Local
McDuffie wins Ward 5 Council race
Gay Republican finishes fourth in 11 candidate race
Democrat Kenyan McDuffie, a civil rights attorney who received the endorsement of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the city’s largest LGBT political group, won a decisive victory on Tuesday in an 11-candidate race for the Ward 5 seat on the D.C. City Council.
The seat became vacant earlier this year when incumbent Democrat Harry Thomas Jr. resigned shortly after being indicted for embezzling city funds. He pleaded guilty to the charge and was sentenced to 38 months in jail.
Gay Republican candidate Tim Day, an accountant who is credited with raising questions about Thomas’s financial dealings that prompted authorities to open an investigation that led to Thomas’s indictment, came in fourth place. Day received the endorsement of the gay group Log Cabin Republicans of Washington.
Ward 5 political observers say McDuffie pulled together a broad coalition of supporters from all parts of the ward, including the Brookland, Bloomingdale, and Eckington neighborhoods believed to be home to large numbers of LGBT residents.
“Ward 5 has united behind Kenyan McDuffie, and that’s a good thing,” said Bloomingdale resident Barry Daneker, the Stein Club’s treasurer and vice chair of the Ward 5 Democratic Committee.
“This shows that Kenyan reached out to all the different factions that make up Ward 5,” Daneker said. “Ward 5 is changing and he did his best appeal to everyone.”
McDuffie told members of the Stein Club at an endorsement meeting in April that he is a strong supporter of LGBT equality, including the city’s same-sex marriage law.
According to final but unofficial results released Tuesday night by the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, McDuffie received 4,085 votes or 44.5 percent, more than double the 1,850 votes or 20.2 percent received by his closest rival, Democrat Delano Hunter.
Hunter drew criticism from gay activists in 2010 when he ran against Thomas for the Ward 5 Council seat and said he would support a voter referendum to decide whether the city’s same-sex marriage law should be retained or repealed. At the time he accepted campaign contributions from the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage, which strongly opposed the same-sex marriage law. Earlier this year, Hunter told the Blade he changed his mind and supports the marriage equality law.
Democrat Frank Wilds came in third place, with 1,380 votes or 14.8 percent.
In his fourth place finish, Day received 490 votes or 5.3 percent.
Day beat Democratic attorney Ron Magnus, a longtime supporter of LGBT rights, who came in fifth place with 379 votes or 4.1 percent.
Of the remaining candidates, Democrat Shelly Gardner received 241 votes (2.6 percent); Democrat Kathy Henderson, 228 votes (2.5 percent); Democrat Drew Hubbard, 199 votes (2.2 percent); Democrat Rae Zapata, 182 votes (1.9 percent); Ruth Marshall 63 votes (0.7 percent);and independent John Cheeks, 38 votes (0.4 percent).
District of Columbia
Mayor Bowser signs bill requiring insurers to cover PrEP
‘This is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS’
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on March 20 signed a bill approved by the D.C. Council that requires health insurance companies to cover the costs of HIV prevention or PrEP drugs for D.C. residents at risk for HIV infection.
Like all legislation approved by the Council and signed by the mayor, the bill, called the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act, was sent to Capitol Hill for a required 30-day congressional review period before it takes effect as D.C. law.
Gay D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) last year introduced the bill.
Insurance coverage for PrEP drugs has been provided through coverage standards included in the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. But AIDS advocacy organizations have called on states and D.C. to pass their own legislation requiring insurance coverage of PrEP as a safeguard in case federal policies are weakened or removed by the Trump administration, which has already reduced federal funding for HIV/AIDS-related programs.
Like legislation passed by other states, the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act requires insurers to cover all PrEP drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Studies have shown that PrEP drugs, which can be taken as pills or by injection just twice a year, are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.
“I think this is a win for our community,” Parker said after the D.C. Council voted unanimously to approve the bill on its first vote on the measure in February. “And this is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
District of Columbia
Blade editor to be inducted into D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame
Kevin Naff marks 24 years with publication this year
Longtime Washington Blade Editor Kevin Naff will be inducted into D.C.’s Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame in June, the group announced this week.
Hall of Fame honorees are chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter. Naff and two other inductees — Seth Borenstein, a Washington-based national science writer for the AP and Cheryl W. Thompson, an award-winning correspondent for National Public Radio — will be celebrated at the chapter’s Dateline Awards dinner on Tuesday, June 9, at the National Press Club. The dinner’s emcee will be Kojo Nnamdi, host of WAMU radio’s weekly “Politics Hour.”
“I am tremendously honored by this recognition,” Naff said. “I have spent a lifetime in the D.C. area learning from so many talented journalists and am humbled to be considered in their company. Thank you to SPJ and to all the LGBTQ pioneers who came before me who made this possible.”
Naff joined the Blade in 2002 after years in print and digital journalism. He worked as a financial reporter for Reuters in New York before moving to Baltimore in 1996 to launch the Baltimore Sun’s website. He spent four years at the Sun before leaving for an internet startup and later joining the mobile data group at Verizon Wireless working on the first generation of mobile apps.
He then moved to the Blade and has served as the publication’s longest-tenured editor. In 2023, Naff published his first book, “How We Won the War for LGBTQ Equality — And How Our Enemies Could Take It All Away.”
Previous Hall of Fame inductees include luminaries in journalism like Wolf Blitzer, Benjamin Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, and Edgar Allen Poe. The Blade’s senior news reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. was inducted in 2015.
Maryland
Supreme Court ruling against conversion therapy bans could affect Md. law
Then-Gov. Larry Hogan signed statute in 2018
By PAMELA WOOD, JOHN-JOHN WILLIAMS IV, and MADELEINE O’NEILL | The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ kids in Colorado, a ruling that also could apply to Maryland’s ban on the discredited practice.
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide whether it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court’s majority, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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