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Can Clinton win over Obama’s ’08 gay supporters?
Some waiting to hear more, others enthusiastic about 2016 chances
Eight years ago, the Democratic presidential primary split the LGBT community between then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama, who ultimately won the nomination and the White House.
As the 2016 election approaches, many prominent gay Democrats who backedĀ Obama over Clinton in 2008 say they support her this time around, though there are some holdouts who are waiting to hear more, underminingĀ the notion they’d automatically rally behind the former secretary of state in her second bid for the presidency.
Eric Stern, director of operations for the career development office for the law school at University of California, Berkeley, supported Obama in 2008 and said he isn’t yet ready to back Clinton.
“I think it depends on how seriously she and her campaign take the concerns that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have about her ability to champion our interests,” Stern said. “I think it’s going to be really important, and I hope when this happens that she’ll work with Elizabeth Warren to gain her support and will hopefully rely on Elizabeth Warren as an adviser during the campaign.”
Stern recalled in 2008, Clinton was his “third choice.” After his No. 1 choice in the primary, former senator and 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards, dropped out of the race, Stern threw his support behind Obama and became national co-chair of his LGBT leadership council.
Among Stern’s accomplishments were redirecting 70 percent of Edwards’ LGBT supporters to back Obama, managing LGBT voter contact efforts in Ohio and Texas and serving as a media surrogate for the Obama campaign.
“Both the message of the platforms of John Edwards and Barack Obama to me were more in line with my values, so I want to take a wait-and-see approach to what Secretary Clinton has to say about herself, about the kind of president she’d be, the kind of White House she would have and what her priorities would be and how she would address the grave economic inequality in our country right now,” Stern said. “That’s my No. 1 issue.”
Although a “Draft Elizabeth Warren” campaign to urge the Massachusetts senator to enter the race is underway, Stern said he hasn’t formally taken part in those efforts, but may have signed a petition for Warren. At this point, Stern said if he had to vote in the primary, he would back U.S. Sen. Bernard Sanders in his presidential bid.
“I think he’s really the only one who’s standing up to corporate interests and who’s really speaking honestly about the economic inequality that exists in our country, and the way in which a Democratic president would need to address that in order to help those who are unemployed and underemployed and still struggling from the after effects of the recession, and I don’t hear that from Hillary Clinton in the same way I hear that from Bernie Sanders,” Stern said.
But in the likely event Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, Stern said he’d be “proud to vote for her” on Election Day 2016.
The issue of howĀ Obama’s 2008 LGBT supporters viewĀ Clinton came to prominence this week. On the campaign trail in Iowa, Clinton made a stop at the Mason City home of Dean Genth and Gary Swensen, a politically active same-sex couple that was one of the first to marry in Iowa in 2009 and supported Obama over Clinton in 2008.
During her 30-minute remarks, Clinton addressed topics ranging from preserving Obamacare to mental health advocacy, but concluded with a story that could be seen as a call for unification. ClintonĀ recalled a trip to Indonesia whenĀ she was asked on a morning show about how she could work for Obama after he defeated her in the primary.
“I thought I have to answer this in a very serious way that maybe they can understand that in our democracy, we do try to close the ranks after we have hard elections, at least that’s what we should be doing,” Clinton said. “So I said, ‘Well you’re right. I campaigned hard, he won, I lost, I then campaigned to get him elected. He asked me to be secretary of state and I said ‘yes’ for the same reason: We both love our country. And at the end of the day to me, that’s what elections are supposed to be about.”
After the event, Genth told the Blade as the head of a local Democratic group he’s unable at this time to take an official position on the presidential primary. Nonetheless, he had positive things to say about Clinton,Ā despite having backed Obama in 2008.
“We just felt as a lot of people did that it was his moment and it was his time, but I think we feel equally as strong now that this is Hillary’s moment and this is Hillary’s time,” Genth said. “We think she’s tremendously a more mature and stronger candidate than just eight years ago. You could sense in the house today, her demeanor and her sense of knowing what she knows now that she’s served four years as the most traveled secretary of state in the history of our country. I think she’s more comfortable in her skin.”
But Genth recalled that during the 2008 presidential primary, when he helped set up the first Obama campaign office in Iowa and allowed Obama campaign workers to stay at his home, the split in the LGBT community was palpable.
“A lot of our LGBT folks, especially our lesbian friends, were just adamant for Hillary,” Genth said. “We were back in that mode of saying we got to go for the person that can win in November. Our LGBT issues and progress is going to depend on somebody holding the White House for us.”
