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Baldwin makes history with Senate victory in Wis.

Becomes first openly gay U.S. senator

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Tammy Baldwin, gay news, Wisconsin, Washington Blade

Senator-elect Tammy Baldwin defeated former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson this week. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

In an historic first, lesbian Rep. Tammy Baldwin won her race for the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin Tuesday night, becoming the first openly gay person to serve in the Senate.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting Wednesday morning, Baldwin was ahead of former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson by a 51 percent to 46 percent margin.

ā€œI am honored and humbled and grateful,ā€ Baldwin said in election night remarks. Ā ā€œAnd I am ready to get to work, ready to stand with President Barack Obama, ready to fight for Wisconsinā€™s middle class!ā€

LGBT organizations throughout the country hailed Baldwinā€™s victory as an important milestone in the LGBT rights movement.

ā€œThis is a historic victory not only for the peopleĀ of Wisconsin, but for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans across the country who have finally gained an authentic and powerful voice in Congressā€™ upper chamber,ā€ said Chuck Wolf, president and CEO of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which provided financialĀ  support for Baldwinā€™s campaign.

ā€œTonight Tammy shattered a glass ceiling that has existed for more than two centuries, and we could not be more thrilled,ā€ Wolf said.

Baldwinā€™s supporters in Wisconsin noted that she also broke another barrier by becoming the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin.

Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, which also provided financial support and field workers to assist Baldwinā€™s campaign, said Baldwin succeeded in drawing support from voters on a wide range of issues.

ā€œWith a relentless focus on the issues that matter to most Wisconsin voters ā€“ economic security, access to healthcare and fairness and inclusion for all,ā€ Griffin said, ā€œsheā€™s earned the respect of all her constituents, gay and straight.ā€

As of Wednesday afternoon, the election division of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, which runs the stateā€™s elections, reported that Baldwin received 1,533,868 votes, or 51 percent of the total. The board reported that Thompson received 1,370,664 votes, at 46 percent.

Two other candidates received a combined total of 3 percent of the vote, the board reported.

Early polls showed Thompson with a slight lead over Baldwin shortly after Thompson won the GOP nomination in a primary in August. By the middle of September, polls showed Baldwin in the lead, but the size of her lead narrowed by late October, with some pollsters saying the two candidates were in a statistical tie going into Tuesdayā€™s election.

Baldwinā€™s quest to become the nationā€™s first openly gay U.S. senator captured the attention of the LGBT people across the country, many of whom contributed money to Baldwinā€™s campaign.

She also received backing from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and other Democratic leaning groups, including labor unions, environmental organizations and the womenā€™s advocacy group Emilyā€™s List.

In 1998, Baldwin became the first openly gay non-incumbent to win election to the U.S. House when she won her race for Wisconsinā€™s Second Congressional District in which the state capital of Madison is located.

In her seven terms in Congress, Baldwin became known as one of the strongest advocates of LGBT rights in the House as well as one of the strongest champions of progressive causes and policies.

Thompson, whose supporters describe him as a moderate, served as governor of Wisconsin between 1987 and 2001. He served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration from 2001 to 2005. He became a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 but dropped out of the race before the start of the primaries.

Thompson has said he personally opposes same-sex marriage and supports the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage under federal law as a union only between a man and a woman. But he has said he doesnā€™t favor a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality and favors leaving same-sex marriage decisions to the states.

He has said he opposes workplace discrimination based on someoneā€™s sexual orientation but has not said whether he would support federal legislation to ban anti-LGBT discrimination in the workplace.

Although Wisconsin members of the gay Republican group Log Cabin Republicans supported Thompson, the national Log Cabin organization, which endorsed GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for president, didnā€™t endorse Thompson.

ā€œWe endorsed candidates that engaged with us and asked for our endorsement,ā€ said Log Cabin president R. Clarke Cooper, who noted that the group endorsed just four U.S. Senate candidates this year.

The outcome of Tuesdayā€™s Senate election in Wisconsin marked the end of a bruising campaign, which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says may have broken a national record for the most negative TV ads of any U.S. Senate campaign in the state and possibly in the nation.

The Journal Sentinel reports that both Baldwin and Thompson appear to have lashed out at each other with equal force, with some independent observers saying some of the ads from both sides included misleading information.

None of the Thompson attack ads appear to have singled out Baldwin based on her sexual orientation.

