National
Iowa judge wins bid to stay in office
Marriage opponents launched effort to unseat justices
The Iowa Supreme Court (Photo by Ctjf83 via wikimedia commons)
An Iowa Supreme Court justice who was among seven justices that ruled unanimously in 2009 to strike down the state’s law banning same-sex marriage won his bid to remain in office on Tuesday.
In a regularly scheduled ballot measure for judges known as a judicial retention election, Justice David Wiggins very narrowly won his eligibility to serve another eight-year term, according to the Associated Press.
The vote came two years after Iowans voted to oust from office three other Supreme Court justices who joined in the 2009 ruling that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Iowa.
Similar to the vote to oust the three justices two years ago, the vote on Tuesday to retain Wiggins followed an intense campaign by anti-gay groups that accused him and the other justices of overstepping their role as judges to impose on the state a gay marriage law without the consent of the legislature.
“We see a clear violation of separation of powers where they made law from the bench, they executed law from the bench and they even attempted to amend the [Iowa] Constitution,” Bob Vander Plaats, head of the anti-gay group Family Leader, told the Ames Tribune.
Vander Plaats and others opposed to same-sex marriage have billed the judicial election as a referendum on marriage equality.
A coalition of LGBT and judicial advocacy groups, including the Iowa Bar Association, organized a campaign in support of Wiggins, who announced it would not be appropriate for him as a sitting judge to campaign or raise money in an election.
Donna Redwing, executive director of the statewide LGBT group One Iowa, was among those who campaigned for retaining Wiggins. In a commentary last week in the Ames Tribune, Redwing argued that Family Leader and other groups opposed to same-sex marriage used TV ads and other media to give a false and misleading account of the state Supreme Court’s ruling on the marriage question.
“At One Iowa, we are very clear that the job the justices did with integrity and intelligence was based on equal protection and not, as Mr. Vander Plaats claims, on creating new legislation,” Redwing stated.
“Let us be very clear: The court did not create new law, they struck down a marriage ban as unconstitutional,” she said. “They didn’t create legislation; they ruled that existing legislation violated the equal protection clause in our Constitution.”
The anti-gay National Organization for Marriage, which provided funding for the campaign against Wiggins, has vowed to push for the ouster of all seven of the justices that ruled to overturn the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Officials with legal organizations and the state’s law schools have said the Iowa Legislature adopted legislation in the early 1960s to hold the judicial retention elections as a means of ousting judges for corruption or improper conduct. The elections were not intended to remove judges for handing down court rulings that people disagree with, the officials have said.
Under Iowa law, the governor appoints judges from a list of nominees sent to him or her by a nonpartisan judicial nominating commission. All judges must come before voters in a retention election after their first year in office. If retained by the voters, they are cleared for an eight-year term after which they must come before the voters following each eight-year term.
Fred Sainz, vice president of communications for the Human Rights Campaign said HRC contributed $130,000 and raised another $20,000 for the campaign in support of Wiggins.
“In Iowa, the opponents of equality again attempted to politicize the state’s independent judiciary by launching an aggressive campaign to remove Justice David Wiggins,” Sainz told the Blade. “This sets a dangerous precedent of intimidation that strikes at the very root of our nation’s independent judiciary.”
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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