Local
Queer W.Va. anti-mining activist alleges police brutality after arrest
Steele among 20 protesters arrested at Lincoln County mine
Dustin Steele’s July 28 mugshot (Photo courtesy of Arre.st/West Virginia State Police)
Environmental activists on Thursday demanded that West Virginia officials investigate allegations that state troopers beat a queer anti-mountaintop coal mining activist over the weekend.
CREDO Action and Energy Action Coalition urged Attorney General Darrell McGraw and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia Booth Goodwin to investigate Dustin Steele’s claims that officers dragged him across a sidewalk and asphalt at the Hobet mine in Lincoln County on July 28. Steele, 21, further alleges that an unspecified number of state troopers punched and kicked him while in custody.
Officers arrested Steele and 19 others with the group Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival after they blocked access to the mine and charged them with trespassing and obstructing an officer. RAMPS further alleges that troopers dragged a second protester by her pigtails.
Steele, a West Virginia native who has protested mountaintop coal mines for nearly a decade, told the Blade that more than 50 protesters had gathered at the mine south of Charleston in the state’s southern coalfields. Steele said roughly 30 protesters left Hobet once the officers arrived, but RAMPS maintained they forced them to walk four hours until they reached their vans parked along a nearby state highway.
A video on the group’s website shows what appears to be mine supporters holding pro-coal signs, shouting obscenities and even threatening the protesters as they walked down the access road. RAMPS claims that miners used their vehicles to prevent them from driving away from the area.
“Twenty of us chose to stay on the property and protest this form of coal mining by being arrested on the mine site,” said Steele.
Steele, who has identified as queer for the last year and uses gender-neutral pronouns, was released Wednesday on $25,000 bail. Steele stressed that gender identity did not motivate the alleged attack.
“That to my knowledge is unrelated,” stressed Steele. “I do not believe they were aware of my gender identification.”
A Lincoln County magistrate earlier today released nine of the protesters after they pleaded guilty to trespassing — they received a year’s probation and must pay a $500 fine. The remaining 10 protesters who remain in custody on $25,000 bail are scheduled to go before a different judge on Tuesday.
“Setting $25,000 bail for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience is not serving justice — it is serving the coal industry,” said Josh Nelson of CREDO Action. “That’s why CREDO Action’s West Virginia activists are calling on U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin and Attorney General Darrell McGraw to launch a full investigation into what exactly occurred during and after Saturday’s protests.”
First Sgt. Michael Baylous of the West Virginia State Police told the Blade that Steele has yet to file a formal complaint. He further defended the department in a statement.
“The West Virginia State Police is a law enforcement entity which has no desire to enter the political debate on surface mining. Our job is to enforce the laws of the land, which we do in a professional manner,” said Baylous. “In this particular instance, the West Virginia State Police simply responded to a radical action group’s organized and calculated efforts to violate the laws of the State of West Virginia and deprive others of their Constitutional rights. Any attempts by this radical action group to use the West Virginia State Police in an effort to advance their political agenda will be unsuccessful. Therefore, we have no further comment to make on the allegations which have been reported in the media.”
The attorney general’s office told the Blade that it does not have investigative authority under West Virginia law. Whit Jones, campaign director for the Energy Action Coalition, stressed that authorities have an obligation to investigate Steele’s allegations.
“The Energy Action Coalition is joining the call for U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin and Attorney General Darrell McGraw to investigate in solidarity with those fighting to protect their homes, their families, and their futures in West Virginia,” he said in a press release. “Young people want to see an end to mountaintop removal mining, but we also want our rights to peacefully protest without fear of assault by police protected.”
Steele is expected to file a formal complaint with state police in the coming days.
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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