Opinions
Supreme Court poised to roll back LGBTQ rights
Rebalance stolen court via expansion, term limits
LGBTQ advocates were rightly relieved when the Supreme Court handed down Bostock v. Clayton County this past June, a case that extended the prohibition against discrimination in employment to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. And with the most LGBTQ-friendly President-elect in U.S. history poised to take office in a matter of days, our community has even more reason to be hopeful.
Despite these positive developments, however, the Supreme Court poses a grave danger to the LGBTQ community. As the court ushers in a new era of conservative dominance—with anti-LGBTQ justices holding a 6-3 supermajority—the fragile judicial coalition on which the movement for equality has relied is at significant risk of being cast aside.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recent confirmation to the court is deeply concerning. Justice Barrett has defended Justice Roberts’ dissent in Obergefell, indicating that the issue of marriage equality should belong to state legislatures. She has repeatedly used transphobic and homophobic language, and even argued that Title IX does not protect transgender people. Her extremist positions will embolden the anti-LGBTQ conservative justices on the court – Justices Kavanaugh and Alito recently held an inappropriate private meeting with an anti-gay activist who had filed briefs in pending cases — and other Trump-appointed judges, as well as state legislatures to take anti-LGBTQ stances. With equality hanging in the balance, the LGBTQ community cannot afford a Supreme Court that stands to crush any progress made.
Marriage equality: In October, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to a case involving Kentucky woman Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. However, the denial of certiorari came with warning signs: Justices Alito and Thomas wrote a section that cast doubt on the constitutionality of Obergefell, the landmark Supreme Court case in which Justice Kennedy’s opinion that held that marriage is a fundamental right guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Constitution. In the certiorari denial, Justice Thomas wrote: “By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the Court has created a problem that only it can fix. Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ‘ruinous consequences for religious liberty.’” While broad majorities of the American people support marriage equality and opponents of it might not have the votes on the Supreme Court to overturn the precedent, it is nonetheless a troubling sign that two Justices would sign onto discrimination against our fellow citizens.
Discrimination: The currently pending case before the Supreme Court about discrimination is Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. The case emerged from circumstances in 2018: The city of Philadelphia had hired a number of agencies for foster care service. When the city learned that two agencies denied same-sex couples as foster parents, Philadelphia threatened to stop using the agencies unless they agreed to nondiscrimination requirements. While one of the agencies complied, the other, the Catholic Social Services (“CSS”), sued the city in federal district court. The federal district court found in Philadelphia’s favor, which the Third Circuit then unanimously affirmed. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
The CSS claims that because the city looks to several factors, including religious and racial factors, in spite of anti-discrimination law, it cannot at the same time prohibit the agency from considering the sexual orientation of foster parents under the guise of “religious belief.” If Philadelphia makes exceptions to its anti-discrimination laws in foster placement, it must also allow religious agencies an exception as well. If Philadelphia does not do so, it violates the First Amendment. The city claims that it can choose not to provide government contracts to organizations that do not adhere to its nondiscriminatory requirements. For the court to decide otherwise, it would mandate that the city discriminate.
The stakes are high, in part because a ruling against equality in Fulton could provide cover for undermining Bostock, which extended Title VII protections to LGBTQ employees. An expansion of the religious liberty to discriminate could eat away at Bostock. Even a 5-4 court with Justice Kennedy ruled against LGBTQ rights in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Now, with a 6-3 conservative supermajority, Fulton could strike a big blow against equality.
Health care and family: If the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in California v. Texas, health care protections for the LGBTQ community would be eliminated. Section 1557 of the ACA is the law’s non-discrimination provision, which bans discrimination in health care on the basis of sex. The Obama administration’s rule interpreted Section 1557’s ban on sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In addition to Section 1557, the ACA as a whole has been enormously important for the LGBTQ community. The uninsured rate for lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans fell dramatically due to the ACA and LGBTQ adults have become more likely to report having regular access to health care. For transgender Americans, who are more likely to live in poverty or be unemployed and to face enormous challenges and have negative experiences accessing health care, the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and provision of individual health insurance through the marketplaces are critical. The 6-3 conservative supermajority on the court makes the end of the ACA significantly more likely, with disastrous consequences that will disproportionately affect the LGBTQ community.