This time around, Genth said Clinton’s experience in the Obama administration as secretary of state places her at the top of the list ofĀ candidates seeking the White House.
“There is no human being alive and breathing on this planet Earth that has her resume,” Genth said. “Not Abraham Lincoln, not Thomas Jefferson, not Ronald Reagan, not Bill Clinton, nor Barack Obama. No one has ā male or female, or for that matter worldwide ā that resume of hers now. And so, I think that makes her extremely qualified.”
In the camp of taking a cautious approach to Clinton is John Klenert, a gay D.C. Democratic activist who was a member of the national LGBT committee for Obama in 2008.
Klenert said Clinton is the only Democrat at this point who could win the White House, but added he’s “not particularly thrilled with the way things are happening now with the campaign,” taking note of recent criticism that ClintonĀ avoids media questions.
“She’s not the best speech person, but that said, she has seemed to improve her communications skills at least one-on-one with people and doesn’t come across as what seemed to be plastic,” Klenert said. “I look at it this way, the nomination is hers to lose at this point. Will she win in November? God, I hope so, but that’s a lifetime in politics.”
Among the things that Klenert said he would like Clinton to address is voting rights for D.C. in Congress as well as whether she’ll break another glass ceiling by appointing for the first time an openly LGBT person as a Cabinet member and an out lesbian as a U.S. ambassador.
But a significant portion of Obama’s 2008 gay supporters say they’re fully behind efforts to elect Clinton to the White House.
California Assembly member Evan Low, who was also a member of the national LGBT committee during the 2008 primary, said Clinton is his “candidate of choice” for this snapshot in time.
“She’s had a record of leadership not only in the Senate, but also as secretary of state to really promote a lot of issues that we care about in the LGBT community,” Low said. “I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for individuals, such as myself and others, to rally behind her candidacy.”
Low, who in his previous capacity as mayor of Campbell, Calif., was the youngest openly gay, Asian-American mayor in the country, pointed to her leadership on LGBT issues at the State Department, which he said “bodes well.”
Stampp Corbin, a San Diego-based Democratic activist and publisher of San Diego LGBT Weekly, was a stalwart supporter of Obama, but said he’s now “100 percent” behind Clinton.
“To be honest, I think that she’s moved significantly,” Corbin said. “She’s in the right place with respect to LGBT issues, and that is of major importance to me. I’m not a one-issue voter, but that is the issue that is at the top of my list. I don’t understand people if they’re gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender, I really don’t understand how your equality is not the most important thing to you.”
Corbin said he picked Obama over Clinton and became co-chair of the 2008 Obama National LGBT Leadership Council because of “personal connections” to the Obamas, noting he and Michelle Obama attended the same high school in Illinois.
Among his duties for the campaign were drafting policy papers for the campaign on LGBT issues and he helped guide the campaign through the controversy afterĀ it hired pastor Donnie McClurkin, an advocate of “ex-gay” therapy, to help rally evangelicals in South Carolina.
“He has been very deliberate about what he’s gotten done, and he’s gotten it done without a lot of fanfare and all of that, where people were complaining 100 days in,” Corbin said. “And of course, they’re going to now all take credit for putting pressure on the president as he asked, but it was just a bunch of people flapping their gums and not giving the president his due in time to get to the issues that he felt were important.”
AnotherĀ LGBT advocate who backed Obama over Clinton in 2008 was Tobias Barrington Wolff, a gay University of Philadelphia law professor and civil rights lawyer who served as chair of the national LGBT policy committee. Although he had no formal role in the administration, Obama himself said during a Pride event at at the White House last year Wolff has “been advising me since my first presidential campaign and has had a great impact on my administration and how weāve thought about a bunch of issues.”
Wolff declined to comment for this article, but gave an interview in 2008 toĀ the gay blog QueertyĀ in which heĀ discussed the distinction between Obama and Clinton. Although he called Clinton a good candidate and gave “the Clintons” credit for granting access to the White House during the 1990s to gay people, Wolff reportedly said that was onlyĀ half of the story.
“The bad story, of course, is the actual result that the presidency produced: the only two occasions in American history when anti-gay policies were written into the statutes of the United States,” Wolff said. “I think the story of the gay vote in this election, once again, has been the story of a familiar name, a familiar brand and then gay and lesbian voters having to learn about somebody new. I think the more LGBT people learn about Barack’s record on LGBT equality and HIV/AIDS and the way that he talks about LGBT equality to general audiences, the more excited they become and the more they switch over to his side.”
