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Orlando still recovering from Pulse nightclub massacre

Victims’ families, friends struggle to cope with tragedy

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The Pulse nightclub, gay news, Washington Blade

The Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 5. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

ORLANDO, Fla. — Axel Rodríguez was drinking a cocktail on the terrace of Stonewall Bar, which overlooks the partially built Orlando City Stadium in the city’s Parramore neighborhood on Sunday afternoon.

Rodríguez, who was born in Puerto Rico, was speaking with a group of friends who had arrived shortly after 3 p.m. The men quickly began to talk about the massacre at the Pulse nightclub that took place less than three miles away from the gay bar on June 12.

“We have it on our minds,” Rodríguez told the Washington Blade. “But like everything you have to move forward.”

Wednesday marks four months since a gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 others inside the Pulse nightclub.

Rodríguez’s friend, Xavier Serrano Rosado, a 35-year-old gay man with a young child, was among the victims of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Rodríguez also knew Frankie “Jimmy” de Jesús, a native of the Puerto Rican city of Caguas who also died inside the nightclub.

“[Jimmy] was a very nice guy,” said Rodríguez.

Victims were ‘so young,’ ‘lively’

The Pulse nightclub is located near the intersection of South Orange and Kaley Avenues in Orlando’s Downtown South neighborhood.

A fence that now surrounds the building contains a large makeshift memorial to the victims. Other reminders of the massacre remain visible throughout Orlando.

Axel Rodríguez of Orlando, Fla., holds a Puerto Rican flag with rainbow colors on it during a memorial service on June 13, 2016, that paid tribute to the victims of the Pulse Nightclub massacre. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

Axel Rodríguez of Orlando, Fla., holds a Puerto Rican flag with rainbow colors on it during a memorial service on June 13, 2016, that paid tribute to the victims of the Pulse Nightclub massacre. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

Banners along South Orange Avenue on which the nightclub is located and signs on Interstate 4 read, “Orlando Strong” and “Orlando United.”

A large mural that pays tribute to the victims has been painted on the North Mills Avenue building in which the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida is located. An exhibit at the Orange County Regional History Center near Lake Eola Park in downtown Orlando that contains pictures, stuffed animals, handwritten messages and other items from makeshift memorials to the victims opened last week.

“As soon as you think you’re OK, something else will spark it,” said Joseph Greene of Orlando on Sunday afternoon while he was sitting outside the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida and encouraging passersby to register to vote.

Greene said he knew Serrano and two other people who died inside the Pulse nightclub.

He showed the Blade pictures of him that he has kept on his phone. Greene said that he knows people who attended 15 funerals in the days after the massacre.

“They were so young and they were so lively,” he said.

Rodríguez told the Blade he is still unable to drive past the nightclub, even though it is a couple of blocks away from his home.

“I can’t,” he said.

Equality Florida CEO Nadine Smith said during a panel at the 2016 Out & Equal Workplace Summit that took place last week at Walt Disney World that she too continues to struggle with the massacre’s aftermath.

“In some ways the further away from the 12th I get, the harder it is for me to keep it together when we have these conversations,” she said.

Smith became emotional at times during the panel that included Orlando City Commissioner Patty Sheehan and Joel Morales, who was an HIV counselor at the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida on June 12. A number of people who were in the audience were also crying.

‘We still haven’t recovered’

Nearly half of the massacre’s victims were LGBT Puerto Ricans.

A plaque with the names of those who were killed at the Pulse nightclub is adjacent to the island’s first LGBT-specific monument that San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz officially dedicated on June 26.

A number of gay bars and clubs in the Puerto Rican capital also honored the victims. A makeshift memorial that contained their pictures and candles was outside the LGBT Community Center of Puerto Rico in San Juan’s Hato Rey neighborhood in July when the Blade traveled to the island.

“The Puerto Rican LGBT community in the diaspora and in Puerto Rico was the hardest hit by the Pulse tragedy,” Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of Puerto Rico Para Tod@s, a Puerto Rican LGBT advocacy group, told the Blade on Tuesday. “We are still mourning, we are still recovering, we are still remembering.”

The family of Gilberto Silva Menéndez, who died at the Pulse nightclub, planted a tree in his honor in his hometown of Manatí, Puerto Rico, in August. His sister, Marynell Valentín, told the Blade on Tuesday that her family is coping as best they can.

“The family is better each day,” she said. “We are trying to rise above this unimaginable pain.”

Ángel Candelario Padró was a member of the Puerto Rican National Guard who moved to Chicago to pursue his nursing career. He was working at an ophthalmologist clinic and as a Zumba instructor when he was killed at the Pulse nightclub.

“We still haven’t recovered,” Candelario’s aunt, Leticia Padró, told the Blade on Tuesday.

City is ‘beacon of hope’ to the world

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer created the OneOrlando Fund in the wake of the massacre.

The fund raised $29.5 million, which includes the more than $9.5 million that Equality Florida raised through a GoFundMe campaign it launched hours after the shooting.

