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Most religious freedom bills defeated in legislatures
Of 78 such measures introduced, five made it into law
From left, Gov. Rick Snyder (R-Mich.), Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Gov. Gary Herbert (R-Utah) allowed religious freedom bills to become law. (Photo of Snyder by Major.guy2012 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; photo of Pence public domain; photo of Herbert by 32ATPs courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Now that most state legislative sessions have come to a close for this year, observers have differing assessments on the efforts aimed at stopping a series of religious freedom bills seen to enable anti-LGBT discrimination, although the vast majority were defeated.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, of the 78 religious freedom bills introduced this year, six became law and two of those measures were scaled back.
Rose Saxe, a staff attorney with the ACLU LGBT Project, characterized efforts to defeat the bills as successful and attributed the defeat of most of the bills to the case made by the LGBT community against them.
“There was an incredible onslaught of bills in the past year…in a tremendous number of states, and I think we made a very good case — the LGBT community and the broader community — for the harms that these measures would cause, and managed to stop almost all of them,” Saxe said.
Yet ahead of an expected decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry across the country, measures in Arkansas, Utah, Indiana, Michigan and North Carolina seeking religious accommodations for LGBT discrimination became law.
The first of these bills to become law this year was SB 202 in Arkansas, which prohibits municipalities from enacting non-discrimination ordinances for classes of individuals outside the scope of state law, including on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. After new Republican majorities in the Arkansas Legislature passed the bill, Gov. Asa Hutchinson allowed it to become law by taking no action when the measure reached his desk.
One bill that became law in Utah, SB 297, allows employees in clerk’s offices to refuse to perform same-sex marriages. But the legislation was actually endorsed by state LGBT advocates before it was signed by Gov. Gary Herbert. The measure passed as part of an agreement to enact LGBT non-discrimination protections in the state for employment and housing (although that bill had a broad religious exemption similar to other civil rights laws in the state). Moreover, if an official doesn’t wish to perform a same-sex marriage, that person isn’t allowed to facilitate any marriages and someone else must be present in their office who can perform the service.
The biggest blowback for one of these measures came after Gov. Mike Pence signed into law a sweeping religious freedom bill, SB 101, which prohibited government action against individuals for acting on a religious belief, including the purposes of discrimination against LGBT people. After a media firestorm and condemnation from the business community, Pence signed into law a “fix” that clarifies the law doesn’t allow discrimination against LGBT people (although churches, ministers and non-profit religious organizations were exempt from the change).
At the same time in Arkansas, Hutchinson asked the state legislature to redraft a similar religious freedom bill, SB 975, so it would mirror the existing accommodations under federal law. The bill Hutchinson would sign had a more limited accommodation for religious objections.
For a time, no other states enacted similar religious freedom laws. But last week, the North Carolina Legislature overrode the veto of Gov. Pat McCrory on SB 2, which enables magistrates and registers of deeds to opt out of issuing marriage licenses based on a religious objection, although invoking the exemption requires them not to issue any marriage licenses for at least six months.
Also last week, Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law a series of religious freedom bills, HB 4188, HB 4189, HB 4190, which allow child placement agencies to refuse a state referral for the placement of a child if that service would conflict with the agency’s sincerely held religious beliefs as stated in written policy.
Michaelangelo Signorile, a gay New York activist and author of “It’s Not Over,” wrote in an op-ed for the Huffington Post the enactment of religious freedom bills in North Carolina and Michigan demonstrates Indiana wasn’t the turning point many observers thought. Further, Signorile criticized national LGBT advocates, including the Human Rights Campaign, for not doing enough to stop them.
“And why you should be fighting mad is simply that the enemies of equality made their strategy very clear and very public back then, yet some of our major LGBT groups haven’t been paying attention,” Signorile said. “They’ve been heralding the wins against bigotry, such as those in Indiana and others, as major turning points — not to mention the fact that these wins are good opportunities for the groups to fundraise around — and they have run away from the battles in the states where losses are a real possibility or probability.”
The Human Rights Campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment on Signorile’s criticism. The organization issued news statements against the measures and launched a campaign against religious freedom bills called “Don’t Repeat the Mistakes of Indiana” in 12 states, including North Carolina and Michigan. HRC President Chad Griffin also expressed opposition to the measures in a series of messages on Twitter.
Dan Pinello, a political scientist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said “there’s a distinct limit” to the power to stop anti-LGBT laws in state legislatures that are overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans, such as those in Michigan and North Carolina.
“With such overwhelming single-party control of state legislatures, there’s little LGBT advocates can do to quell conservative legislators’ fears of political backlash from constituents who are outraged by the probability the Supreme Court will soon authorize marriage equality nationwide,” Pinello said. “Instead, Republican state lawmakers have been doing whatever they can to signify solidarity with their own activist base.”
Notably, while religious freedom measures became law in some states where conservatives control legislatures, similar measures didn’t advance to the same extent in other states with even greater conservative control. In Oklahoma, 15 anti-LGBT bills were pending before the state legislature, but none became law, nor did any of the 23 anti-LGBT bills in Texas, including HB 4105, which sought to prohibit the use of state funds for issuing a marriage license to same-sex couples or recognizing a same-sex marriage.
Saxe attributed the difference among the state legislatures to the “particular vagaries” of each legislative session, adding the media firestorm that emerged in Indiana “raised the profile” and made it harder to pass anti-LGBT bills in other states.
“Both Texas and Oklahoma had a ton of bills that were introduced,” Saxe said. “They were both conservative states and, I think in some ways, there just really wasn’t the appetite to move that.”