Wolff was reportedly also critical of Clinton’s position that she would seek to repeal only Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act as opposed to the entire law. He was quoted as saying, “It is incomprehensible to me that she continues to support vicious anti-gay legislation.”
Another prominent gay Obama supporter in 2008 was David Mixner, who supported Bill Clinton during the 1990s, but had a falling out with him after he signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law.
Mixner said he couldn’t comment for this article because he’s on vacation in Italy, but in 2008, he weighed in on the raceĀ to The Advocate.
āMoving from one candidate to another is never an easy process, but the times demand that we all participate fully and completely to bring about change,” Mixner said. “Originally, my support went to Sen. Edwards because of the war in Iraq. For the very same reason, I am supporting Senator Obama. This is not even a close call for me.ā
Two major Obama backers in 2008 in California were Rufus Gifford and Jeremy Bernard, who were then a couple and raised millions for the campaign. Once the administration was underway, Gifford became U.S. ambassador to Denmark and Bernard became the first-ever male White House social secretary.
Bernard didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article, but Gifford said via email he thinks favorably of Clinton, although he could provide no official comment.
“All I will say is that I have always liked and respected Secretary Clinton very much,” Gifford said. “I think she is a remarkable public servant.”
Concluding her speech in Mason City, Iowa on Monday, Clinton acknowledged disagreements on the way individuals seek to move the country forward, but said she wants to be the candidate leading the way.
“We can disagree, and we will,” Clinton said. “We’ll have all kinds of arguments even about the best things to do, but we should be coming from a place of love, of loving our country and respecting one another. And we have to rebuild this feeling in our country. We have too much work to be done. We have too many people who deserve a better shot at a future for themselves and their families. I want to be their champion, and with your help, I will get up every single day to make sure the country we love is the country we deserve to have.”
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Honoring the legacy of New Orleansā 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire
Why the arson attack that killed 32 gay men still resonates 50 years later
On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and accommodation, in the face of institutional and official failures, are a path to healing.
The story I related to them began on a typical Sunday night at a second-story bar on the fringe of New Orleansā French Quarter in 1973, where working-class men would gather around a white baby grand piano and belt out the lyrics to a song that was the anthem of their hidden community, āUnited We Standā by the Brotherhood of Man.
āUnited we stand,ā the men would sing together, ādivided we fallā ā the words epitomizing the ethos of their beloved UpStairs Lounge bar, an egalitarian free space that served as a forerunner to todayās queer safe havens.
Around that piano in the 1970s Deep South, gays and lesbians, white and Black queens, Christians and non-Christians, and even early gender minorities could cast aside the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the times to find acceptance and companionship for a moment.
For regulars, the UpStairs Lounge was a miracle, a small pocket of acceptance in a broader world where their very identities were illegal.
On the Sunday night of June 24, 1973, their voices were silenced in a murderous act of arson that claimed 32 lives and still stands as the deadliest fire in New Orleans history ā and the worst mass killing of gays in 20th century America.
As 13 fire companies struggled to douse the inferno, police refused to question the chief suspect, even though gay witnesses identified and brought the soot-covered man to officers idly standing by. This suspect, an internally conflicted gay-for-pay sex worker named Rodger Dale Nunez, had been ejected from the UpStairs Lounge screaming the word “burn” minutes before, but New Orleans police rebuffed the testimony of fire survivors on the street and allowed Nunez to disappear.
As the fire raged, police denigrated the deceased to reporters on the street: āSome thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.ā
For days afterward, the carnage met with official silence. With no local gay political leaders willing to step forward, national Gay Liberation-era figures like Rev. Troy Perry of the Metropolitan Community Church flew in to āhelp our bereaved brothers and sistersā ā and shatter officialdomās code of silence.
Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. āItās high time that you people, in New Orleans, Louisiana, got the message and joined the rest of the Union,ā Perry said.
Two days later, on June 26, 1973, as families hesitated to step forward to identify their kin in the morgue, UpStairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve stood in his badly charred bar, the air still foul with death. He rebuffed attempts by Perry to turn the fire into a call for visibility and progress for homosexuals.
āThis fire had very little to do with the gay movement or with anything gay,ā Esteve told a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer. āI do not want my bar or this tragedy to be used to further any of their causes.ā
Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath ā and the bar owner also remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business.
