, top Democrats from both chambers of Congress reintroduced the Equality Act, which would codify LGBTQ-inclusive protections against discrimination into federal law, covering employment as well as areas like housing and jury service.

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