Local
Former GOP activist says ‘Vice’ omits full story of Mary Cheney
Lesbian daughter joined father’s re-election bid in 2003
The recently released movie about the life and political career of former Vice President Dick Cheney called “Vice” has drawn the attention of LGBT activists for portraying Cheney and his wife Lynne as being accepting and supportive of their lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney.
Film critics have also noted that one of the movie’s most dramatic and emotional scenes captures Mary Cheney’s dismay when she learns that her older sister Liz Cheney came out against same-sex marriage shortly after announcing her candidacy for the U.S. Senate from Wyoming in 2013.
The movie shows Mary Cheney sulking over what she believed was her father and mother’s decision to give Liz Cheney the go-ahead to oppose same-sex marriage to boost her Senate campaign, which Liz later abandoned in 2014.
But Charles Francis, who in 2000 founded the Republican Unity Coalition as a GOP gay-straight alliance to expand the party’s base of support, says “Vice” totally omits the fact that in 2003 Mary Cheney resigned from her position on the group’s board of directors to join her father’s re-election campaign.
Francis notes that her resignation came after President George W. Bush announced his support in 2003 for the Texas sodomy law, which made gay sex illegal a short time before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Texas law and all state sodomy laws in its landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision.
The following year Bush came out in support of a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in every state.
“I would not want to rehash all of this were it not that the film places Mary’s ‘betrayal’ by Liz and her Dad at the center of the emotional conclusion,” Francis said. “Mary Cheney is portrayed, finally, as an innocent victim of political/Republican homophobia when Dick and Lynne Cheney give the OK to Liz Cheney to oppose same-sex marriage in her Senate primary.”
Francis points out that Mary Cheney had left the LGBT Republican cause and the Republican Unity Coalition in 2003, long before the conflict with her sister in 2013.
“She had left the community a long time before that when we needed her most before the all-out push for a constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage in 2003-2004,” said Francis.
Mary Cheney resumed support for LGBT issues, including same-sex marriage, after her father left office in 2009. She married her partner since 1992, Heather Poe, in 2012.
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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