Saturday October 15 @ 8 pm. Heartwood Crossing at Occidental Center for the Arts. Heartwood Crossing returns to OCA for an evening of amazing harmonies and uplifting, energizing music! Treat yourself to Americana at its finest. This talented local group is sure to include some of your favorite tunes, and thrill you with their originals. Heartwood Crossing is Emily Lois, Dan Ransford, Tim Sheehan, Dave Monterey, Jon Berger and Daniel Magee. Tickets to this event are $25 GA, $20 for OCA members at www.occidentalcenterforthearts.org; or at the door. OCA is wheelchair accessible. Fine refreshments for sale, art gallery open during intermission. Following current public health guidelines for optional indoor masking. Become an OCA Member and get free/discounted admission to all events! 3850 Doris Murphy Ct. Occidental, CA. 95465. OCA is a non profit performing and fine arts center staffed by volunteers.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, a case that could determine the future of LGBTQ rights nationwide.
The case involves Lorie Smith, a Christian woman in Colorado who makes wedding announcement websites. Smith wanted to post a message on her professional website stating that she wouldn’t make websites for same-sex marriages because it would be against her faith.
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When she found out that such a notice would violate Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, she preemptively sued her state’s government, saying that the laws violated her First Amendment right to free speech. Her lawsuit sought to block enforcement of the law.
A district court ruled against Smith in 2019 saying that she lacked legal standing to oppose the law because the state hadn’t actually investigated her, and so she hadn’t been harmed by it – factors usually required in order for a person to claim legal standing to oppose a law.
She appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, and it also ruled against her in a 2-1 ruling, stating that such laws are “essential” to maintaining “democratic ideals.”
Smith’s case sounds very similar to the 2018 Supreme Court case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which involved a cake shop owner who refused to make a cake for a same-sex marriage because it violated his rights to free speech and religious freedom. Both Smith and the cake shop owner sued over the same law and both are legally represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian and anti-LGBTQ legal group. But Smith’s case differs in two key ways.
First, no same-sex couples actually asked Smith to design their website. So, the Supreme Court could agree with the district court’s decision that she lacks legal standing to challenge the law.
Second, the Supreme Court only agreed to hear Smith’s free speech argument. That means the court’s final ruling won’t necessarily decide whether it’s legal for people to discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds.
Rather, the central question in Smith’s case — according to her supporters — is whether states can use public accommodation and non-discrimination laws to compel business owners to create speech that they personally disagree with, such as a website that promotes a same-sex marriage when its creator would never promote such an event otherwise.
However, LGBTQ advocates say that the effects of this case will go far beyond free-speech, and could hollow out LGBTQ protections by essentially allowing any employee to deny service to LGBTQ people or those whose identities they disagree with.
Some amicus briefs filed to the court said that its nine justices should decide whether the First Amendment applies to goods and services that are uniquely expressive forms of speech, like creative works.
However, it might be difficult for the court to decide which works are “uniquely expressive” arts. After all, some might argue that medicine, teaching, or serving are all “arts,” potentially leaving the door open for medical providers, educators, and customer service workers to all discriminate against LGBTQ people.
Jennifer Pizer, acting chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, told The Los Angeles Blade, “This contrived idea that making custom goods, or offering a custom service, somehow tacitly conveys an endorsement of the person — if that were to be accepted, that would be a profound change in the law.”
“And the stakes are very high because there are no practical, obvious, principled ways to limit that kind of an exception, and if the law isn’t clear in this regard, then the people who are at risk of experiencing discrimination have no security, no effective protection by having non-discrimination laws, because at any moment, as one makes their way through the commercial marketplace, you don’t know whether a particular business person is going to refuse to serve you,” she added.
“It’s not too much to say an immeasurably huge amount is at stake,” Pizer said.
In its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, the court ruled narrowly in favor of the cakeshop, saying that it hadn’t gotten a fair and impartial hearing in lower decisions and dodging the larger question about whether it should be legal to discriminate based on speech or religious grounds.
Considering the Supreme Court’s current 6-to-3 conservative majority, and its willingness last year to overturn the 40-year old right to an abortion, the court could declare a right to discriminate, effectively setting the fight for LGBTQ rights back several decades and ushering in a new generation of people willing to deny services to anyone they find morally objectionable.
