Bishop Kwabena Albert “Rainey” Cheeks, the founder and former senior pastor of D.C.’s LGBTQ supportive Inner Light Ministries church and founder of Us Helping Us, People Into Living, which provides services for D.C.-area residents with HIV with an outreach to the Black LGBTQ community, passed away on Aug. 11 at Georgetown University Hospital. He was 74.

 Statements released by Inner Light Ministries and Us Helping Us describe Cheeks as a pivotal leader in the advocacy for supportive and welcoming religious services and support for the LGBTQ community and for helping to establish HIV treatment and prevention services for LGBTQ people most at risk for HIV/AIDS.

 “In 1985, Bishop Cheeks founded Us Helping Us with a vision rooted in love, community empowerment, and the belief that our people deserved to live healthy, whole, and dignified lives,” Us Helping Us says in a statement announcing Cheeks’s passing.

“What began as a vision became a movement – one that has touched countless lives and continues to serve communities today,” the statement says. “His leadership, courage, compassion, and commitment to our community helped lay the foundation for the work we carry forward. While we grieve the loss of  the man who started it all, we also celebrate the extraordinary legacy he leaves behind.” 

“For over 30 years, Us Helping Us has been providing innovative care and services to improve the health and well-being of Black, gay men,” the organization says on its website. “We work every day to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS in the entire Black community by providing care to anyone who walks through our door,” the statement says.

In a separate statement on its website, Inner Light Ministries says Cheeks  founded the LGBTQ supportive church in 1993 and served as its senior pastor. One of his former assistants, Rev. Darryll Moch, said Cheeks retired as pastor in 2018 but remained active in the church in the role of Pastor Emeritus until the time of his passing.

 “His work as an outspoken advocate for the LGBT community and the inclusive nature of spirituality and ministry extends to everyone and the Love of God is not exclusive of anyone,” the church statement says. “This work has fueled ministers and ministries around the country and the world,” it adds.

It says Cheeks graduated and was ordained in 1982 from the National Spiritual Science Center  of the  Nation’s Capital and received an Honorary Doctorate of Divinity degree from the St. Andrews Theological Seminary in London, England. 

The Inner Light Ministries statement and others who knew Cheeks point out that he played a lead role in helping to open in 1975 the Clubhouse nightclub that operated until its closing in 1990 as a mostly Black LGBTQ social club. Although  the Clubhouse became known as a Black gay bar, it only served alcoholic beverages during special events, according to a 2021 article about the popular venue by the D.C. History Center.

The article says Cheeks and four others arranged for the Clubhouse to operate at 1296 Upshur St., N.W. in the city’s Petworth neighborhood “as a place where anyone 16 and over could go and have the house party they couldn’t have in their own house.”     

The Inner Light Ministries statement says the Clubhouse, under Cheeks’s leadership, became a place where “hundreds in D.C.’s LGBT community flocked in the doors for both community and spiritual refuge, dancing and celebrating with each other weekly.”

The statement says Cheeks was also designated as a Grand Master in the Korean form of martial arts and karate known as Tae Kwon Do. It says he was rated in the top 10 in that arts category in the U.S. and won a silver and bronze metal in the first world championship competition in Soul, Korea, where Tae Kwon Do originated.

 “In 2002, he was inducted into the Tae Kwon Do International Hall of Fame and received the rank of Grand Master 9^th Degree,” the statement says. 

As if that were not enough, the statement says Cheeks was certified in grief and bereavement counseling and had served as a teacher in the subjects of meditation and world religion.  

It says he has received numerous awards for his service to the D.C. community, including from the D.C. LGBTQ Rainbow History Project, former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’s Community Service Award, the Whitman Walker Health Community Service Award, and the Episcopal Care and Response Community Award. 

In an updated statement released on Aug. 13, Inner Light Ministries calls Cheeks a dedicated leader whose work and impact “extended far beyond the pulpit.” 

“Bishop Cheeks was more than a religious leader,” it says. “Bishop Cheeks was a builder of bridges, a voice for the voiceless, and  a constant reminder that service is one of the highest callings,” it says, adding, “Through both word and deed, Bishop Cheeks inspired others to stand for equity, care for one another, and work tirelessly for a better tomorrow.”

A Celebration of Life for Cheeks is scheduled to take place at 11 a.m.  Saturday, Aug. 29, at D.C.’s First Congregational Church at 945 G Street, N.|W. 

