Local
Anti-gay group joins Va. marriage case
Alliance Defending Freedom representing defendant
An anti-gay group is representing a defendant in a case that challenges Virginia’s same-sex marriage amendment (photo via wikimedia).
An anti-gay group is representing one of the two defendants in a federal lawsuit that challenges Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban.
Court documents indicate the Alliance Defending Freedom on Monday filed a status report with Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Monday on behalf of Prince William County Circuit Court Clerk Michèle McQuigg. Norfolk Circuit Court Clerk George Schaefer has tapped lawyers with former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s Virginia Beach law firm to represent him in the case.
Lawyers representing the plaintiffs — Timothy Bostic and Tony London of Norfolk and Carol Schall and Mary Townley of Richmond — filed their own status report with Allen after she questioned whether a hearing in the case that is scheduled to take place on Thursday “remains warranted” following Attorney General Mark Herring announcement he will not defend the commonwealth’s same-sex marriage ban.
“Virginia’s definition of marriage does not codify impermissible sex or sexual orientation discrimination,” wrote Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers in the status report it filed with Allen. “As to the claim of sex discrimination, Virginia’s marriage laws treat men and women identically. No man or woman is permitted to marry a person of the same sex, so there is no ‘differential treatment for denial of opportunity for which relief is sought.’”
The Alliance Defending Freedom also dismissed attempts to compare this lawsuit to the case that prompted the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 to strike down interracial marriage bans in the landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling.
“While race is irrelevant to the state’s interest in marriage, the sex of the two individuals marrying is central,” wrote the group.
Allen dismissed the Alliance Defending Freedom’s request to delay the hearing that will take place as scheduled on Thursday. The judge’s order also indicates the Family Foundation of Virginia has also filed an amicus brief in the case.
“We expect the ADF to use the same tired arguments that we’ve seen lose repeatedly in courts across the country,” Adam Umhoefer, executive director of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is representing Bostic and London and Schall and Townley, told the Washington Blade.
The Alliance Defending Freedom did not return the Blade’s request for comment.
Herring continues to face criticism for not defending marriage amendment
Virginia Republicans and social conservatives continue to blast Herring for not defending the marriage amendment that voters approved in 2006.
“The attorney general’s decision to refuse to enforce a duly-adopted provision of the Virginia Constitution is frightening,” said state Del. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah County) on Sunday during the Republican Party of Virginia’s weekly address.
Republican Party of Virginia Chair Pat Mullins last week suggested Herring should resign if he won’t defend the gay nuptials ban. National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown said state lawmakers should impeach the attorney general.
A Virginia House of Delegates committee on Jan. 24 approved a bill that would allow any state lawmaker to defend a law if the governor and attorney general decline to do so. More than 30 legislators on the same day urged Gov. Terry McAuliffe to defend the state’s marriage amendment.
“There are people who are going to attack me and try to say, ‘Well it’s about the duty of the attorney general [to defend the marriage ban,]’” Herring told the Blade during a Jan. 23 interview. “In fact what they’re really upset about is that they disagree with marriage equality. And that’s their right, but it’s not the law.”
Alliance Defending Freedom staffers in 2013 testified against measures that sought to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples in Delaware and Rhode Island — gays and lesbians in the two states began to exchange vows last summer. The Arizona-based organization also filed briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8.
The justices last June found a portion of DOMA unconstitutional and struck down Prop 8.
The Alliance Defending Freedom has also represented a New Mexico photographer and two Vermont innkeepers who faced lawsuits from gays and lesbians who said the refused to do business with them.
The Southern Poverty Law Center last July criticized the Alliance Defending Freedom and other U.S. groups for supporting the campaign to defend Belize’s anti-sodomy law.
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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