Almost a decade after a Black gay man was beaten so severely that he lost sight in one eye, a judge has awarded him $4.5 million for the pain and suffering caused.
“It’s been nine years,” the victim, Taj Patterson, told The New York Daily News. “A lot of back and forth. A lot of legal scenarios I didn’t understand. It was a long process.”
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In 2013, Patterson was walking in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when he was attacked by a dozen men who were part of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood watch group.
The men accused Patterson of vandalizing cars, even though they had not filed a police report and police found the claim of vandalism to be unfounded.
The men beat Patterson while saying, “Stay down, fa***t, stay the fuck down.” He was left blind in one eye.
As Patterson told it to McClatchy News, the neighborhood watch group had received reports that a Black person had been vandalizing cars, and “I guess they took it upon themselves to apprehend the first Black person they saw.”
“I was a 22-year-old kid going out for a friend’s birthday,” Patterson said. “I didn’t think my life would change so drastically so quickly.”
Several months later, five men were indicted. Charges were dismissed against two of them, and two of them pleaded guilty and got community service. One of their cases, that of Mayer Herskovic, went to trial in 2017, but the case fell apart when several eyewitnesses recanted their testimony.
The judge did end up convicting Herskovic, but the appeals court ultimately threw it out.
Patterson then filed a lawsuit against the NYPD and the city of New York for allegedly giving his attackers preferential treatment.
And now, he is finally receiving some justice. Judge Miriam Sunshine awarded Patterson $3 million for past pain and suffering and $1.5 million for future pain and suffering.
“There is no numerical value you can place on someone’s eyesight or their limbs or their body in general,” Patterson said, adding that he “was violated in a very major way.”
“With that said, I’m glad that it’s all over after almost a decade.”
In 1970, Sandy Schuster, mother of four, and Madeline Isaacson, mother of two, met at a Pentecostal church in Seattle. They fell in love and subsequently left their husbands to live together with their kids. The church forced them out, and in 1972, their husbands sued for full custody of the children.
They nearly won.
Determined to support Schuster and Isaacson, Seattle activists founded the Lesbian Mothers’ National Defense Fund (LMNDF). It became one of the first U.S. organizations to offer support and legal advice to lesbians grappling with child custody issues. Thanks to LMNDF’s work, Schuster and Isaacson retained custody of their kids.
My own mother wasn’t so lucky.
She came out in 1979 and fled our abusive father’s posh suburban house with my younger siblings and me. We moved into her new girlfriend’s duplex in a scrappy Southern California beach town. Mom had no job, no checking account, and no clue that she might lose custody of her kids. She knew nothing of LMNDF, so when my outraged father sued for full child custody, he won.
We grew up plagued by depression, baffled over why we couldn’t live with our beloved mother—former leader of my sister’s and my Brownie troop and hostess of the best kids’ birthday parties in town. I knew no other adolescents with lesbian mothers. I thought my siblings and I were the only ones until I discovered Abigail Garner’s 2004 book Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell it Like It Is.
Only then did I begin to realize just how many lesbian mothers and their children had been forcibly separated in the Dark Ages of the 1970s and early 1980s. When documentarians Jody Laine, Shan Ottey, and Shad Reinstein found an essay I’d written for The Advocateabout my mother’s experience and contacted me to appear in their film Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement, I jumped at the chance.
Melissa Hart (right) and her siblings in a photo taken by their mother
At last, here were the stories that had eluded me as a teen and young adult—stories similar to my mother’s and mine. It’s impossible to estimate just how many mothers came out and lost custody of their children during this era; stigma and shame kept parents and kids from telling the truth about how legal systems had ripped their families apart. But happily, some of these families remained together.
According to statistics cited in Mom’s Apple Pie, the Seattle-based Lesbian Mothers’ National Defense Fund provided assistance to over 400 lesbian mothers between 1974 and 1980. Other organizations followed suit—two San Francisco lawyers founded The Lesbian Rights Project in 1977, and two years later, urban gay dads who had been previously married to women launched the Gay Fathers Coalition. The former project became today’s National Center for Lesbian Rights, while the latter became the Family Equality Council—both of which serve queer parents across the country.
