Politics
Blade’s Q&A with American Library Association President Emily Drabinski
Conversation comes after a week of battles over book bans on Capitol Hill

American Library Association President Emily Drabinski was in Washington for the PFLAG National “Learning with Love” Convention, whose timing and theme are particularly apposite this year given the escalating fight this week on Capitol Hill over book bans.
She connected with the Washington Blade Saturday morning to discuss matters including how best to combat efforts to pull books from library shelves and ways to help restore public faith in the these institutions along with the qualified professionals serving in them.
Drabinski on Wednesday was named to the Out 100 2023 list, which celebrates the year’s “most impactful and influential LGBTQ+ people” and has included some of the most famous and celebrated public figures.
The honor comes about 16 months after Drabinski was named ALA president and then immediately earned right-wing backlash for a celebratory tweet in which she reflected on the significance of her election as a lesbian with progressive views.
Among the first to speak out against her over the tweet was a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, the anti-LGBTQ group that promotes book bans, opposes public support and funding for libraries and other institutions, and is considered a far-right extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It was not long before elected Republican officials followed suit.
These critics often argue for their right to hold and express political opinions as they wish while claiming that others are unsuited for high profile roles because they hold or have shared views they find objectionable, those that are left-of-center, said Drabinski, who acknowledged homophobia also played a role in the outrage directed at her.
At the same time, Drabinski stressed that her focus remains on the responsibilities of leading the ALA, many of whose 49,000+ members have also been personally targeted by school boards, elected officials, and advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty.
The ALA is not alone in raising the alarm over the alignment of these parties and interests in favor of censoring certain ideas and voices, a movement which according to PEN America has led to an unprecedented number and range of titles being pulled from library shelves across the country.
“These efforts are a threat to student’s rights and freedoms,” according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education, whose Office of Civil Rights last month appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary Matt Nosanchuk whose duties include responding to book bans, taking “enforcement action when necessary.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
American Library Association President Emily Drabinski
October 21, 2023 Interview with the Washington Blade’s White House correspondent, Christopher Kane.
Washington Blade: Reading about the backlash you encountered, I was reminded of Gigi Sohn’s confirmation process in the Senate and how ugly that got. I’m curious to hear how your experience with this may have impacted the way that you look at whether and how to share your political views publicly. And more broadly, as the issues that are top of mind and front and center for ALA are becoming really politically fraught, how you look at the intersection of politics with your work?
Emily Drabinski: It’s a question I think about constantly. You know, I think everybody has a political viewpoint, all of us do, and my political views inform how I think about the world and how I explain the world to myself, but the American Library Association isn’t about me. The status of American libraries is not about me. Attacks on the right to read and and libraries in general, they might have my name on them, but they’re clearly not about me.
What’s been frustrating is to see the whole entire Association — which is about what libraries are about, which is building community; it’s about collective action and collectives of people coming together. [So], to see the focus on me as an individual has been really distressing.
It’s also not lost on me which ideas you can have, which identities you can have, or which you can write — like what political viewpoint will get you this kind of blowback. And it’s not everybody, right? It’s only some of us. You know, they’re all about freedom of thought and they’re all against cancellation of individuals for their viewpoints, and yet they don’t extend that to people from across the political spectrum.
Blade: You mentioned the issue of which identities are allowed. The homophobia seems not to be lingering beneath the surface; this is really tinged with homophobia.
Drabinski: Absolutely. When the Montana Library Commission voted to not renew their membership with the American Library Association, that was about my queer identity as much as it was about anything else.
Regardless of what they said, when you listen back to the hearing, there were that someone on the call quoting Leviticus — which felt like, you know, so, so regressive, and a kind of conversation about queer identity that I had, that I remember us having in the 90s. And I thought we were in a different kind of world, but it’s like the book bans — there are obvious attacks on black people, people of color, indigenous people, and LGBTQ+ people. And so it’s no surprise that they’ve come from for me also, I suppose.
Blade: Did you meet with lawmakers when you were in Washington, and can you tell me about what your advocacy work has looked like recently?
Drabinski: I did not meet with lawmakers. I was here to be at PFLAG. ALA continues to work with lawmakers, and I think it’s important to say across the political spectrum, you know, we there’s broad bipartisan support for libraries. That’s always been true. And so we work with people from all sides of the aisle around the right to read. So, you know, I don’t want it to seem like the politicization of libraries is coming from the Republican Party in general. I think we all know it’s from a minority of people that don’t represent the broad political spectrum in this country.
