National
NYC latest to call on Supreme Court to overturn DOMA
Brief contends anti-gay law undermines benefits afforded by city
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down DOMA (Blade file photo by Michael Key)
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and lesbian New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have joined the growing choir of individuals calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act.
On Wednesday, attorneys representing the City of New York — as well as Bloomberg and Quinn in their official capacities — filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking the justices to take up lesbian Edith Windsor’s challenge to DOMA, known as Windsor v. United States.
Windsor, a New York City widow, had to pay nearly $363,000 in federal estates taxes upon the death of her spouse, Thea Spyer, in 2009 because of Section 3 of DOMA, which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
The 14-page brief calls DOMA “the last remaining obstacle to achieving legal equality between the city’s married couples” while making the case to strike down the anti-gay law.
“Solely because of DOMA, Edith Windsor was required to pay more than $363,000 in federal estate tax on her legal spouse’s estate,” the brief states. “If Ms. Windsor’s spouse had been a man, the marital exemption provided by federal law would have applied and she would not have owed any federal estate taxes at all. As a result of DOMA, thousands of legally married same-sex couples in the New York City are being subjected to this type of disparate treatment because their legal marriages are not recognized under federal law.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Windsor, has already filed a request with the Supreme Court calling on justices to take up the lawsuit and overturn DOMA. Windsor has already seen some success. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York already ruled in her favor and ordered that Windsor be refunded the $363,000 in taxes she had paid.
The request from New York City is one of several calling on the Supreme Court to review DOMA. Both supporters and defenders of the law have made requests to the Supreme Court, including the House Republican-led Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, which took up legal defense of DOMA after the Obama administration announced it would no longer defend it, and the Justice Department, which has since been actively litigation against DOMA. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has also asked the Supreme Court to review and strike down DOMA on the basis that it violates a state’s right to regulate marriage under the Tenth Amendment as has Lambda Legal in the case of Golinski v. Office of Personnel Management.
The brief presents the same question to the Supreme Court that has already been asked in earlier briefs asking justices to consider the anti-gay law: Does Section 3 of DOMA violate the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws as applied to persons of the same sex who are legally married under state law?
But the brief goes into different territory than previous requests because it explains why DOMA has a particularly adverse impact on New York City. The State of New York, under the leadership of Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), passed marriage equality legislation last year and had recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of enacting that law.
The brief lays out two main arguments why DOMA unfairly impacts New York City: (1) DOMA forces it to be “the unwilling agent” of federally required separate treatment of lawfully married employees and (2) the disparate treatment of legally married couples under DOMA undermines the city’s non-discrimination laws.
According to the brief, one way in which DOMA complicates the policy administration in New York City is related to the health benefits, retirement plans and family leave offered to city employees and their spouses.
“As an employer, the city must identify the gender of the spouses of its lawfully married employees and then single out those employees with a same-sex spouse,” the brief states. “DOMA enforces discriminatory tax treatment of spousal health care benefits. In many other benefit-related matters, the city must either incur the cost and administrative burden of ‘workarounds’ (employer-created benefit structures attempting to compensate for the discriminatory effects of DOMA), or discriminate in its treatment of its married workforce.”
Rose Saxe, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBT & AIDS Project, praised New York City officials for joining the call for the Supreme Court to review Windsor’s challenge to DOMA.
“We are very pleased that the City of New York has joined our request to have the Supreme Court consider Edie Windsor’s case, particularly in light of the harm that DOMA causes so many married New Yorkers,” she said.
The Supreme Court won’t be able to decide whether to hear the case until justices return from summer recess and the start their conference on September 24.
CORRECTION: An initial version of this article stated that the New York City brief was the fifth petition asking the Supreme Court to review DOMA. That count didn’t take into account a petition filed by Lambda Legal. The initial also inaccurately stated the brief was filed Thursday. The Blade regrets the errors.
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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