āPhil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,ā recounted Esteveās friend Bob McAnear, a former U.S. Customs officer. āPhil wouldnāt report it because, if he did, police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.ā
The next day, gay bar owners, incensed at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting. āHow dare you hold your damn news conferences!ā one business owner shouted.
Ignoring calls for gay self-censorship, Perry held a 250-person memorial for the fire victims the following Sunday, July 1, culminating in mourners defiantly marching out the front door of a French Quarter church into waiting news cameras. āReverend Troy Perry awoke several sleeping giants, me being one of them,ā recalled Charlene Schneider, a lesbian activist who walked out of that front door with Perry.
Esteve doubted the UpStairs Lounge storyās capacity to rouse gay political fervor. As the coroner buried four of his former patrons anonymously on the edge of town, Esteve quietly collected at least $25,000 in fire insurance proceeds. Less than a year later, he used the money to open another gay bar called the Post Office, where patrons of the UpStairs Lounge ā some with visible burn scars ā gathered but were discouraged from singing āUnited We Stand.ā
New Orleans cops neglected to question the chief arson suspect and closed the investigation without answers in late August 1973. Gay elites in the cityās power structure began gaslighting the mourners who marched with Perry into the news cameras, casting suspicion on their memories and re-characterizing their moment of liberation as a stunt.
When a local gay journalist asked in April 1977, āWhere are the gay activists in New Orleans?,ā Esteve responded that there were none, because none were needed. āWe donāt feel weāre discriminated against,ā Esteve said. āNew Orleans gays are different from gays anywhere elseā¦ Perhaps there is some correlation between the amount of gay activism in other cities and the degree of police harassment.ā
An attitude of nihilism and disavowal descended upon the memory of the UpStairs Lounge victims, goaded by Esteve and fellow gay entrepreneurs who earned their keep via gay patrons drowning their sorrows each night instead of protesting the injustices that kept them drinking.
Into the 1980s, the story of the UpStairs Lounge all but vanished from conversation ā with the exception of a few sanctuaries for gay political debate such as the local lesbian bar Charleneās, run by the activist Charlene Schneider.
By 1988, the 15th anniversary of the fire, the UpStairs Lounge narrative comprised little more than a call for better fire codes and indoor sprinklers. UpStairs Lounge survivor Stewart Butler summed it up: āA tragedy that, as far as I know, no good came of.ā
Finally, in 1991, at Stewart Butler and Charlene Schneiderās nudging, the UpStairs Lounge story became aligned with the crusade of liberated gays and lesbians seeking equal rights in Louisiana. The halls of power responded with intermittent progress. The New Orleans City Council, horrified by the story but not yet ready to take its look in the mirror, enacted an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and public accommodations that Dec. 12 ā more than 18 years after the fire.
āI believe the fire was the catalyst for the anger to bring us all to the table,ā Schneider told The Times-Picayune, a tacit rebuke to Esteveās strategy of silent accommodation. Even Esteve seemed to change his stance with time, granting a full interview with the first UpStairs Lounge scholar Johnny Townsend sometime around 1989.
Most of the figures in this historic tale are now deceased. Whatās left is an enduring story that refused to go gently. The story now echoes around the world ā a musical about the UpStairs Lounge fire recently played in Tokyo, translating the gay underworld of the 1973 French Quarter for Japanese audiences.
When I finished my presentation to the City Council last June, I looked up to see the seven council members in tears. Unanimously, they approved a resolution acknowledging the historic failures of city leaders in the wake of the UpStairs Lounge fire.
Council members personally apologized to UpStairs Lounge families and survivors seated in the chamber in a symbolic act that, though it could not bring back those who died, still mattered greatly to those whose pain had been denied, leaving them to grieve alone. At long last, official silence and indifference gave way to heartfelt words of healing.
The way Americans remember the past is an active, ongoing process. Our collective memory is malleable, but it matters because it speaks volumes about our maturity as a people, how we acknowledge the pastās influence in our lives, and how it shapes the examples we set for our youth. Do we grapple with difficult truths, or do we duck accountability by defaulting to nostalgia and bluster? Or worse, do we simply ignore the past until it fades into a black hole of ignorance and indifference?
I believe that a factual retelling of the UpStairs Lounge tragedy ā and how, 50 years onward, it became known internationally ā resonates beyond our current divides. It reminds queer and non-queer Americans that ignoring the past holds back the present, and that silence is no cure for what ails a participatory nation.
Silence isolates. Silence gaslights and shrouds. It preserves the power structures that scapegoat the disempowered.