Blade: And those voices have become, I think, amplified on social media. You’ve certainly had experiences with Moms for Liberty. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the group and its influence and maybe some of the ways that that that might be countered, you know, from the left.
Drabinski: I don’t follow the group very closely, you know, just because I think that their work — they want to sort of sow chaos, I think, inside of public institutions, including schools and libraries. They’re very well funded; their funding is difficult to track. They clearly aren’t local, right? You have in many libraries Moms for Liberty groups trying to ban books when they’re not even members of the community.
But I think what we can learn from them is what it means to be loud, right? They have a tiny number of people who are very, very loud and draw a lot of attention and in some cases can drown out the other side at various school and library board meetings. But what I’m seeing on the ground when I travel around the country is that once people understand what is happening in their libraries, they are quick to mobilize against it.
Even in southern Louisiana, right, near the gulf where you had St. Tammany Parish, the story of the attacks on the libraries there which have been definitely driven by these organized groups. [The state’s Attorney General] Jeff Landry [created] a tip line where you can report on your librarians and teachers for distributing, you know, inappropriate materials or whatever. He campaigns on this issue in St. Tammany, but even in St. Tammany, the community is organized to fight back and you see books now making their way back to the shelf.
So, I think that there’s something for us to learn — that we need to be as loud as they are. We know we’ve got numbers on our side. As long as we can get everybody out to the meeting when the decisions are being made, as long as we can get people who are pro-library, pro-reading and pro-freedom, frankly, in positions of authority in local government and on library boards, I think we’re gonna win because poll after poll shows that that nobody’s against children reading. You just can’t be.
Blade: I’m reminded now of your comments during last night’s panel discussion at the PFLAG conference about the importance of these library board elections. Do you think that there’s more work to be done to build out an infrastructure of grassroots organizing around these issues in the same way that Moms for Liberty has done?
Drabinski: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s the way to win, right, is to have densely organized people on the ground who have a vision of a world that’s about equality and equal access to public resources. We have the desire to have people live on our side. Most people want those things. But the one thing I would push back against is the idea that we don’t have organized entities doing that kind of work already. I think we’ve paid less attention to those movements than we should.
So, for example, in St Tammany Queer North Shore is a social group that has been organized around all the things that LGBTQ+ people do, hanging out with each other, going to potlucks, go to parties, or making a float for the Mardi Gras parade — but then they also see what’s happening in their local library and they organize quickly and got a lot of the community out to support the library.
There’s a recent story in Convergence Magazine that talks about a library in Danvers, Massachusetts where they had people organized to protest a drag queen makeup hour, where they were gonna teach you how to put on makeup, which is such a great program, right? And 350 people showed up from the organized labor community, the faith community, the other related movements like the environmental movement, in that area. They showed up en masse to protect the library and formed a human chain, a human wall around a library to keep the 11 protesters away.
So I think sometimes the stories we tell overemphasize the power that groups like Moms for Liberty have, when we have lots of examples that I think get a little less airtime, where you see organized people who care about libraries showing up and and winning.
Blade: There’s also this persistent problem of declining faith in expertise and institutional knowledge. How do you think the media could do a better job of relaying information about these topics?
Drabinski: Every time I see a profile of — you know that profile in the Post of like the 11 people who are behind the vast majority of book ban attempts? I want every one of those profiles to be matched by a profile of a school or public or academic librarian who is doing critical, community based, community focused work to make life better for people.
We’re very activated around the book banners, but we don’t pay enough attention to the parts and places where we’re winning. And so I think a better understanding of what librarians do every day, and what library workers contribute to their community…I see all of this attention being paid to us around the books and stuff. And I want to use this moment to tell the stories of American libraries that are bigger and better and greater than that.
When I go around to libraries and talk to library workers, and they show what they’re doing — everything from a library in Ames, Iowa, [where] you can borrow a pair of reading glasses in the library in case you forgot yours. Like, a little example of the library solving a problem for people and every every library will have like in that same library. And in that library in Ames, there were like 15 other things that were evidence that librarians were solving problems for the community. So I think it’s really important to tell those kinds of stories and they’re a little less sexy, I think, than the meanness, but I think they’re also really important.