James Dale, the gay former Boy Scout whose landmark Supreme Court case established the organization’s First Amendment right to exclude him, has filed a second federal lawsuit against the Department of Defense over its relationship with Scouting America.

The Aug. 3 lawsuit, which is being exclusively reported by the Blade, seeks records about how the Pentagon is enforcing its ongoing compliance reviews with Scouting America, escalating Dale’s legal challenge to what he and his attorney, Isaac Park, characterize as government pressure on a private organization to change its policies.

The filing, which has not previously been reported, comes months after Dale sued the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the memorandum outlining the department’s agreement with Scouting America. That first lawsuit resulted in the Pentagon releasing the memorandum just three weeks after Dale filed his complaint.

Now, Dale and Park want to know what happened after the memorandum was signed — including how the Pentagon is conducting its 90-day compliance reviews and whether those reviews are being used to pressure Scouting America to make additional changes.

The second lawsuit cites the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in NRA v. Vullo, which addressed when government officials cross the constitutional line by using their authority to pressure private organizations or entities into taking action the government itself could not directly require.

“I find myself in this interesting, ironic place where I’m defending the decision that expelled me,” Dale told The Washington Blade. “That said, Scouts, you have a First Amendment shield to protect yourselves from the DOD.”

Dale’s legal fight comes as Scouting America faces pressure from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has criticized the organization’s embrace of LGBTQ youth, girls and Scouts of color.

In recent years, Scouting America has made significant progress toward becoming a more inclusive organization — from removing its bans on LGBTQ Scouts and leaders, to providing opportunities for women and girls to participate in Scouting, to making Scouts of color feel more supported and visible within the organization.

Those changes angered Hegseth, who has never been a Scout, to the point that he threatened to sever the military’s longstanding ties with the organization.

Such a move would mean that the U.S. military would no longer provide medical and logistical support for the National Jamboree, the massive gathering of Scouts in West Virginia that typically draws about 20,000 participants. It would also prevent Scout troops from meeting on U.S. or overseas military installations, where many bases host active Scouting programs.

In February, before that threat was carried out, Hegseth announced that the Pentagon had reached an agreement with Scouting America that he said would refocus the organization away from diversity initiatives and other policies he characterized as “woke.” He again threatened to end the military’s longstanding support for the organization if it failed to comply within six months.

Hegseth also placed particular emphasis on Scouting America’s policies regarding transgender youth, saying the organization would require members to use their “biological sex at birth and not gender identity.”

But Scouting America President and CEO Roger Krone struck a different tone.

“We have transgender people in our program and we’ll have transgender people in our program going forward,” Krone told The Associated Press in February.

The conflicting messages prompted Dale to dig deeper.

“I wanted to get to the bottom of what deal had been struck with Scouting America under pressure,” Dale said. “What pressure did the Pentagon apply on a private youth organization that had a right to determine their own members?”

Dale filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the memorandum between the Pentagon and Scouting America. When the Defense Department did not provide the document, he turned to Park, a former Supreme Court clerk, and sued the department for its release.

Park said they deliberately took a narrow approach to the FOIA lawsuit, seeking a single document rather than launching a broader fight over thousands of pages of government records.

“We had one document that we really wanted, which was this memorandum, and we were going to ensure that there’s like a lead-pipe, stone-cold case for disclosure,” Park said.

The strategy worked quickly. Three weeks after the lawsuit was filed, the Pentagon released the memorandum.

But the document did not end Dale and Park’s questions. Instead, they said, it raised new ones.

Hegseth had publicly described a six-month window for Scouting America to make changes. But the memorandum provides for an ongoing compliance mechanism, with reviews taking place every 90 days.

For Dale and Park, that raises the possibility that the Pentagon could continue pressing Scouting America to change its policies long after the February agreement was announced.

Park described their concern as “jawboning” — the use of government power or influence to pressure a private organization into changing its policies without the government directly ordering it to do so.

“We saw in the weeks after the announcement of the memorandum changes being made to Scouting America’s policies,” Park said. “Them saying one thing, the department saying a slightly different thing, and our first question then was, of course, like, what is actually in this memorandum? Is this how they kind of got what they wanted?”

The memorandum, Park said, “clarified certain questions, but definitely also didn’t contain other changes” that Scouting America had made.

“That naturally arises: Well then, how did those changes come about?” he said.

Dale points to changes at Scouting America’s National Jamboree as an example of what he believes could be the result of the pressure.

The organization removed dedicated spaces for girls, Scouts of color and LGBTQ Scouts at the flagship event, which concluded last week.

