Local
Ruth Spiegel dies at 88
PFLAG activist had two gay sons
Ruth Helen Weinstein Spiegel
Ruth Helen Weinstein Spiegel died Oct. 22 at the Cohen-Rosen Residence at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville, Md., according to her family. She was 88 and died of “old age” her family said.
Two of Spiegel’s three sons were gay and she had “multiple LGBT descendants” according to her son, Charles Spiegel of San Francisco. She marched in Capital Pride parades with PFLAG and had a pink granite triangle installed at the family plot at Congressional Cemetery.
Spiegel was born in 1927 to Isidor and Frances Weinstein, grew up in Brooklyn and Great Neck, N.Y. Services were held Oct. 25 at the Congressional Cemetery Chapel. She was predeceased on Oct. 23, 1997 by her husband, George Spiegel, a Washington attorney.
Spiegel valued education, her family said. She was a graduate of Great Neck High School and Wellesley College (1948) where she was followed by her sister and niece. She was active in her children’s preschool and as a PTA leader at Pinecrest Elementary School, both in Woodmore, Silver Spring, Md. She worked first at Little Brown & Co. in Boston.
While raising a family, among the other publishers she worked for as an editor was the Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series. Simultaneously Spiegel earned a master’s degree in classics at the Catholic University of America. She re-entered full-time work at the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1974 for the next 27 years, retiring as managing editor.
Spiegel lived for a decade in San Francisco largely to be near her youngest granddaughter. She was a member of PFLAG of Washington, and the American Association of University Women.
She is survived by sons John (Silver Spring, Md.), Ladd (New York City) and Charles (San Francisco); her sister Anne Miller (White Plains, N.Y.); five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Donations may be made in honor of Ruth’s life to a charity of your choice or to the Anacostia Community Museum Smithsonian Institution.
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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