National
Out-of-state activists headed to N.C. to fight amendment
Volunteers ready to staff phone banks, boost turnout for Tuesday vote
K. Travis Ballie (Blade photo by Michael Key)
For K. Travis Ballie, helping with the campaign against Amendment One in North Carolina represents a chance to reverse the losses on state ballot initiatives in the more than 30 states that have seen votes on marriage equality.
“I’m going down because 2012 is a very unique year, even since 2004, when we saw the greatest number of marriage amendments on the ballot, we didn’t defeat any of them,” Ballie said. “Now in 2012, we have an anti-marriage amendment on the ballot in a southern state, in North Carolina, which also happens to be one of the most important swing states in this election cycle.”
Ballie, a gay 23-year-old Silver Spring, Md., resident, said he’s personally invested in the fight against the anti-gay measure — which will come before state voters Tuesday and would make a ban on same-sex marriage part of the state constitution — because he has gay friends in North Carolina, including one who had a marriage ceremony in the state a few weeks ago.
“This is really her marriage on the ballot,” Ballie said. “When there are people like Hillary that are in North Carolina that are just pleading for help from activists across the country, the only moral response is to go down to North Carolina and really help defeat this amendment.”
Ballie said challenging anti-gay amendments wherever they emerge across the country is important.
“I think we’re at a point where our community understands that we need to put up a fight wherever an amendment happens, be it a Southern state, be it the Northeast, anywhere in the country,” Ballie said. “These amendments are politically feasible to be defeated and even if we lose, which we won’t, we are really orchestrating one of the largest LGBT-focused statewide campaigns in North Carolina, one of the fastest growing states in our country.”
Ballie is one of several LGBT rights supporters — coming from places like D.C., Sacramento and Chicago — who are expected to travel to North Carolina to help in the campaign against Amendment One.
Another D.C.-area resident, Bryan Oklin, a gay 28-year-old attorney, said he also intends to travel to North Carolina to participate in efforts against Amendment One, calling it a “misguided, divisive measure,” because of the negative effect it would have on LGBT families.
“It seeks to enshrine in the North Carolina state Constitution that one group of the state’s citizens deserves less civil rights than all others,” Oklin said. “It is a backwards, bigoted initiative reminiscent of a past, less tolerant period of time.”
Same-sex marriage is already barred by statute in North Carolina. Opponents say the measure would not only make that ban part of the state constitution, but also prohibit civil unions and interfere with domestic partner benefits offered by municipalities as well as threaten contractual arrangements between same-sex partners.
Adam Bink, director of online programs for the Courage Campaign and an organizer for grassroots efforts against Amendment One, said the Coalition to Protect All NC Families, the campaign against Amendment One, will have more than 100 volunteers coming from out of state either through their signup form or through the Human Rights Campaign. On top of that, Courage Campaign will bring in 15 additional supporters.
“We’ll be putting volunteers to work at phone banks, events like OutRaleigh 2012 this weekend, and going to doors to talk to voters and leave reminders to vote across college campuses and in neighborhoods,” Bink said. “They’ll be focused on one core mission: ensuring we get our supporters to the polls.”
Bink said the out-of-state efforts that helped lead to the passage of California’s Proposition 8 are a stark reminder of why outside support can be important.
“Courage Campaign members from across the country wrote in to tell us they’re going because don’t want to leave any state behind, and because they understand that Amendment 1 goes too far in hurting families across North Carolina,” Bink said. “Our members will never forget the busloads of volunteers from outside California that helped pass Prop 8. We’ve learned from that experience.”
It’s this memory of Prop 8 that is motivating Amanda Wallner, a 24-year-old lesbian from Sacramento, Calif., to travel to North Carolina. For her, the memory of the passage of Prop 8 in 2008 as a college student and the rescinding of the marriage law in Maine in 2009 — which she helped fight — both weigh heavily on her.
“The loss of the ‘No on 8’ campaign hit me really hard,” Wallner said. “When we lost, I could barely get out of bed the next day. I still get emotional sometimes when I read about it. Any opportunity that I have to apply some of the lessons that I learned during that campaign to help out other LGBT people — I’m really excited to have the opportunity.”
Wallner added that going door-to-door explaining the harm of anti-gay amendments brings the biggest gains for the LGBT movement.
“That’s one of the reasons that I love electoral campaigns so much,” Wallner said. “It gives me that opportunity to talk to people face to face, and for them to be able to put a face to the issue.”
These activists could face an uphill battle; polls have shown majority support for the amendment, though there has been a shift in momentum in recent weeks.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said he thinks the amendment is likely to pass as similar marriage amendments have in the past.
“I couldn’t guess the margin at the moment, but it is hard to see how it fails to garner a majority ‘yes’ vote,” Sabato said. “The usual patterns are emerging: Seniors are strongly in favor and young people are the least likely to back it, Democrats are opposed while Republicans support.”
Even so, the pro-LGBT side in the race has a funding advantage over proponents of the anti-gay amendment. According to media reports, the Coalition to Protect All NC Families has raised $2.3 million to date and has $294,000 in cash on hand, while Vote for Marriage NC has raised a total of $1.2 million and has $112,000 in cash on hand. The pro-LGBT side is touting that individual small donations make up the bulk of its funds, while large contributions from the Christian Action League and the National Organization for Marriage made up the other side.
Moreover, recent polling shows support for the marriage amendment is declining. Data published last week by Public Policy Polling found only 54 percent of voters in the state plan to vote for it, while 40 percent are opposed to the measure. That’s the lowest level of support for the measure that PPP has found in polling since last October.
Bink said the decline in support for the North Carolina amendment shows the pro-LGBT side is within “striking distance” of victory.
“What’s more, the same poll shows that the more North Carolinians learn what Amendment One does, the less they support it, which is why an original 27-point lead has been cut in half,” Bink said. “A supermajority of North Carolinians oppose a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage as well as civil unions and domestic partnerships for unmarried couples of any gender, endangers domestic violence laws, and takes benefits like health insurance away from children of unmarried couples.”
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
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.
National
Medical groups file lawsuit over Trump deletion of health information
Crucial datasets included LGBTQ, HIV resources
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.
U.S. Federal Courts
Federal judge scraps trans-inclusive workplace discrimination protections
Ruling appears to contradict US Supreme Court precedent
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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