Solidarity, on the other hand, unites. Solidarity illuminates a path forward together. Above all, solidarity transforms the downtrodden into a resounding chorus of citizens ā in the spirit of voices who once gathered āround a white baby grand piano and sang, joyfully and loudly, āUnited We Stand.ā
Robert W. Fieseler is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of āTinderbox: the Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation.ā
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New Supreme Court term includes critical LGBTQ case with ‘terrifying’ consequences
Business owner seeks to decline services for same-sex weddings
The U.S. Supreme Court, after a decision overturning Roe v. Wade that still leaves many reeling, is starting a new term with justices slated to revisit the issue of LGBTQ rights.
In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court will return to the issue of whether or not providers of custom-made goods can refuse service to LGBTQ customers on First Amendment grounds. In this case, the business owner is Lorie Smith, a website designer in Colorado who wants to opt out of providing her graphic design services for same-sex weddings despite the civil rights law in her state.
Jennifer Pizer, acting chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, said in an interview with the Blade, “it’s not too much to say an immeasurably huge amount is at stake” for LGBTQ people depending on the outcome of the case.
“This contrived idea that making custom goods, or offering a custom service, somehow tacitly conveys an endorsement of the person ā if that were to be accepted, that would be a profound change in the law,” Pizer said. “And the stakes are very high because there are no practical, obvious, principled ways to limit that kind of an exception, and if the law isn’t clear in this regard, then the people who are at risk of experiencing discrimination have no security, no effective protection by having a non-discrimination laws, because at any moment, as one makes their way through the commercial marketplace, you don’t know whether a particular business person is going to refuse to serve you.”
The upcoming arguments and decision in the 303 Creative case mark a return to LGBTQ rights for the Supreme Court, which had no lawsuit to directly address the issue in its previous term, although many argued the Dobbs decision put LGBTQ rights in peril and threatened access to abortion for LGBTQ people.
And yet, the 303 Creative case is similar to other cases the Supreme Court has previously heard on the providers of services seeking the right to deny services based on First Amendment grounds, such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. In both of those cases, however, the court issued narrow rulings on the facts of litigation, declining to issue sweeping rulings either upholding non-discrimination principles or First Amendment exemptions.
Pizer, who signed one of the friend-of-the-court briefs in opposition to 303 Creative, said the case is “similar in the goals” of the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation on the basis they both seek exemptions to the same non-discrimination law that governs their business, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, or CADA, and seek “to further the social and political argument that they should be free to refuse same-sex couples or LGBTQ people in particular.”
“So there’s the legal goal, and it connects to the social and political goals and in that sense, it’s the same as Masterpiece,” Pizer said. “And so there are multiple problems with it again, as a legal matter, but also as a social matter, because as with the religion argument, it flows from the idea that having something to do with us is endorsing us.”
One difference: the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation stemmed from an act of refusal of service after owner, Jack Phillips, declined to make a custom-made wedding cake for a same-sex couple for their upcoming wedding. No act of discrimination in the past, however, is present in the 303 Creative case. The owner seeks to put on her website a disclaimer she won’t provide services for same-sex weddings, signaling an intent to discriminate against same-sex couples rather than having done so.
As such, expect issues of standing ā whether or not either party is personally aggrieved and able bring to a lawsuit ā to be hashed out in arguments as well as whether the litigation is ripe for review as justices consider the case. It’s not hard to see U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has sought to lead the court to reach less sweeping decisions (sometimes successfully, and sometimes in the Dobbs case not successfully) to push for a decision along these lines.
Another key difference: The 303 Creative case hinges on the argument of freedom of speech as opposed to the two-fold argument of freedom of speech and freedom of religious exercise in the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation. Although 303 Creative requested in its petition to the Supreme Court review of both issues of speech and religion, justices elected only to take up the issue of free speech in granting a writ of certiorari (or agreement to take up a case). Justices also declined to accept another question in the petition request of review of the 1990 precedent in Smith v. Employment Division, which concluded states can enforce neutral generally applicable laws on citizens with religious objections without violating the First Amendment.
Representing 303 Creative in the lawsuit is Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that has sought to undermine civil rights laws for LGBTQ people with litigation seeking exemptions based on the First Amendment, such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
Kristen Waggoner, president of Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote in a Sept. 12 legal brief signed by her and other attorneys that a decision in favor of 303 Creative boils down to a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment.
