President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal on Thursday to LGBTQ advocates Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, and Mary Bonauto, senior director of civil rights and legal strategies at GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD Law).

They, along with 18 other awardees, were honored in the East Room of the White House with a ceremony celebrating their exemplary deeds of service to their country or fellow citizens.

In a statement, the White House said that, “By leading the marriage equality movement, Evan Wolfson helped millions of people in all 50 states win the fundamental right to love, marry, and be themselves,” while Bonauto, an attorney who argued the Obergefell case that made same-sex marriage the law of the land in 2015, “made millions of families whole and forged a more perfect union.”

“Together, you embody the central truth: We’re a great nation because we’re a good people,” the president said. “Our democracy begins and ends with the duties of citizenship. That’s our work for the ages, and it’s what all of you embody.”

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Democratic U.S. Rep. Benny Thompson (Miss.) were honored on Thursday for their work leading the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol.

President Joe Biden on Dec. 23 signed the National Defense Authorization Act with a provision that bans gender-affirming health care for children of U.S. servicemembers.  

The U.S. Senate last week approved the NDAA by an 85-14 vote margin.

Biden in a statement the White House released after he signed the NDAA said his administration “strongly opposes” the anti-trans provision.

“By prohibiting the use of appropriated funds, the Department of Defense will be compelled to contravene clinical practice guidelines and clinical recommendations,” said the statement. “The provision targets a group based on that group’s gender identity and interferes with parents’ roles to determine the best care for their children.”  

“This section undermines our all-volunteer military’s ability to recruit and retain the finest fighting force the world has ever known by denying health care coverage to thousands of our service members’ children,” added Biden. “No service member should have to decide between their family’s health care access and their call to serve our nation.”

The Human Rights Campaign in a statement noted the NDAA is the first anti-LGBTQ federal law signed since the Defense of Marriage Act.

President Joe Biden on Monday signed a proclamation to establish a national monument in Newcastle, Maine, that will honor Frances Perkins, who became the first woman named to a Cabinet-level position when she was chosen by FDR to serve as secretary for the U.S. Department of Labor.

The move highlights the Biden-Harris administration’s record of advancing women’s rights and strengthening the labor movement while also commemorating Perkins’s achievements, including the establishment of pensions, unemployment, and workers’ compensation, the minimum wage and overtime pay, the 40-hour workweek, and child labor laws.

Perkins is also credited with helping to lay the blueprint for legislation like the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the National Labor Relations Act.

Research suggests she may have been a lesbian, perhaps even the first LGBTQ Cabinet secretary.

According to the National Park Service, “Perkins’ relationship with one roommate, Mary Harriman Rumsey,” who was a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, “was very intimate,” though an entry for the late labor secretary on the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project quotes her biographer Kirsten Downey’s assertion that “it is probably impossible to know whether Frances’s relationship with Mary was also sexual or romantic.”