“We see spaces for girls being eradicated, spaces for kids of color, spaces for gay people, for trans kids,” Dale said. “It happened at the flagship event of scouting, the jamboree.”

Dale said he fears similar changes could occur at the local level, including at Scout meetings and council events.

“All this document is empowering the government to keep pressing, keep putting pressure on Scouting America,” Dale said. “And what is that doing to American kids?”

The dispute is particularly striking because of Dale’s own history with the organization.

Dale had a long history with Scouting before the organization expelled him in 1990. At the time, he was a 19-year-old student at Rutgers University in New Jersey and was serving as an assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 73.

While attending Rutgers, Dale became co-president of the university’s Lesbian/Gay Student Alliance and was interviewed by The Star-Ledger about the health and well-being of LGBTQ students.

The interview made its way to Boy Scouts officials. The organization subsequently expelled Dale after learning that he was gay, describing him as an “active sodomite.”

Dale sued the Boy Scouts under New Jersey’s public accommodations law and initially won. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in his favor, finding that the state’s interest in preventing discrimination outweighed the organization’s claimed right to exclude him.

The Boy Scouts appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 decision in 2000, the Supreme Court reversed the New Jersey ruling, holding that forcing the Boy Scouts to accept Dale as an openly gay assistant scoutmaster would violate the organization’s First Amendment right to freedom of expressive association.

The Scouts had argued that homosexual conduct was inconsistent with the values it sought to instill in young people.

Dale was devastated by the ruling.

“I thought it was the wrong decision at the time,” he said.

But the constitutional protection the Supreme Court recognized in his case is now at the center of Dale’s argument against the Pentagon.

The Boy Scouts’ policies have changed dramatically since Dale’s case. The organization began allowing openly gay youth in 2013 and gay adult leaders in 2015. It later expanded its policies to include transgender youth and adults.

The Boy Scouts of America formally changed its name to Scouting America in 2025.

Dale said those changes were made voluntarily — precisely the kind of private organizational decision that the Supreme Court’s ruling in his case protected.

“They did it voluntarily,” Dale said. “They won the Supreme Court case against me.”

Now, he argues, Scouting America should invoke that same protection against the government.

Park said that is the central constitutional question behind their efforts.

“In 1990, when he was expelled from the Scouts for being gay, and in 2000, after a narrow 5-4 loss at the court, we were told that a private entity, an organization like Scouting, are allowed to set their own membership policies,” Park said.

Over the following two decades, Park said, Scouting America changed those policies on its own.

“We won the culture war,” Park said. “Organizations like Scouting America decided on their own, of their own free will, that actually what they want is to be inclusive with respect to gay youth, with respect to trans youth.”

The question now, Park said, is whether the government can pressure an organization to reverse those voluntary decisions.

“I think that the story here is that of jawboning,” Park said. “Our question has always been the how of how this administration is achieving whatever policy goals, whatever ideological outcomes that they want.”

Dale sees the issue as extending well beyond Scouting America.

“It’s not even about the scouting program,” Dale said. “It is, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s about really what the executive branch is doing to private organizations that have a right to set their own policies for membership.”

Park said the argument could appeal to people across the political spectrum.

“During the Biden administration, it was COVID policy, and it was the NRA that the right was screaming about jawboning,” Park said. “This is a bipartisan issue in the sense that no one thinks the government is allowed to do this.”

For now, Dale and Park are seeking more information.

Park said their review of the memorandum left them with additional questions about the Pentagon’s relationship with Scouting America and whether the 90-day compliance mechanism is being used to continue influencing the organization.

“Disclosure or transparency is the right remedy for this,” Park said.

Dale’s interest in Scouting is not merely legal.

He said he still believes deeply in the organization and had returned to involvement with Scouting only recently, after years away.

“I love scouting,” Dale said. “I fought for a decade to get back in scouting.”

That makes his current position all the more unusual.

The organization that once fought him in court is now the organization he is trying to defend from government interference.

“I never thought that would be the case,” Dale said. “That would be saving queer kids.”

Dale said he hopes Scouting America will ultimately stand up for the policies it adopted after his Supreme Court case.

“They didn’t want gay people in the ’90s. Fine, I thought that was wrong,” Dale said. “But now they want to have trans kids. They want to have girls. They want to have kids of color.”

“But Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth don’t want them to,” he said.

The Pentagon declined to comment on Dale’s allegations or the ongoing litigation.

“As a matter of policy, we do not comment on ongoing litigation,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Washington Blade via email.

