National
Holder defends decision to drop DOMA defense
House Republicans criticize att’y gen’l for abandoning anti-gay law

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder endured a barrage of hostile questions from House Republicans Tuesday over the Obama administration’s decision to drop defense of the Defense of Marriage Act in court.
During an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Holder defended President Obama’s determination that DOMA is unconstitutional in response to inquiries from GOP lawmakers amid other questions about the Justice Department’s role in preventing illegal immigration, prosecuting terrorist suspects and stopping child pornography.
Tough questioning for Holder particularly came from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), who recalled Holder’s Feb. 23 letter to Congress stating that the Justice Department would no longer defend DOMA in court and asked the attorney general simply, “Why’d you do it?”
Holder replied that litigation challenging DOMA in the Second Circuit — where there’s no legal precedent for laws related to sexual orientation — afforded the opportunity for the Justice Department to examine DOMA with heightened scrutiny and to determine the anti-gay law was unconstitutional.
“Applying the heightened scrutiny test, we did not think that the statute would pass constitutional muster, and as a result, I thought that we could not make reasonable arguments in defense of the statute — something that is done extremely rarely, but happens occasionally,” Holder said. “I recommended to the president that we not defend the statute and he agreed with that recommendation.”
But Holder’s answer apparently didn’t satisfy Sensenbrenner, who railed against the Justice Department for what he said was abandoning its duty by dropping defense of DOMA.
“Sexual preference has never been a protected class in any of our civil rights laws,” Sensenbrenner said.
In response, Holder noted that federal law anticipates that the executive branch may determine that some laws shouldn’t be defended in court and affords Congress the opportunity to take up defense of such statutes if the administration declines to defend them.
“The reasons for the determination were, as I said, this different standard and the fact that much has changed since the passage of the bill 15 years or so ago,” Holder said. “The Supreme Court has ruled that criminalizing homosexual contact is unconstitutional. Congress has repealed the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”
But Sensenbrenner observed that Congress has never taken action to repeal DOMA since the anti-gay law was enacted in 1996. Additionally, the Wisconsin lawmaker said the Lawrence v. Texas decision that Holder referenced was related only to the criminalization of homosexual acts and that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a personnel issue in the Defense Department.
“DOMA does not deal with either of these two items,” Sensenbrenner said. “DOMA was an attempt to define for federal purposes that marriage is between one man and one woman, and 45 states in this country have also reached that conclusion — either through a constitutional amendment ratified by the people as was the case in Wisconsin or through statutory enactments by the legislature.”
Sensenbrenner’s remarks on DOMA are misleading in part because Section 3 of the statute has no impact on states where same-sex marriage isn’t available. The anti-gay law prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriage only in jurisdictions where it’s available.
Sensenbrenner added he would back defunding the Justice Department for the cost to the House of defending DOMA in court — a move proposed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) last month after he hired former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement to take up defense of the statute.
“I certainly would support an effort to have the cost of Congress’ defending this provision … come out of the Justice Department’s appropriations, so that the message is sent down the street that an attorney general or president can’t willy-nilly decide that a law that they have voted against — if they’d been in Congress at the time — is unconstitutional,” Sensenbrenner said.
Holder replied that lower courts have also come to the conclusion that DOMA is unconstitutional and the notion that the Justice Department should lose funds over the decision to drop defense of the anti-gay law is “inappropriate.”
“The lawyers in the Department of Justice who would have worked on that case, believe me, have more than a full-time job, and they will have to use the time that might have been used in the DOMA defense — they will use it other areas,” he said.
The attorney general added Congress has the ability to approve funding for the expense of hiring Clement without reducing funds for the Justice Department.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the sponsor of DOMA repeal legislation, came to Holder’s defense during the hearing and said the Obama administration had no option but to determine the anti-gay law was unconstitutional following the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down state sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.
“I don’t believe that the administration had any choice in the matter at all by looking at the legal precedence,” Nadler said. “There had been no determination by any court, as far as I know, certainly by any circuit, of the proper standard of review after Lawrence. And if you look at the normal criteria for determining the standard of review that the Supreme Court has enjoined upon us as to what a suspect classification is … it meets all the tests, and you really had no choice but to go that route.”
Nadler added he hopes Congress doesn’t try to “start trying to intimidate” the Justice Department by threatening to restrict funds as a result of the department’s decision over DOMA.