However, in at least one instance, a Thompson campaign official sent an email to the news media in early September, one day before Baldwin spoke before the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., highlighting Baldwinā€™s appearance at an LGBT Pride festival in Madison several years earlier.

The email, sent by Thompson campaign staffer Brian Nemoir, included an attached YouTube video showing Baldwin waiving her arms while dancing on a stage with the popular Wisconsin rock band V05. Some of the band members were dressed in Wonder Woman costumes as the band played the theme song for the Wonder Woman TV series.

Nemoir stated in his email that Baldwin was scheduled to discuss ā€œheartland valuesā€ in her Democratic Convention speech.

ā€œClearly, thereā€™s no one better positioned to talk ā€˜heartland valuesā€™ than Tammy,ā€ he said sarcastically in the email.

Baldwin supporters called the email a form of gay baiting, saying it was an attempt to question Baldwinā€™s values because she appeared at an LGBT Pride event. A Thompson campaign spokesperson said Nemoir was acting as an individual and not on behalf of the campaign when he sent the email and video.

While the Thompson campaignā€™s negative TV ads steered clear of Baldwinā€™s sexual orientation, they sought to portray her as an ultra liberal politician out of touch with the needs of the state and the country.

One ad pointed to Baldwinā€™s longstanding support for a single payer health insurance system, quoting her as saying several years ago that the single payer system she supported is a ā€œgovernment takeover of medicine.ā€ Another ad noted that Baldwin voted four times against economic sanctions for Iran, criticizing her judgment on a key foreign policy issue.

Baldwin responded to the health insurance attack by saying she voted for and continues to support the Affordable Care Act, President Obamaā€™s health insurance reform measure that Congress passed two years ago. She said her support for a single payer system was ā€œmootā€ since the Obama measure is about to be implemented.

She said she voted against sanctions for Iran at a time when she was hopeful that dissident groups in Iran would overturn Iranā€™s government and establish a true democratic system. She said she began voting for sanctions after determining that the opposition forces didnā€™t have the strength to change the government.

A Thompson campaign attack ad that drew expressions of outrage from Baldwinā€™s campaign and its supporters showed video footage of the devastation of the World Trade Center in New York following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and denounced Baldwin for voting against a 2006 House resolution honoring victims of the attacks.

Baldwin said she voted for at least four other 9/11 resolutions honoring victims of the terrorist attacks but voted against the 2006 resolution because it included other provisions on unrelated issues with which she disagreed.

In her own TV ads, Baldwin fired back at Thompson, citing reports by New York firefighters saying the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which Thompson headed at the time of the 9/11 attacks, was slow in responding to firefightersā€™ calls for assistance for their illnesses believed to be caused by the fumes and contaminated dust that engulfed them while responding to the World Trade Center disaster.

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State Department

Transgender, nonbinary people file lawsuit against passport executive order

State Department banned from issuing passports with ‘X’ gender markers

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(Bigstock photo)

Seven transgender and nonbinary people on Feb. 7 filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s executive order that bans the State Department from issuing passports with “X” gender markers.

Ashton Orr, Zaya Perysian, Sawyer Soe, Chastain Anderson, Drew Hall, Bella Boe, and Reid Solomon-Lane are the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the private law firm Covington & Burling LPP filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The lawsuit names Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as defendants.

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June 2021 announced the State Department would begin to issue gender-neutral passports and documents for American citizens who were born overseas.

Dana Zzyym, an intersex U.S. Navy veteran who identifies as nonbinary, in 2015 filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department after it denied their application for a passport with an ā€œXā€ gender marker. Zzyym in October 2021 received the first gender-neutral American passport.

The State Department policy took effect on April 11, 2022.

Trump signed the executive order that overturned it shortly after he took office on Jan. 20. Rubio later directed State Department personnel to ā€œsuspend any application requesting an ā€˜Xā€™ sex marker and do not take any further action pending additional guidance from the department.ā€  

ā€œThis guidance applies to all applications currently in progress and any future applications,” reads Rubio’s memo. “Guidance on existing passports containing an ā€˜Xā€™ sex marker will come via other channels.ā€

The lawsuit says Trump’s executive order is an “abrupt, discriminatory, and dangerous reversal of settled United States passport policy.” It also concludes the new policy is “unlawful and unconstitutional.”