The Blade also contacted Scouting America seeking clarification about its agreement with the Pentagon, including whether Hegseth or other Defense Department officials had pressured the organization to remove or alter policies protecting LGBTQ Scouts, girls, or Scouts of color.

Scouting America did not respond to a request for comment.

For Dale, the fight has brought his long-running legal battle with the Scouts full circle.

He spent the 1990s arguing that the organization should not be permitted to exclude him because he was gay. The Supreme Court ultimately said the Scouts had a constitutional right to make that choice.

Now Dale is arguing that the government cannot force the organization to make a different choice.

“I realized over the course of my life that I expected the institution to save me,” Dale said. “I expected the Boy Scouts of America to do the right thing. I expected the legal system, the Supreme Court, to do the right thing.”

“Neither one did,” he said. “You got to fight for yourselves.”

Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won the Democratic primary for the Senate in Minnesota, as progressive Democrats continue to clinch nominations across the country.

On Tuesday night, NBC News called the race for Flanagan, who received 59.0% of the state’s Democratic primary vote, while her opponent, Rep. Angie Craig, received 39.4%. Flanagan ran against Craig for retiring Sen. Tina Smith’s seat. 

Smith, along with Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., endorsed Flanagan, while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., backed Craig.

Flanagan also received the endorsement of the Christopher Street Project, a transgender rights organization that has been at the center of efforts to counter the Republican Party’s push against transgender rights. The group chose Flanagan over Craig in part because Craig has not co-sponsored the Trans Bill of Rights, legislation that has been introduced multiple times in Congress and seeks to establish federal protections for transgender Americans.

The endorsement underscored a key difference between the two Democrats on LGBTQ issues. While Craig is the first openly lesbian mother in Congress, the Christopher Street Project said LGBTQ identity alone is not enough without a strong commitment to transgender rights as they are increasingly debated in legislative offices around the country.

In 2022, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy organization in the U.S., endorsed Flanagan’s re-election campaign for lieutenant governor alongside Tim Walz, calling the duo “Champions of Equality.”

Flanagan called the race an expensive fight of the “many versus the money,” Flanagan told NBC News’ “Meet the Press Now.” Craig and her allies combined to spend nearly $20 million on the airwaves, while Flanagan and her allies spent $4.7 million, according to AdImpact and NBC.

“I’m running to make sure that people can afford the lives they want to live,” Flanagan said. “I want to get big money out of our politics, and I want to fight for things like ‘Medicare for All’ so that people aren’t just paying for health insurance but actually have access to health care.”

Flanagan criticized Craig, who is in her fourth term, for not standing up enough to President Donald Trump’s administration, a characterization Craig disputed. Craig flipped a competitive House seat in the Twin Cities metro area and had argued that she was the best candidate to win in November.

Craig faced criticism for voting for the Laken Riley Act, an immigration detention measure that Trump signed into law shortly after he started his second term in January 2025. Craig said she later regretted that vote.

Flanagan has been vocal about her stance on abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a recent Minnesota Public Radio debate she said that ICE “has to be ripped apart.” Flanagan said she does support immigration enforcement to ensure secure borders.

Immigration and ICE debates are especially pertinent in the Twin Cities, as ICE agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis during an enforcement crackdown at the behest of President Trump.

Despite the contested race, Craig made it clear that Democrats are committed to unifying.

“We have an existential crisis in our nation with Trump and Republicans, and so I would be right by the lieutenant governor’s side asking my supporters to support her,” Craig said. “The most important thing in this election is that we beat Republicans. That’s what matters.”

On the Republican side, former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya won the Senate primary. Considered an outsider to the Republican Party structure, she did not win the state GOP’s endorsement at the May convention, where delegates instead backed retired Navy SEAL Adam Schwarze.

She has run her campaign on a slew of issues Republicans have deemed worthy — including transgender sports participation, corruption, and minimizing illegal immigrants in the area.

This recent pattern of moderate and centrist Democrats raising huge funds — in many instances backed by major PACs — only to lose to more progressive and less experienced candidates is growing as more people grow disillusioned with the Democratic Party’s inability to push back against Trump and Republicans. A similar outcome happened in Michigan’s Democratic primary last week when progressive physician Abdul El-Sayed won over incumbent U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.).

Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who decided not to run for re-election, stayed neutral in the Senate primary but his wife, Gwen, backed Craig over Flanagan, the governor’s ticketmate.

The Senate seat will be determined in the election on Tuesday, November 3, later this year.