Other Republicans on the committee also took jabs at Holder during their questioning for dropping defense of DOMA.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a freshman Republican who won as a Tea Party challenger in the 2010 election, asked if laws related to sexual orientation merited heightened scrutiny, why shouldn’t heightened scrutiny apply to laws on allowing cousins to marry, underaged marriage or polygamy.
“Since Lawrence, two courts of appeals have upheld a rational basis test for sexual orientation,” Gowdy said. “Why would you single out the one court of appeals that has applied a higher level of scrutiny, ignoring the two that apply to rational basis tests? That just strikes me as a political calculation and not a constitutional calculation.”
In response, Holder denied the decision the Justice Department made over DOMA had a “political component” and said the Supreme Court would ultimately have to address the issue of the anti-gay law’s constitutionality.
Michael Mitchell, executive director of the National Stonewall Democrats, told the Washington Blade after the hearing that he took offense to the suggestion that same-sex marriage is akin to the other unions Gowdy mentioned.
“Most people know there is a clear difference between those things and two loving, consenting adults who are willing to share their lives, and most importantly, take care of each other,” Mitchell said. “Apparently, love and commitment and ’til death do you part’ are not Republican values.”
House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who last year sponsored a resolution condemning the federal court ruling finding California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, expressed displeasure over Obama administration’s decision to drop defense of DOMA during his opening statement.
“I am concerned that in some cases, this administration may have placed political and ideological considerations above enforcing the law,” Smith said. “It seems the president’s personal, political views regarding [DOMA] may have trumped the obligations of the Department of Justice.”
Additionally, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) chided Obama for dropping defense of DOMA after making no mention about doubts over its constitutionality during his 2008 presidential campaign.
“It would have been helpful if the president of the United States, as a constitutional law professor, during the time he was running for president, indicated that he had some constitutional questions about DOMA as he was going around the country saying he believes that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Lungren said.
As a chair of the House Committee on Administration, Lungren signed off on the House contract hiring Clement for a initial total sum cap of $500,000 and a blended rate of $520 an hour.
In response, Mitchell disputed the notion that Obama wasn’t fully disclosing his views in the 2008 presidential campaign and said Obama’s personal position on marriage has no bearing on the constitutionality of DOMA.
“By Rep. Lungren’s logic, the Republicans should have articulated in the midterm elections that they were going to focus solely on divisive social issues and the foisting of tax cuts on the wealthy instead of creating jobs,” Mitchell said.
Holder’s defense of the administration’s decision to drop legal defense of DOMA during the congressional hearing comes on the heels of comments he made to reporters last week backing Clement against criticism from LGBT people for taking up defense of the anti-gay statute.
“Paul Clement is a great lawyer and has done a lot of really great things for this nation. In taking on the representation — representing Congress in connection with DOMA, I think he is doing that which lawyers do when we’re at our best,” Holder reportedly said. “That criticism, I think, was very misplaced.”
Federal Government
Treasury Department has a gay secretary but LGBTQ staff are under siege
Agency reverses course on LGBTQ inclusion under out Secretary Scott Bessent

A former Treasury Department employee who led the agency’s LGBTQ employee resource group says the removal of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) from its discrimination complaint forms was merely a formalization of existing policy shifts that had already taken hold following the second inauguration of President Donald Trump and his appointment of Scott Bessent — who is gay — to lead the agency.
Christen Boas Hayes, who served on the policy team at Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) from 2020 until March of this year, told the Washington Blade during a phone interview last week that the agency had already stopped processing internal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints on the basis of anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
“So the way that the forms are changing is a procedural recognition of something that’s already happening,” said Hayes. “Internally, from speaking to two EEO staff members, the changes are already taking place from an EEO perspective on what kind of cases will be found to have the basis for a complaint.”
The move, they said, comes amid the deterioration of support structures for LGBTQ workers at the agency since the administration’s early rollout of anti-LGBTQ executive orders, which led to “a trickle down effect of how each agency implements those and on what timeline,” decisions “typically made by the assistant secretary of management’s office and then implemented by the appropriate offices.”
At the end of June, a group of U.S. House Democrats including several out LGBTQ members raised alarms after a Federal Register notice disclosed Treasury’s plans to revise its complaint procedures. Through the agency’s Office of Civil Rights and EEO, the agency would eliminate SOGI as protected categories on the forms used by employees to initiate claims of workplace discrimination.
But Hayes’s account reveals that the paperwork change followed months of internal practice, pursuant to a wave of layoffs targeting DEI personnel and a chilling effect on LGBTQ organizing, including through ERGs.