The families of the victims will receive $350,000 from the fund. It has distributed this money, but relatives and loved ones of some of the victims are challenging claims.

“We weren’t defined by that hate-filled act of murder,” said Dyer on Oct. 5 when he spoke at the opening of the 2016 Out & Equal Workplace summit. “We’ve been defined by our combined response that has been with love and compassion and unity.”

Sheehan, who represents the area in which the Pulse nightclub is located, echoed Dyer.

She noted during the Out & Equal conference panel that a group of Black Lives Matters protesters who marched past the makeshift memorial at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center in downtown Orlando after the massacre stopped to hug people who were there to pay their respects to the victims.

Orlando Health and Florida Hospital in August announced they will pay the medical bills of those who were injured at the nightclub. The Orlando Magic will dedicate its Oct. 26 home opener against the Miami Heat to the victims of the massacre.

“Our city is a beacon of hope to the world,” said Sheehan.

Advocates, officials remain critical of Rubio

The gunman, who was born in New York City to Afghan parents and lived in Port St. Lucie, Fla., pledged his allegiance to the so-called Islamic State in a 911 call he made from inside the nightclub. There is no evidence to suggest that ISIS prompted him to carry out the massacre.

Muslim groups in central Florida and around the country quickly condemned the massacre. Syed Hussain, an Orlando resident who was with a group of Shiite Muslims in Lake Eola Park on Sunday, described the shooting to the Blade as a “terrorist attack.”

“That was a heinous crime committed against innocent people,” he said.

“We stand against any type of terror, whether it’s happening here in Orlando, whether it’s happening in Syria,” added Hussain.

A group of Shiite Muslim women pray in Lake Eola Park in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 9, 2016. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

A group of Shiite Muslim women pray in Lake Eola Park in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 9, 2016. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

Donald Trump in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre reiterated his call to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sparked outrage among LGBT rights advocates when he announced his re-election campaign less than two weeks after the massacre. The Cuban-American Republican and Trump in August both spoke at an anti-LGBT conference that took place at an Orlando hotel.

“You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself and then announce your re-election campaign, Marco Rubio, whatever,” Sheehan said angrily at the Out & Equal panel.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott and state Attorney General Pam Bondi also faced widespread criticism over their failure to specifically acknowledge the massacre’s LGBT victims.

“This was an assault on us,” said Sheehan.

Greene told the Blade he was “especially” furious with Bondi, a thrice-married Republican who opposed efforts to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples in Florida. He praised CNN’s Anderson Cooper for challenging Bondi over her opposition to LGBT rights during an interview with her after the massacre.

“That just made me so happy,” said Greene. “I couldn’t believe it because no one’s been standing up to her.”

LGBT groups push for gun control

The massacre also prompted the Human Rights Campaign and dozens of other LGBT advocacy groups to endorse gun control efforts.

The PRIDE Fund to End Gun Violence, a political action committee that formed less than a month after the shooting, endorsed Hillary Clinton last month. Christine Leinonen, the mother of Christopher “Drew” Leinonen, who died inside the Pulse nightclub with his fiancé, Juan Guerrero, has emerged as a prominent advocate in support of the issue.

“Unfortunately I have a voice,” Christine Leinonen told the Blade in August before she spoke at a gun control rally in D.C.’s West Potomac Park.

Smith reaffirmed her organization’s commitment to the issue when she spoke at the Out & Equal panel.

“We kept our first promise to do everything we could to take care of families and survivors,” she said. “Now we are keeping the second promise, which is to honor them all with action to change the law in the third most populous state in the country and to join our voices with those challenging the easy access to weapons of mass slaughter.”

Sheehan agreed, noting she supports the Second Amendment.

“I believe you have (the right) to be able to have a firearm to protect yourself,” she said. “A firearm that can have a 30 or a hundred round magazine is too much in this country.”

“It took that gunman less than five minutes to kill those kids,” added Sheehan. “It took nine minutes to ring the church bell at the vigil.”

A mural at the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida pays tribute to the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

A mural at the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida pays tribute to the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

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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

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Fifty years ago this week, 32 gay men were killed in an arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. (Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

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.

(Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

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.” 

(Photo by H.J. Patterson/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

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.” 

(Photo by Philip Ames/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

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

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The U.S. Supreme Court is to set consider the case of 303 Creative, which seeks to refuse design services for same-sex weddings. (Blade file photo by Michael Key)

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

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Kelley Robinson (Screen capture via HRC YouTube)

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.”

Kelley Robinson IS NAMED as The next human rights Campaign president

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.

Kelley Robinson, Planned Parenthood, Cathy Chu, SMYAL, Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders, Amy Nelson, Whitman-Walker Health, Sheroes of the Movement, Mayor's office of GLBT Affairs, gay news, Washington Blade
Kelley Robinson, seen here with Cathy Chu of SMYAL and Amy Nelson of Whitman-Walker Health, is the next Human Rights Campaign president. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
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