Lawsuits challenging the Obama administration’s interpretation of Section 1557, particularly in regard to its ban on discrimination on the basis of gender identity, have been percolating in the federal courts for years. The Trump administration has attempted to reverse those protections, but it is widely expected that the Biden administration will revert to the Obama-era rule. Even if the ACA survives, this line of litigation could undermine critical protections for transgender individuals in the health care system. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County last term interpreting similar language in Title VII (discrimination on the basis of sex) to cover gender identity should be definitive, the 6-3 conservative supermajority could decide to distinguish these cases and allow for discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in health care. Since so many of the nation’s hospitals are affiliated with religious organizations such as the Catholic Church, the court could seize on Justice Gorsuch’s language in Bostock suggesting that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) could trump Title VII to require broad religious exemptions from non-discrimination in health care.
Transgender rights: In addition to the massive blow that a gutted ACA could have for transgender rights, other cases about transgender rights percolating in the lower courts may someday make their way to the Supreme Court. In Saba v. Cuomo, for example, a transgender, nonbinary resident sued the state of New York for refusing to allow Mx. Saba to obtain a driver’s license that accords with Mx. Saba’s gender identity. In August, a lower court preliminarily enjoined Idaho’s law that barred transgender women from participating on women’s sports teams. That decision is currently being appealed.
Just this past year, the Fourth Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit considered whether school bathroom policies violated transgender students’ rights. Though both circuits ruled in favor of the students, the Grimm case briefly reached the Supreme Court in 2017 before being sent back to the lower court. In 2019, the Supreme Court rejected certiorari in a case involving transgender bathrooms, leaving a lower court’s trans-affirming decision in place. But it only takes four votes for the Court to take a case, and with a 6-3 supermajority now firmly in place, there is no telling the havoc it could wreak on transgender rights.
As we celebrate the end of the Trump era, and as we prepare to work with the incoming Biden administration to restore rights that have been destroyed over the past four years while advancing the case for equality, the LGBTQ community must pay attention to the danger posed by anti-LGBTQ justices, and we must advocate forcefully for judicial reforms such as court expansion and term limits that rebalance the stolen, illegitimate court.
Aaron Belkin is the director of the Palm Center and of Take Back the Court, and a political science professor at San Francisco State University.
Opinions
Let love and compassion guide our response to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
Former president is diminished, but he and family deserve love and prayers
When I heard Joe Biden had serious prostate cancer, I felt immediate compassion for him and his family. I am a prostate cancer survivor myself. Then I heard how Trump, and some of his MAGA Republicans, responded and was amazed at how they are able to constantly sink to new lows. Trump’s son posted on X “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???” Clearly, they will never give up on being vile human beings.
The equally disgusting Joe Scarborough had on a doctor who declared he positively knows Biden must have known about his cancer years ago, although he knows nothing about the case. The reality, coming from many specialists, is at this time only Biden’s doctors know when he was diagnosed, and whether he even had regular PSA tests done, and when. Based on the latest research, the American Urological Association (AUA) age guidelines are that they do not recommend routine PSA screening for men 70 or older. This is because prostate cancer is normally very slow growing, and if you were to be diagnosed after 70, you will likely die of something else. Then you had the felon in the White House talking about “stage nine” cancer. Is he really so dumb? Guess he is as he tries to prove it nearly every time he opens his mouth. Talk about diminished.
Now is Biden diminished from what he was years ago? It is clear he is. Should the people around him have tried to hide that in order to have him run again, no! But the-then president’s hiding health issues is nothing new. Wilson was severely impaired and it is said his wife Edith ran the country for his last year in office. The same was said about Nancy Reagan when they hid Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. Kennedy hid his Addison’s disease and other infirmities, and Trump hid how sick he was from COVID, when being helicoptered to the hospital. Is it wrong to hide these things from the American public, yes, but clearly not unusual. Actually, the media is often complicit in this, which many said they were in Biden’s case. Then you have a guy like Jake Tapper who is happy to be complicit, so he can now write a book about it and make loads of money. Very sad.
I think the time has come in the case of Joe Biden, for us to just offer him and his family some love and prayers, and the hope he will be able to manage his cancer and live a long life. Then turn the page and deal with the things that will matter more to the lives of the American people today.