That expertise piece, you know, I heard this like stat many years ago about Flickr, the old photo site, the most popular tag on on Flickr was “me,” the word “me,” because people wanted to be able to click on the word and find pictures of themselves. People, right? We curate worlds for ourselves, which is [not shameful]; we all do it.
But what library workers do is they think about everybody at once. They think about the public and think about meeting the needs of the public. So even the “parent’s rights” thing, like I’m a parent. I have rights. I have a child that I want to protect and the idea that by giving my child access to a diverse range of reading materials, which is absolutely a priority in my household, that that would somehow be an attack on someone else’s children. It’s like my librarians know and understand and appreciate publics in a way that nobody else does.
If we could talk more about that public and the service that libraries provide, it would be good for all of us to be thinking about other people rather than so much about our individual solitary worldviews.
I find that when I tell stories about what’s happening in public libraries to people, they’re blown away. Like, there’s a library where you can check out a cotton candy machine in Donnelly Idaho — rural Donnelly, Idaho, a town of like, I don’t know, 4000 people, the vast majority of whom are living below the poverty line.
The library is a public entity that makes it possible for everybody to have a birthday party. And, once a month, they get queer kids together for like after=hours hangout time and they’ve got three or four kids who show up and it’s the only place in the community where they can use the names that they have for themselves and the pronouns that they use for themselves without fear of reprisal. And that’s the work of the library, making that possible.
I think if we could tell more of those stories, of what libraries really do — which is absolutely not distribute pornography — that is not what any library is doing, I absolutely promise you that. It’s not happening.
Blade: For me, the question of who ought to decide things like which materials should be made available to young people and of which ages is settled just with the knowledge that librarians are required to have master’s degrees. But there are many people who refuse to defer to the expertise of medical doctors. Is the kind of storytelling you were describing a way to get around this problem?
Drabinski: Yeah, but you erode trust in public institutions, and you defund them over 40 years of organized disinvestment in the public sector, and then you find that they are weakened. And then you say, this institution is weak and failing, and then you attack it. And we’ve seen this again and again, libraries aren’t the first and we won’t be the last. I think we have a lot to learn from public education, because they came for the teachers at schools first, and now they’ve come for us.
Blade: Absolutely, and in the arts more broadly. I’m thinking of Jesse Helms’s crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts in the 80s.
Drabinski: Totally. we’ve been here before, you know, but I think for a lot of us — I was talking to a couple of other PFLAG-ers this morning, and we can’t believe we’re here again.
Blade: The word “unprecedented” is cropping up a lot lately…
Drabinski: Who doesn’t love a library? Everybody loves the library, right? This attack on a much beloved public institution and the people who steward that institution, that feels unprecedented to me. I had no idea that the world would turn against us in this way; it’s been challenging.
Congress
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill to criminalize gender affirming care advances
Judiciary Committee markup slated for Wednesday morning

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)’s “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which would criminalize guideline-directed gender affirming health care for minors, will advance to markup in the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning.
Doctors and providers who administer medical treatments for gender dysphoria to patients younger than 18, including hormones and puberty blockers, would be subject to Class 3 felony charges punishable by up to 10 years in prison if the legislation is enacted.
LGBTQ advocates warn conservative lawmakers want to go after families who travel out of state to obtain medical care for their transgender kids that is banned or restricted in the places where they reside, using legislation like Greene’s to expand federal jurisdiction over these decisions. They also point to the medically inaccurate way in which the bill characterizes evidence-based interventions delineated in standards of care for trans and gender diverse youth as “mutilation” or “chemical castration.”
Days into his second term, President Donald Trump signed “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” an executive order declaring that the U.S. would not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit” medical treatments and interventions intended for this purpose.
Greene, who has introduced the bill in years past, noted the president’s endorsement of her bill during his address to the joint session of Congress in March when he said “I want Congress to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body.”
Congress
Pappas in Senate race focuses on costs, health care, and personal freedoms
Gay NH congressman hopes to succeed retiring US Sen. Jeanne Shaheen

U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) recently sat down with the Washington Blade for an exclusive interview following the official launch of his bid for New Hampshire’s open U.S. Senate seat, which is expected to be among the most closely watched contests of the 2026 midterm election cycle.
The congressman, who is serving his fourth term as the representative for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, expects next year’s race will be “very high profile” and “challenging.” The New York Times, meanwhile, anticipates “an expensive and dogged affair.”