Pinello said some states benefited from effective opposition often from sources that aren’t affiliated with one side or the other of our polarized politics, such as the business community. Several years ago, he recalled, Texas lawmakers considered a bill banning gay people from adopting children, representatives from the Texas child-welfare agency testified against it. Consequently, the bill died in committee.
“Sometimes activists can help facilitate such politically neutral sources to act on the behalf of LGBT Americans, but it’s a delicate and time-consuming process that often is impossible in the closing heats of legislative sessions, when so many bills come up for consideration without any consequential public deliberation,” Pinello said.
It should be noted that after a religious freedom bill failed in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, who’s considered a likely Republican presidential candidate, signed an executive order that prohibits state government retaliation against a person for acting on the basis of a religious belief in opposition to same-sex marriage.
Among the bills against the LGBT community pending in state legislatures were a rash of measures in Florida, Kentucky, Texas, Nevada, Minnesota, Missouri and Massachusetts specifically targeting transgender people. None of these “ID to pee” bills became law.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said the rash of “these bathroom bounty bills” because right-wing think tanks typically develop an idea for bills and find legislators all over the country to try to pass them.
“We were very pleased that none of them has passed,” Keisling said. “I think we owe that primarily two factors. First, state-based LGBT advocates and allies did phenomenal and smart work to kill them. Second, it seems that reasonable people in the Republican leadership in these states realized that they were bad and unnecessary bills and were more likely to start a flood of lawsuits than solve any problem. They are bad policy and bad politics and I think everyone who looks with open mind understands that.”
But some measures advanced by state legislatures this year were beneficial LGBT community. According to San Francisco-based Bay Area Reporter, numerous pro-LGBT bills in California advanced ahead of the June 5 deadline to move legislation out of its chamber of origin, including AB 959, which would require state agencies to collect demographic data on gender identity and sexual orientation, and AB 960, which would update California law to protect families using assisted reproduction methods.
Oregon became the latest state to bar widely discredited “ex-gay” therapy after Gov. Kate Brown, who’s bisexual, signed a measure against the practice into law. The Illinois Legislature sent a similar measure to the desk of desk of Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose signature remains in question.
It remains to be seen whether a ruling from the Supreme Court in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide will generate enough impact to inspire state legislatures to move forward with religious freedom bills at a later time.
An Indiana-style bill is pending in Michigan, which technically could be taken up at any time because the state has a year-round session, but Snyder said he would veto the bill as a standalone measure. In North Carolina, time has run out to pass an Indiana-style bill this session, but lawmakers have vowed to act at a later time.
Saxe said in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling, there may be “a greater demand for these laws,” but advised state legislatures to look to the example of Indiana as a reason not to move forward.
“There was an overwhelming rejection of that at so many levels that I’m hoping that the state legislatures will realize this is not really the way to move forward, but I think for the foreseeable future this will be something we will have to fight really hard against,” Saxe said.
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Honoring the legacy of New Orleans’ 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 Orleans’ 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, “United We Stand” by the Brotherhood of Man.
“United we stand,” the men would sing together, “divided we fall” — the words epitomizing the ethos of their beloved UpStairs Lounge bar, an egalitarian free space that served as a forerunner to today’s 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 — 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: “Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.”
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 “help our bereaved brothers and sisters” — and shatter officialdom’s code of silence.
Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. “It’s high time that you people, in New Orleans, Louisiana, got the message and joined the rest of the Union,” 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.
“This fire had very little to do with the gay movement or with anything gay,” Esteve told a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I do not want my bar or this tragedy to be used to further any of their causes.”
Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath — and the bar owner also remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business.
“Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recounted Esteve’s friend Bob McAnear, a former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.”
The next day, gay bar owners, incensed at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting. “How dare you hold your damn news conferences!” 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. “Reverend Troy Perry awoke several sleeping giants, me being one of them,” recalled Charlene Schneider, a lesbian activist who walked out of that front door with Perry.
Esteve doubted the UpStairs Lounge story’s 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 — some with visible burn scars — gathered but were discouraged from singing “United We Stand.”
New Orleans cops neglected to question the chief arson suspect and closed the investigation without answers in late August 1973. Gay elites in the city’s 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, “Where are the gay activists in New Orleans?,” Esteve responded that there were none, because none were needed. “We don’t feel we’re discriminated against,” Esteve said. “New Orleans gays are different from gays anywhere else… Perhaps there is some correlation between the amount of gay activism in other cities and the degree of police harassment.”
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 — with the exception of a few sanctuaries for gay political debate such as the local lesbian bar Charlene’s, 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: “A tragedy that, as far as I know, no good came of.”
Finally, in 1991, at Stewart Butler and Charlene Schneider’s 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 — more than 18 years after the fire.
“I believe the fire was the catalyst for the anger to bring us all to the table,” Schneider told The Times-Picayune, a tacit rebuke to Esteve’s 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. What’s left is an enduring story that refused to go gently. The story now echoes around the world — 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 past’s 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 — and how, 50 years onward, it became known internationally — 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 — in the spirit of voices who once gathered ‘round a white baby grand piano and sang, joyfully and loudly, “United We Stand.”
Robert W. Fieseler is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of “Tinderbox: the Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation.”
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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 — 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 — whether or not either party is personally aggrieved and able bring to a lawsuit — 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. Colorado’s own cases agree that the government may not use public-accommodation laws to affect a commercial actor’s 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 Smith’s 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.
“I’m honored and ready to lead HRC — and our more than three million member-advocates — as we continue working to achieve equality and liberation for all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people,” Robinson said. “This 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 — and today I am making a promise and commitment to carry this work forward.”
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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