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Comings & Goings
Etzkorn joins board of Cosmos Club Historic Preservation Foundation
The Comings & Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at: [email protected].
Congratulations to Lars Etzkorn on joining the board of the Cosmos Club Historic Preservation Foundation. Etzkorn had previously served as its legal adviser. The board is dedicated to stewardship of the club’s historic building, the Townsend House, and to promoting preservation in the Dupont Circle and Massachusetts Avenue neighborhoods.
On joining the board Etzkorn said, “It’s an honor to work with such esteemed people to preserve a historic treasure, the Townsend House, as well as to help in the rest of the board’s mission.”
Etzkorn has a legal practice that focuses on estate and life planning, trust and estate administration, charitable giving and governance. He works with individuals and families, and with local and national cultural, education and health organizations. He began his career as counsel with the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and has served as counselor to the vice chair at the Interstate Commerce Commission. Etzkorn also served in senior and cabinet appointments for four mayors in two cities — for Bosley and Harmon in St. Louis and Williams and Fenty in D.C. Etzkorn is Secretary of the Board of the Downtown DC Foundation; serves on the National Advisory Council of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement at Washington University in St. Louis; and is a member of the board of Dumbarton Arts & Education.
Etzkorn earned his undergraduate degree in history from Washington University and graduated cum laude from the Saint Louis University School of Law.
Congratulations also to Michael Anthony Vazquez, MTS, on founding The Maiden Group, a social impact agency and research and consulting firm facilitating partnerships that serve as a vanguard against autocracy and in pursuit of an inclusive democracy. He said, “Out of years of labor, long discussions with friends, coalition partners, and advisors, I launched The Maiden Group to provide a focused space to facilitate cross-sector engagement and strategic deployment in response to the rise of autocracy and the threats posed by Christian Nationalists and their associates. The Maiden Group is but one member of an ecosystem in the fight to not only preserve democracy, but to bring into being the inclusive democracy that we dream of, even if we have never lived it. Through an ethic of shared work, or what mujerista theologians call en conjunto, I believe we can not only stop the threats we are facing, but also create the world we dream of.”
Vazquez currently serves as an adviser at Public Private Strategies. He formerly served as the Religion & Faith Director at the Human Rights Campaign; Senior Communications Strategist at the USAID Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships; and Founder of Brave Commons.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from Weber State University, Ogden, Utah; and his master’s of Theological Studies from the Divinity School at Duke University, Durham, N.C.
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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