“It discriminates against individuals based on their sex and, as to some, their transgender status,” reads the lawsuit. “It is motivated by impermissible animus. It cannot be justified under any level of judicial scrutiny, and it wrongly seeks to erase the reality that transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people exist today as they always have.”

Solomon-Lane, who lives in North Adams, Mass., with his spouse and their three children, in an ACLU press release says he has “lived virtually my entire adult life as a man” and “everyone in my personal and professional life knows me as a man, and any stranger on the street who encountered me would view me as a man.”

ā€œI thought that 18 years after transitioning, I would be able to live my life in safety and ease,” he said. “Now, as a married father of three, Trumpā€™s executive order and the ensuing passport policy have threatened that life of safety and ease.”

“If my passport were to reflect a sex designation that is inconsistent with who I am, I would be forcibly outed every time I used my passport for travel or identification, causing potential risk to my safety and my familyā€™s safety,ā€ added Solomon-Lane.

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Federal Government

Education Department moves to end support for trans students

Mental health services among programs that are in jeopardy

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The U.S. Department of Education headquarters in D.C. (Photo courtesy of the GSA/Education Department)

An email sent to employees at the U.S. Department of Education on Friday explains that “programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices” will be reviewed and cut in cases where they ā€œfail to affirm the reality of biological sex.ā€

The move, which is of a piece with President Donald Trump’s executive orders restricting transgender rights, jeopardizes the future of initiatives at the agency like mental health services and support for students experiencing homelessness.

Along with external-facing work at the agency, the directive targets employee programs such as those administered by LGBTQ resource groups, in keeping with the Trump-Vance administration’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal government.

In recent weeks, federal agencies had begun changing their documents, policies, and websites for purposes of compliance with the new administration’s first executive action targeting the trans community, ā€œDefending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.ā€

For instance, the Education Department had removed a webpage offering tips for schools to better support homeless LGBTQ youth, noted ProPublica, which broke the news of the “sweeping” changes announced in the email to DOE staff.

According to the news service, the directive further explains the administration’s position that ā€œThe deliberate subjugation of women and girls by means of gender ideology ā€” whether in intimate spaces, weaponized language, or American classrooms ā€” negated the civil rights of biological females and fostered distrust of our federal institutions.”

A U.S. Senate committee hearing will be held Thursday for Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, who has been criticized by LGBTQ advocacy groups. GLAAD, for instance, notes that she helped to launch and currently chairs the board of a conservative think tank that “has campaigned against policies that support transgender rights in education.”

NBC News reported on Tuesday that Trump planned to issue an executive order this week to abolish the Education Department altogether.

While the president and his conservative allies in and outside the administration have repeatedly expressed plans to disband the agency, doing so would require approval from Congress.

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State Department

Protesters demand US fully restore PEPFAR funding

Activists blocked intersection outside State Department on Thursday

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HIV/AIDS activists block an intersection outside the State Department on Feb. 6, 2025. They were demanding the Trump-Vance administration to fully restore PEPFAR funding. (Photo courtesy of Housing Works)

Dozens of HIV/AIDS activists on Thursday protested outside the State Department and demanded U.S. officials fully restore President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funding.

The activists ā€” members of Housing Works, Health GAP, and the Treatment Action Group ā€” blocked an intersection for an hour. Health GAP Executive Director Asia Russell told the Washington Blade that police did not make any arrests.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Jan. 24 directed State Department personnel to stop nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for 90 days in response to an executive order that President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration. Rubio later issued a waiver that allows PEPFAR and other ā€œlife-saving humanitarian assistanceā€ programs to continue to operate during the freeze.

The Blade on Wednesday reported PEPFAR-funded programs in Kenya and other African countries have been forced to suspend services and even shut down because of a lack of U.S. funding.

ā€œPEPFAR is a program that has saved 26 million lives and changed the trajectory of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic,” said Housing Works CEO Charles King in a press release. “The recent freeze on its funding is not just a bureaucratic decision; it is a death sentence for millions who rely on these life-saving treatments. We cannot allow decades of progress to be undone. The U.S. must immediately reaffirm its commitment to global health and human dignity by restoring PEPFAR funding.” 

ā€œWe demand Secretary Rubio immediately reverse his deadly, illegal stop-work order, which has already disrupted life-saving HIV services worldwide,” added Russell. “Any waiver process is too little, too late.”

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