Local
Gay incumbent beats gay challenger in Rehoboth race
Gossett retains seat amid ordinance controversies
Rehoboth Beach City Commissioner Patrick Gossett defeated challenger Richard Perry. (Photo public domain)
A heated dispute over proposed ordinances to regulate rental housing in the LGBT-friendly resort city of Rehoboth Beach, Del., emerged as the lead issue in the city’s Aug. 8 election in which incumbent gay City Commissioner J. Patrick Gossett beat gay challenger Richard Perry.
Gossett, a longtime Rehoboth civic activist and resident, has sided with fellow commissioners and Rehoboth Mayor Sam Cooper who favor more stringent regulations that they say are needed to prevent the city’s quiet residential neighborhoods from being inundated by large, newly built rental houses.
Perry, an attorney and newcomer to Rehoboth politics, was backed by a coalition of business owners and renters, including many gay residents and vacationers, who believe the Board of Commissioners crossed the line in proposing — and in some cases passing — ill-conceived regulatory measures that critics say will hurt the city in the long run.
While Perry lost his bid for one of two seats on the Commission that were up for election on Aug. 8, challenger Paul Kuhns, a former commissioner who expressed mostly the same positions as Perry on the regulatory issues, defeated incumbent Commissioner Willis Sargent, who largely held the same views as Gossett on those issues.
Sources familiar with Rehoboth politics, including Perry himself, said more voters chose Gossett mostly likely because he had greater name recognition and was viewed as more experienced and involved in local civic affairs for a longer period of time than Perry.
Perry said he believes he also lost support by what he called an unfair effort by his opponents to “mischaracterize” him as a real estate developer seeking to profit from Rehoboth’s booming rental housing market. Although he’s in the process of building a second home in Rehoboth, Perry said he is not a developer. He said his motive for opposing many of the proposed regulatory measures is to ensure that the city continues to benefit from a strong economy based on vacationers and renters.
Under the Rehoboth electoral system for the Board of Commissioners, which serves as the city’s legislative body, all seats are at-large seats. In the case of the Aug. 8 election, the highest two vote getters were declared the winners.
The final vote count released by the city’s Board of Elections showed that Kuhns came in first place with 545 votes followed by Gossett, who came in second with 521 votes. Sargent finished third with 464 votes. Perry came in fourth place with 407 votes.
“Although I lost and came in last, no one who has run for the first time has ever got as many votes as I got,” Perry told the Washington Blade on Monday. “So I think they got the message very strong on Saturday,” he said, referring to what he said was his and Kuhns’ message of opposition to over regulation.
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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