Senate elections tend to attract a disproportionate share of attention and resources especially in recent years as control over the chamber has tended to change hands more often and with smaller margins, but Pappas’s race is expected to be a bellwether for Democrats as they work to mount a comeback after last year’s electoral defeat.
At the same time, Pappas is gearing up for the battle over the Republican led reconciliation spending bill, with Democratic lawmakers exercising what little leverage they may have in the minority to fight against “disastrous cuts to Medicaid” while “finding other ways to protect what’s important to the people that we represent.”
Lawmakers on Sunday night gave the go-ahead for the GOP’s tax and spending package, but negotiations continue into this week as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) works to appease conservative hardliners and swing district Republicans.
Granite Staters are “really concerned” about negotiations in Washington over spending, but also with the exigencies created by President Donald Trump over the past 100+ days of his second term, which have cropped up repeatedly during the town hall-style events in New Hampshire that Pappas has headlined over the spring.
“That’s part of the reason why things are so challenging here in Washington,” the congressman said. “Oftentimes you’re pulled in 10 different directions on any given day based on what this administration is trying to do, based on what Republicans in Congress are trying to do.”
“We’ve got to figure out how we can shed light on what’s happening, try to confront the damage, and use whatever tools we have to fight back,” he said, while remaining “focused on those things that matter most, whether that’s people losing their health insurance, cuts to programs like Social Security, and people’s access to their benefits.”
The US Senate election
“I’ve got a strong foundation of support” for the Senate race, Pappas told the Blade, noting “I’ve run four campaigns for the House in half the state of New Hampshire” whose congressional map is cleaved into halves with the congressman’s constituents in the eastern portion of the state while freshman Democratic Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander represents the 2nd District.
Following the announcement in March that New Hampshire’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen (D), would not be seeking reelection next year, “I spent the first couple weeks,” Pappas said, “talking directly with folks all across New Hampshire to see what was on their minds, and increasingly, I was hearing from people that they wanted me to jump into the race.”
The sentiment was shared by Shaheen and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation — Goodlander and U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D) — who quickly endorsed Pappas’s bid. Speculation that the state’s popular former governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, might mount a formidable challenge for the seat ended with his announcement last month that he would not enter the race.
Even if Pappas is on the glidepath for the Senate, which is difficult to handicap so far in advance of November 2026, the election is expected to draw substantial attention and resources.
According to the Cook Political Report, of the Senate seats that will be up for grabs in the midterms, nine are held by incumbent Democrats and 19 by incumbent Republicans who are expected to easily win reelection, which leaves just five races whose outcomes are less certain and which therefore are likely to earn most of the attention and resources next year: The blue-leaning open seat in New Hampshire, an open seat in Michigan that is currently deemed a toss-up, the seat in Georgia held by incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, which is also considered a toss-up, and the red-leaning seats held by incumbent GOP U.S. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
While the maps present long-shot odds of Democrats regaining control of the upper chamber even though Republicans had reclaimed the Senate majority last year by flipping just four seats for a modest margin of 53-47, races like Pappas’s are expected to be testing grounds for the minority party’s major campaigns midway through Trump’s second term.
New Hampshire has long been a political battleground where elections tend to be close and voters tend to split the ticket. According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, only three U.S. states are less politically partisan: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. The determination is based on data collated from the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, where voters in both of the Granite State’s two congressional districts favored Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over Donald Trump while supporting the Republican gubernatorial nominees, Chris Sununu and Kelly Ayotte.
Shaheen has “really built a brand that’s based on serving people and delivering for the constituents of New Hampshire,” Pappas said. “So that’s the kind of work that I want to carry on — but recognizing, in this time, that we really have to stand up and fight and be a part of our response to what this administration is doing.”
“We do need to re-establish some basic checks and balances here in Washington, so that there is oversight and accountability of an administration that’s blowing through all the guardrails and is really estranged from public opinion and from the Constitution,” he said, while continuing “to find ways to meet people where they are, to hear their stories, and to connect the fight here in Washington to people’s lives back home.”
Responding to the needs of Granite Staters
Specifically, while “people are responding to a lot of different stories,” Pappas highlighted concerns about “cuts to specific programs, the fact that we’ve got 80,000 VA employees that are going to be fired,” and over the direction in which care for veterans is headed under the new administration.