Those are the things the felon in the White House, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, along with the MAGA Congress, are trying to do to them. Things like taking away their healthcare, and thereby also causing the closure of some rural hospitals. Things like the mass firings of federal workers, including thousands of veterans. Things like making it harder for our veterans to access their healthcare by cutting services at the Veterans hospitals. Things like increasing costs for groceries, and other items, due to the felon’s ineffective use of tariffs. Things like seeing college costs go up, as foreign students who pay the full fare at most schools, are sent home or denied visas. Things like making it harder to file for social security by closing so many offices, and pretending to lower drug prices, but not really doing it. Things like cutting research looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, MS, HIV/AIDS, and a host of other diseases, which will hurt people for decades to come. Things like creating havoc in the world, and bowing down to dictators. Things like walking away from our allies and making the world a less safe place for all of us, including abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to his friend Putin. I always believed Putin has some dirt on him. Trump said Zelenskyy would be responsible for WW III. But it’s Trump who will be, if it happens. Then we must put a focus on the idiot who is secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., and whether he will allow the flu and covid vaccines, being readied for the fall, to be available in a timely manner. Will he continue to disparage all vaccines, and by doing so, cause deaths here, and around the world. Things like abandoning the fight against climate change and thereby screwing the planet and future generations.
These are the things the American public really needs to know about, and care about. It may have been wrong to hide Biden’s being diminished, but he is no longer in office, and he no longer impacts people’s lives on a daily basis. The felon in the WH does, and that is where the focus must be.
A first generation American from Queens, N.Y., Kameny was a decorated WWII veteran. With a prodigious 148 I.Q., he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1957 he was recruited by the Army Map Service, a pioneering agency in space exploration.
In 1953 in the wake of McCarthyism, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 that prohibited homosexuals from military or civilian employment. Having nothing to do with workplace conduct, the Army learned that Kameny might be a homosexual. When confronted, he equivocated and was terminated. Unlike then thousands of other homosexuals terminated from government employment, Kameny fought back.
He took on the military and Civil Service Commission including being the first openly gay man to file an appeal about gay rights to the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped co-found and chair the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.
He wrote letters to, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He founded and chaired the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organization, the nation’s first regional gay organization.
In the 1960s homosexuality, even with a consenting adult in the privacy of one’s bedroom was criminal. The police entrapped and extorted gay men. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. A bar could lose its license if there was more than one homosexual in their establishment. Homosexuals were considered dangerous, deviant and demented.
Kameny coined the phrase “Gay Is Good.” He organized picketing called Annual Reminders each July 4 from 1965 to 1969 at Independence Hall. The picketers were the first to call for gay equality. The 1965 Annual Reminder had 39 activists making it then the largest demonstration for gay rights. In the mid-1960s the country had an estimated 300 gay and lesbian activists.
He published a newsletter that became the Washington Blade, now the nation’s oldest LGBTQ weekly newspaper. Kameny and Barbara Gittings, the mother of the movement that demonstrated for the right to be heard at the 1971 American Psychiatric Association meeting. Their panel at the 1972 meeting with a masked psychiatrist using a pseudonym and voice modulator was so impactful that the APA created a panel to determine if homosexuality as a mental illness was based on science or discrimination. In 1973, that classification was removed.
He advised gays and lesbians who were the subject of discharge from federal government service. He identified test cases and referred them to the ACLU, Lambda Legal and other counsel. Slowly, but surely those cases began a process for LGBTQ equality.
His efforts led D.C. to be the first city to overturn its sodomy criminal laws. He helped found the first national LGBTQ organization, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. His efforts laid the groundwork for HRC and National LGBTQ Task Force.
After Stonewall in June 1969, he chaired a meeting of NY, Philadelphia and D.C. activists that authorized and helped organize to help remember Stonewall the first New York Pride Parade. He believed that Stonewall could be the movement’s Boston Tea Party. He marched in that 1970 parade holding a picket emblazoned with “Gay Is Good.”
He was the first out person to run for Congress as the D.C. delegate. Money left over from his campaign was used to fund the first gay rights television commercial. In July 1975, he was the first to be advised by the Civil Service Commission that it would eliminate homosexuality as a basis for not hiring or for firing a federal civilian employee. In 1977, he attended the White House’s first meeting with gays and lesbians.
Kameny died on Oct. 11, 2011, National Coming Out Day. He lived to see marriage equality approved in several states. He attended the signing by President Obama of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which enabled gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Kameny is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. On his tombstone is inscribed “Gay Is Good.” Over 70,000 of his documents are in the Library of Congress and picket signs from the pioneering demonstrations are housed in the Smithsonian Institution.
On May 21 LGBTQ national organizations gather in front of the Supreme Court. One hundred activists will each hold a candle for his 100th birthday. Fifteen national leaders will engage in picketing similar to the 1965 picketing at the White House and Independence Hall. They will honor Frank Kameny; celebrate the 10th anniversary of marriage equality (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015); and push back on those who would attempt to render us invisible, deny our history and undermine our equality. We will remember the nation’s loss when it fired a Harvard Ph.D. in astronomy because of his status as a homosexual. History repeats itself. This month the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to terminate transgender servicemembers solely because of their sexual orientation. How far we have come. How much farther we have to travel.