Hayes joined Treasury’s FinCEN in 2020 as the agency transitioned into the Biden-Harris administration, working primarily on cryptocurrency regulation and emerging technologies until they accepted a “deferred resignation” offer, which was extended to civil servants this year amid drastic staffing cuts.
“It was two things,” Hayes said. “One was the fact that the policy work that I was very excited about doing was going to change in nature significantly. The second part was that the environment for LGBTQ staff members was increasingly negative after the release of the executive orders,” especially for trans and nonbinary or gender diverse employees.
“At the same time,” Hayes added, “having been on the job for four years, I also knew this year was the year that I would leave Treasury. I was a good candidate for [deferred resignation], because I was already planning on leaving, but the pressures that emerged following the change in administration really pushed me to accelerate that timeline.”
Some ERGs die by formal edict, others by a thousand cuts
Hayes became involved with the Treasury LGBTQ ERG shortly after joining the agency in 2020, when they reached out to the group’s then-president — “who also recently took the deferred resignation.”
“She said that because of the pressure that ERGs had faced under the first Trump administration, the group was rebuilding, and I became the president of the group pretty quickly,” Hayes said. “Those pressures have increased in the second Trump administration.”
One of the previous ERG board members had left the agency after encountering what Hayes described as “explicitly transphobic” treatment from supervisors during his gender transition. “His supervisors denied him a promotion,” and, “importantly, he did not have faith in the EEO complaint process” to see the issues with discrimination resolved, Hayes said. “And so he decided to just leave, which was, of course, such a loss for Treasury and our Employee Resource Group and all of our employees at Treasury.”
The umbrella LGBTQ ERG that Hayes led included hundreds of members across the agency, they said, and was complemented by smaller ERGs at sub-agencies like the IRS and FinCEN — several of which, Hayes said, were explicitly told to cease operations under the new administration.
Hayes did not receive any formal directive to shutter Treasury’s ERG, but described an “implicit” messaging campaign meant to shut down the group’s activities without issuing anything in writing.
“The suggestion was to stop emailing about anything related to the employee resource group, to have meetings outside of work hours, to meet off of Treasury’s campus, and things like that,” they said. “So obviously that contributes to essentially not existing functionally. Because whereas we could have previously emailed our members comfortably to announce a happy hour or a training or something like that, now they have to text each other personally to gather, which essentially makes it a defunct group.”
Internal directories scrubbed, gender-neutral restrooms removed
Hayes said the dismantling of DEI staff began almost immediately after the executive orders. Employees whose position descriptions included the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were “on the chopping block,” they said. “That may differ from more statutorily mandated positions in the OMWI office or the EEO office.”
With those staff gone, so went the infrastructure that enabled ERG programming and community-building. “The people that made our employee resource group events possible were DEI staff that were fired. And so, it created an immediate chilling effect on our employee resource group, and it also, of course, put fear into a lot of our members’ hearts over whether or not we would be able to continue gathering as a community or supporting employees in a more practical way going forward. And it was just, really — it was really sad.”
Hayes described efforts to erase the ERGs from internal communication channels and databases. “They also took our information off internal websites so nobody could find us as lawyers went through the agency’s internal systems to scrub DEI language and programs,” they said.
Within a week, Hayes said, the administration had removed gender-neutral restrooms from Main Treasury, removed third-gender markers from internal databases and forms, and made it more difficult for employees with nonbinary IDs to access government buildings.
“[They] made it challenging for people with X gender markers on identification documents to access Treasury or the White House by not recognizing their gender marker on the TWAVES and WAVES forms.”
LGBTQ staff lack support and work amid a climate of isolation
The changes have left many LGBTQ staff feeling vulnerable — not only because of diminished workplace inclusion, but due to concerns about job security amid the administration’s reductions in force (RIFs).
“Plenty of people are feeling very stressed, not only about retaining their jobs because of the layoffs and pending questions around RIFs, but then also wondering if they will be included in RIF lists because they’re being penalized somehow for being out at work,” Hayes said. “People wonder if their name will be given, not because they’re in a tranche of billets being laid off, but because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
In the absence of functional ERGs, Hayes said, LGBTQ employees have been cut off from even informal networks of support.
“Employees [are] feeling like it’s harder to find members of their own community because there’s no email anymore to ask when the next event is or to ask about navigating healthcare or other questions,” they said. “If there is no ERG to go to to ask for support for their specific issue, that contributes to isolation, which contributes to a worse work environment.”