“The big fight right now is around health care,” he said. “It’s around defending Medicaid coverage, ensuring we’re going to continue to have a Medicaid expansion program in New Hampshire, which is something that I’ve worked with then-Gov. Maggie Hassan to implement, and whether we’re going to have tax fairness and prevent huge tax breaks from going to the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations.”
Asked about cuts to medical research that are impacting research universities across the country, Pappas said the issue has been raised often in discussions with people in his home state.
“The University of New Hampshire does a tremendous amount of research with federal funds,” he noted, “and that’s something that we’ve worked hard through the years to advocate for, and it’s really important for the university to continue to be able to do that work and help us understand the world around us, how it’s changing, and how we can respond to protect public health, for instance, to protect our communities against sea level rise — those are just important priorities.”
Unlocking “breakthroughs in science and medicine” is important for America’s global competitiveness, the congressman added, whether by “homegrown talent here in the United States or research scientists from around the world that want to come to our country and share their expertise and help the United States move forward.”
“Donald Trump has decided that universities and colleges are a political enemy of his, and he’s trying to punish them, but in doing that, he’s really short changing our economy and the future of the United States,” Pappas said, adding, “most people recognize that, especially people in New Hampshire.”
The congressman recounted how he was able to work closely with his colleagues in the state’s congressional delegation to leverage public pressure and influence by labor unions to reinstate probationary employees at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard who were let go following drastic cuts to the federal workforce under the Trump-Vance administration.
“It’s really critical to the future of that facility, which rehabilitates our nuclear submarine fleet and has nearly 7,000 civilian employees,” Pappas said. “So that was one case where we found that we were able to get a lot of local attention and support around an issue, and perhaps that news made it all the way back here to the Defense Department who were concerned about public pressure.”
“We’ve got a lot of long-time employees at that shipyard,” along with “a lot of new people that have been brought on board as a result of an expansion over the last several years,” the congressman noted. “Across the board, people want to know that we’re focused, especially on our families’ bottom line right now,” which is why it was important for him and his colleagues to “go to bat for a facility that’s really important to people’s livelihoods, but also to our overall economy” and for national security.
Moving forward, Pappas said, they will continue pushing back against “efforts to attack the right to organize and collective bargaining,” because “unions at the shipyard have a great relationship with management, but that could be disrupted by political efforts from this administration to attack labor unions.”
The economy and protecting personal freedoms
The congressman said that while “we need to try a little bit of everything to try to identify what is going to break through,” at the same time, “I do have the sense that the last election hinged on the economy, that every election really hinges on the economy, and those are the issues that are going to be, I think, most salient to folks next year.”
“We’ve got to make sure that we’re making progress at addressing inequities in the economy and are lowering costs,” he said. “Right now, the top issues that I hear about in New Hampshire include the high cost of housing, the lack of affordability of child care, the fact that our health care system is still inaccessible, and far too expensive for most people to be able to get the care that they need.”
“We’re not getting any of that from Republicans right now,” Pappas said, when it comes to the “work we have to do to level the playing field in our economy,” adding, “they talked a big game in the last campaign about lowering costs, but they’re taking no meaningful action to do it, and so we need to be thoughtful about a really forward-thinking agenda that can focus on how we allow people to get ahead and stand in this economy.”
Asked about whether and to what extent Pappas will focus his messaging on the president’s tariffs, he noted “people are already responding,” especially in “a state like New Hampshire that has a longstanding close relationship with Canada.”
He continued, “88 percent of our small businesses import something. We have a lot of exporting businesses that rely on their markets overseas, including in places like Canada and China, and some of those markets are going away because of the tariffs that have been slapped on U.S. goods that we export.”
Trump’s trade war “has generated so much instability in our economy, it’s really hard for our small businesses to navigate,” Pappas said, with these new “disruptions to supply chains and the threat of increased costs” following a “really tough 5-year period from inflation and workforce shortages to the pandemic that predated that.”
“This is an issue that I think brings people together across party lines,” Pappas said. “Folks understand that we have trade agreements in place that have been negotiated [and] supported on a bipartisan basis, including” the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, “which was renegotiated during the first Trump administration.”
The congressman continued, “it only makes sense to move forward in a way where we are focused on how we can make more things in the United States, but also recognize that we can’t make everything and we can’t go it alone, so we need to be working with close partners like Canada, and there’s no there’s no reason for this sort of trade war that only hurts our businesses and our ability to create jobs and have a thriving economy.”