“Colorado and the United States still contend that CADA only regulates sales transactions,” the brief says. “But their cases do not apply because they involve non-expressive activities: selling BBQ, firing employees, restricting school attendance, limiting club memberships, and providing room access. Coloradoās own cases agree that the government may not use public-accommodation laws to affect a commercial actorās speech.”
Pizer, however, pushed back strongly on the idea a decision in favor of 303 Creative would be as focused as Alliance Defending Freedom purports it would be, arguing it could open the door to widespread discrimination against LGBTQ people.
“One way to put it is art tends to be in the eye of the beholder,” Pizer said. “Is something of a craft, or is it art? I feel like I’m channeling Lily Tomlin. Remember ‘soup and art’? We have had an understanding that whether something is beautiful or not is not the determining factor about whether something is protected as artistic expression. There’s a legal test that recognizes if this is speech, whose speech is it, whose message is it? Would anyone who was hearing the speech or seeing the message understand it to be the message of the customer or of the merchants or craftsmen or business person?”
Despite the implications in the case for LGBTQ rights, 303 Creative may have supporters among LGBTQ people who consider themselves proponents of free speech.
One joint friend-of-the-court brief before the Supreme Court, written by Dale Carpenter, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who’s written in favor of LGBTQ rights, and Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues the case is an opportunity to affirm the First Amendment applies to goods and services that are uniquely expressive.
“Distinguishing expressive from non-expressive products in some contexts might be hard, but the Tenth Circuit agreed that Smithās product does not present a hard case,” the brief says. “Yet that court (and Colorado) declined to recognize any exemption for products constituting speech. The Tenth Circuit has effectively recognized a state interest in subjecting the creation of speech itself to antidiscrimination laws.”
Oral arguments in the case aren’t yet set, but may be announced soon. Set to defend the state of Colorado and enforcement of its non-discrimination law in the case is Colorado Solicitor General Eric Reuel Olson. Just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would grant the request to the U.S. solicitor general to present arguments before the justices on behalf of the Biden administration.
With a 6-3 conservative majority on the court that has recently scrapped the super-precedent guaranteeing the right to abortion, supporters of LGBTQ rights may think the outcome of the case is all but lost, especially amid widespread fears same-sex marriage would be next on the chopping block. After the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against 303 Creative in the lawsuit, the simple action by the Supreme Court to grant review in the lawsuit suggests they are primed to issue a reversal and rule in favor of the company.
Pizer, acknowledging the call to action issued by LGBTQ groups in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, conceded the current Supreme Court issuing the ruling in this case is “a terrifying prospect,” but cautioned the issue isn’t so much the makeup of the court but whether or not justices will continue down the path of abolishing case law.
“I think the question that we’re facing with respect to all of the cases or at least many of the cases that are in front of the court right now, is whether this court is going to continue on this radical sort of wrecking ball to the edifice of settled law and seemingly a goal of setting up whole new structures of what our basic legal principles are going to be. Are we going to have another term of that?” Pizer said. “And if so, that’s terrifying.”
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Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman, named president of Human Rights Campaign
Progressive activist a veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund
Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman and veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, is to become the next president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ group announced on Tuesday.
Robinson is set to become the ninth president of the Human Rights Campaign after having served as executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and more than 12 years of experience as a leader in the progressive movement. She’ll be the first Black, queer woman to serve in that role.
āIām honored and ready to lead HRC ā and our more than three million member-advocates ā as we continue working to achieve equality and liberation for all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people,ā Robinson said. āThis is a pivotal moment in our movement for equality for LGBTQ+ people. We, particularly our trans and BIPOC communities, are quite literally in the fight for our lives and facing unprecedented threats that seek to destroy us.”
The next Human Rights Campaign president is named as Democrats are performing well in polls in the mid-term elections after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving an opening for the LGBTQ group to play a key role amid fears LGBTQ rights are next on the chopping block.
“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reminds us we are just one Supreme Court decision away from losing fundamental freedoms including the freedom to marry, voting rights, and privacy,” Robinson said. “We are facing a generational opportunity to rise to these challenges and create real, sustainable change. I believe that working together this change is possible right now. This next chapter of the Human Rights Campaign is about getting to freedom and liberation without any exceptions ā and today I am making a promise and commitment to carry this work forward.ā
The Human Rights Campaign announces its next president after a nearly year-long search process after the board of directors terminated its former president Alphonso David when he was ensnared in the sexual misconduct scandal that led former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign. David has denied wrongdoing and filed a lawsuit against the LGBTQ group alleging racial discrimination.
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