Hayes said they had not interacted directly with Secretary Bessent, but they and others observed a shift from the previous administration. “It is stark to see that our first ‘out’ secretary did not host a Pride event this year,” they said. “For the last three years we’ve flown the rainbow Pride flag above Treasury during Pride. And it was such a celebration among staff and Secretary Yellen and the executive secretary’s office were super supportive.”
“Employees notice changes like that,” they added. “Things like the fact that the Secretary’s official bio says ‘spouse’ instead of ‘husband.’ It makes employees wonder if they too should be fearful of being their full selves at work.”
The Blade contacted the Treasury Department with a request for comment outlining Hayes’s allegations, including the removal of inclusive infrastructure, the discouragement of ERG activity, the pre-formalization of EEO policy changes, and the targeting of DEI personnel. As of publication, the agency has not responded.
U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court to consider bans on trans athletes in school sports
27 states have passed laws limiting participation in athletics programs

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear two cases involving transgender youth challenging bans prohibiting them from participating in school sports.
In Little v. Hecox, plaintiffs represented by the ACLU, Legal Voice, and the law firm Cooley are challenging Idaho’s 2020 ban, which requires sex testing to adjudicate questions of an athlete’s eligibility.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described the process in a 2023 decision halting the policy’s enforcement pending an outcome in the litigation. The “sex dispute verification process, whereby any individual can ‘dispute’ the sex of any female student athlete in the state of Idaho,” the court wrote, would “require her to undergo intrusive medical procedures to verify her sex, including gynecological exams.”
In West Virginia v. B.P.J., Lambda Legal, the ACLU, the ACLU of West Virginia, and Cooley are representing a trans middle school student challenging the Mountain State’s 2021 ban on trans athletes.
The plaintiff was participating in cross country when the law was passed, taking puberty blockers that would have significantly reduced the chances that she could have a physiological advantage over cisgender peers.
“Like any other educational program, school athletic programs should be accessible for everyone regardless of their sex or transgender status,” said Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project. “Trans kids play sports for the same reasons their peers do — to learn perseverance, dedication, teamwork, and to simply have fun with their friends,” Block said.
He added, “Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth. We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”
“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Tara Borelli. “Everyone understands the value of participating in team athletics, for fitness, leadership, socialization, and myriad other benefits.”
Borelli continued, “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last April issued a thoughtful and thorough ruling allowing B.P.J. to continue participating in track events. That well-reasoned decision should stand the test of time, and we stand ready to defend it.”
Shortly after taking control of both legislative chambers, Republican members of Congress tried — unsuccessfully — to pass a national ban like those now enforced in 27 states since 2020.
Federal Government
UPenn erases Lia Thomas’s records as part of settlement with White House
University agreed to ban trans women from women’s sports teams

In a settlement with the Trump-Vance administration announced on Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania will ban transgender athletes from competing and erase swimming records set by transgender former student Lia Thomas.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found the university in violation of Title IX, the federal rights law barring sex based discrimination in educational institutions, by “permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.”
The statement issued by University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson highlighted how the law’s interpretation was changed substantially under President Donald Trump’s second term.
“The Department of Education OCR investigated the participation of one transgender athlete on the women’s swimming team three years ago, during the 2021-2022 swim season,” he wrote. “At that time, Penn was in compliance with NCAA eligibility rules and Title IX as then interpreted.”
Jameson continued, “Penn has always followed — and continues to follow — Title IX and the applicable policy of the NCAA regarding transgender athletes. NCAA eligibility rules changed in February 2025 with Executive Orders 14168 and 14201 and Penn will continue to adhere to these new rules.”
Writing that “we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules” in place while Thomas was allowed to compete, the university president added, “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the university for future generations of female athletes.”
Under former President Joe Biden, the department’s Office of Civil Rights sought to protect against anti-LGBTQ discrimination in education, bringing investigations and enforcement actions in cases where school officials might, for example, require trans students to use restrooms and facilities consistent with their birth sex or fail to respond to peer harassment over their gender identity.
Much of the legal reasoning behind the Biden-Harris administration’s positions extended from the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that sex-based discrimination includes that which is based on sexual orientation or gender identity under Title VII rules covering employment practices.
The Trump-Vance administration last week put the state of California on notice that its trans athlete policies were, or once were, in violation of Title IX, which comes amid the ongoing battle with Maine over the same issue.
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