“I also think, with respect to personal freedoms, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, we have to continue to take steps to re-establish Roe v. Wade as the law of the land and defend reproductive freedom,” Pappas said.
“I’m the only candidate in this race right now, and I think regardless of who the Republican is, we’re going to be fighting for the Women’s Health Protection Act and to make sure that we’re re-establishing the precedent that Roe set for more than half a century, which is broadly supported in New Hampshire,” he said.
LGBTQ issues
A co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, Pappas is the first openly gay member of Congress to represent New Hampshire. If elected, he would be the third out LGBTQ U.S. senator behind U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Laphonza Butler, who served from 2023 to 2024.
Trump, along with his Republican allies in Congress and appointees serving in his second administration, has undermined rights and protections for LGBTQ people on a variety of fronts, including by dismantling and defunding efforts to fight against HIV. Cuts to basic and clinical science research along with public health programs have been advanced by the president’s budget and the GOP lawmakers’ reconciliation package, as well as through the reorganization of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Now in the minority, House Democrats “will not be in the room negotiating, as much as we would love to tell the majority exactly how we feel about all these items,” Pappas conceded. At the same time, “to get a budget put in place and appropriations bills passed, you’ll need 60 votes in the Senate, which means you need some sort of bipartisan consensus, at least in that body,” which “could potentially be a difference maker in defending some of these programs that folks care about, that the president has sought to eliminate.”
“Services for people with HIV, access to health care, vital research — those are things that Americans broadly support,” the congressman said. “We’re going to stand up against it, and where there’s harm to people and important priorities, I’ll certainly be speaking out, and I know that members of the Equality Caucus will be taking that very seriously.”
“Many people in this administration,” Pappas said, “are not traditional Republicans and don’t support the same set of policies that we’ve seen even Republican presidents put in place,” like the PEPFAR initiative led by George W. Bush, “which has changed the trajectory of the treatment of HIV and AIDS around the world.”
“Now, they are attacking that program and its ability to provide care for people in some of the most vulnerable regions of the world, and it’s been reported that individuals in Africa have died as a result of not getting the treatments that they were counting on through that program,” the congressman noted.
He continued, “We really have a human responsibility to do whatever we can to meet the needs of people who are susceptible to disease or who have been exposed to it, and the fact that this administration is breaking with that long bipartisan tradition of research, of humanitarianism, I think is incredibly cruel, and it’s not what the United States should stand for.”
What has been especially frustrating, Pappas said, is the silence from Republicans in Congress including those who “have championed these programs for decades.”
“I don’t know what to say to that,” he said, except that “people need to be paying attention and we need to do everything possible to speak out and fight back against it” because “we can’t see an interruption in terms of the progress that’s been made in fighting disease and developing new therapies.”
Public health aside, when asked about how the Democratic Party should approach messaging on issues of transgender rights and gender identity, Pappas stressed that “Americans largely embrace equality” and people want others “to have the same rights and responsibilities.”
The congressman raised the Equality Act as an example — a bill that would protect Americans against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in areas from housing to employment, which was reintroduced last month with a press conference headlined by Pappas and top Democrats from both chambers of Congress.
Democrats should not shy away from advancing bills that advance “fairness and equality before the law,” he said, “especially at a time where we know that the LGBTQ community is being targeted by really cynical political attacks.”
“Where I come from, in New Hampshire, we’ve adopted protections for trans individuals in our state’s non discrimination statutes,” Pappas noted, “and so I think when you come from an environment like New Hampshire, you understand that people do respect their neighbors for their differences.”
He continued, “We’re a live and let live state, and so I think it’s really consistent with who we are to be tolerant and embrace people of different identities and orientations. That’s who we are as Granite Staters. And I think people recognize that in order to have a future where everyone can live a full and productive life, you need to provide people with equality before the law.”
Politics
Joe Biden diagnosed with ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer
The former president and his family are reviewing treatment options, according to a statement

According to a statement from his personal office on Sunday, former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones.
“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.
Biden and his family “are reviewing treatment options with his physicians,” the statement said. “While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.”
“Cancer touches us all,” the former president posted on X Monday. “Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support.”
Cancer touches us all. Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support. pic.twitter.com/oSS1vGIiwU
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 19, 2025