Malcolm Lazin is the national chair, Kameny 100. He is the executive director, LGBT History Month and executive producer of three LGBTQ documentaries including Gay Pioneers. He was an adjunct professor of LGBT History and Rights at New College of Florida. www.kameny100.org.
Opinions
Returning to Alcatraz: Memory through a queer lens
Trump would like to ‘rebuilt and reopen’ notorious island prison
When I arrived at Alcatraz Island, what I felt wasn’t curiosity — it was discomfort. Standing before such a photogenic landscape, something felt off. As if the place was trying to erase what it truly was: a mechanism of punishment, a machine built to control and define who should be excluded. I couldn’t walk those corridors without thinking about what this place represents for so many of us: a symbol of how the state has decided, time and again, that some lives matter less.
As a queer person, what struck me wasn’t just the past Alcatraz holds — but how that past is still alive in today’s policies. As I looked into the empty cells, I thought about the many LGBTQIA+ people who have been punished simply for existing. People like Frank Lucas Bolt, the first prisoner of Alcatraz — not convicted for violence, but for “sodomy,” a label the legal system used to persecute gay men.
He was not the only one. For decades, being gay or trans was enough to end up in a federal prison or a psychiatric hospital. Not for a crime, but for defying the norm. The legal and medical systems worked hand in hand to suppress any deviation from prescribed gender and sexuality. In prisons, queer people were subjected to physical punishment, solitary confinement, and even conversion therapy. Alcatraz was not an exception — it was one of the system’s most brutal epicenters.
But the queer memory of this place isn’t found in tourist brochures. To uncover it, you have to read between the lines, search through archives that are never taught in schools, and listen to those who still carry the scars. Walking among those walls, I realized that remembering isn’t enough — we have to contest the meaning of memory itself. What isn’t told, is repeated.
That’s why, when a few weeks ago President Trump said he’d like to “rebuild and reopen Alcatraz,” I didn’t take it as just another symbolic gesture. I took it as a warning. In times of crisis, punishment becomes an easy offer: lock them up, expel them, make them disappear. And in that narrative, queer, migrant, and racialized bodies are always the first to be targeted.
The danger isn’t just in the idea of a reopened prison, but in what it represents: The longing to return to a social order that was already deeply unjust. The nostalgia for “tough-on-crime” prisons is the same one that criminalizes unhoused people, persecutes migrants, and stigmatizes queer and trans youth in public spaces. Anyone who dreams of locking up more people isn’t thinking about justice — they’re thinking about control.
In 1969, a group of Native American activists occupied Alcatraz for over a year. They did it to denounce land theft and the government’s betrayal of treaties. During their occupation, they painted a message on the island’s water tower: “Peace and Freedom. Home of the Free Indian Land.” That gesture was a radical reclamation of space, a way of saying: this island can also be a place of resistance.
Alcatraz holds many layers. It was a high-security prison, yes, but it also became the stage for one of the most powerful acts of civil disobedience in the 20th century. That tension still lingers. The question is not just what happened at Alcatraz, but what we want it to represent today. A renewed model of punishment — or a site of memory that helps us prevent more harm?
As I walked its halls, I couldn’t stop thinking about the migrant detention centers that are still full today. About trans people held in inhumane conditions. About arbitrary detentions. About those of us who, like me, crossed borders just to survive. The distance between that Alcatraz and our present is not as wide as we’d like to believe. The walls may change, but punishment still operates on the same bodies.
Standing before the empty cells, I felt what many must have felt there: the weight of abandonment, the state’s mark upon their body, the feeling that their existence was a problem. But I also felt something else: conviction. The certainty that we will no longer walk into those spaces in silence. That we will not let ourselves be labeled as “mistakes” or “deviants.” That if they try to lock us up again, they will find us organized, with memory, with dignity.
Alcatraz does not need to be rebuilt. It needs to be understood. And we — queer, racialized, migrant communities — need to transform that understanding into action: to push back against hateful rhetoric, to protect those still living under threat, and to tell our full stories. Let no one be punished again for being who they are. Let history not become a locked cell once more.
The views expressed in this article are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, colleagues, or any affiliated organization. They are shared from a personal perspective shaped by lived experience and advocacy work.
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Frank Kameny’s legacy lives on