Most helpful to me was COLAGE, formerly known as Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, affiliated with the Family Equality Council. Here, I found peers who spoke to our shared experiences of growing up with queer parents. Some, like me, remained in the closet about our moms and dads throughout middle and high school because of the repercussions of fraught custody battles. Others, enviable for their confidence and savvy, grew up out and proud, marching in parades alongside their parents.
Thanks to the efforts of these organizations and others, newly-out parents in 2022 seldom lose full custody of their kids, and many children grow up with a strong sense of in-person and online community among others with queer parents. My own daughter came out last year—a revelation worthy of celebrating both for her own powerful sense of self and for the vast network of support systems around her.
I remember Sandy Schuster and Madeline Isaacson and the queer parent activists of the 1970s with reverence. And I remember my own mother, gone since 2019, with admiration. She honored her identity and fought my father and a homophobic legal system alone, determined to be a kind and compassionate guiding force for my siblings and me her whole life.
She succeeded.
Melissa Hart is the author, most recently, of Daisy Woodworm Changes the World and Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens. Learn more at www.melissahart.com.
“I didn’t know if there was a place and a space for me to do this sort of work that I’ve really come to love and enjoy, while also getting to be myself while I do it,” she said on the same day that she officially filed for a name change with the Iowa courts.
She is not the first reporter to make that announcement. ESPN journalist M.A. Voepel announced in a tweet in August that he is transitioning and would use male pronouns.
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In an interview with a friend who is a former reporter for the station, Reichardt said she had thoughts about being transgender in high school. But she noted that her Minnesota hometown is rural and she “didn’t even have the language to describe what I was feeling.”
She said that at work she felt like “I was someone I didn’t really feel like” when she dressed in slacks and button-up shirts.
“A while after I started being on air, I kind of just reached a personal breaking point where I thought, ‘Why don’t I like the person that I am seeing every time I am going out in the field? Why don’t I connect with that person? Why don’t I want to be that person?’”
Reichardt said she gradually came into her identity as a transgender woman over the course of several years and began a medical transition process in September 2021.
“To gradually come into a role where I am feeling more and more at home in my body than I really ever did before has been amazing to get to experience and share with people,” she said.
A conservative judge in Texas has issued a ruling against a federal guidance ensuring workplace non-discrimination protections for transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming employees.
In an October 1 ruling, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, declared that, in June 2021, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued guidance that incorrectly interpreted the June 2020 Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County.
The 2020 Supreme Court decision found that discrimination against gay and transgender employees is a form of sex discrimination forbidden by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
One year later, the EEOC issued a guidance stating that the ruling required workplaces with more than 15 employees to allow all transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming workers to use the pronouns, dress codes, facilities, and healthcare practices matching their gender identities.
In response, the state of Texas sued the EEOC, and Judge Kacsmaryk just ruled in the state’s favor. He ruled that although the 2020 Supreme Court decision declared that employers can’t discriminate against workers for their sexuality or gender identity, it doesn’t protect an employee’s “correlated conduct.”
As such, Kacsmaryk declared the EEOC’s guidance unlawful and said that Texas doesn’t have to follow it. However, the matter is far from settled.
That’s because 20 Republican-led states have also sued the EEOC over the guidance, alleging that the federal agency violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not following the required process for making new rules and also the Constitution’s 10th Amendment by trampling on states’ authority over privacy expectations in workplaces.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling isn’t entirely surprising considering that he once served as the deputy general counsel for the First Liberty Institute (FLI), a legal organization that generally represents conservative Christians, attacks the separation of church and state, and opposes LGBTQ rights.
“Five justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to same-sex marriage hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — a secret knowledge so cleverly concealed in the nineteenth-century amendment that it took almost 150 years to find,” he wrote.
Thirty-one-year-old Clayton Hubbird has been charged with first-degree reckless homicide and use of a dangerous weapon for killing Regina “Mya” Allen.
August 29 video footage from a BP gas station showed that Allen and Hubbird briefly talked inside the station before she stepped into the passenger’s seat of his black Chevy Tahoe SUV, police told FOX6. When the two arrived at Allen’s apartment complex, a witness told police that he saw them arguing in the vehicle before hearing a gunshot.
Allen reportedly stumbled out of the vehicle and exclaimed, “I’m shot!” before dialing 911 for emergency services. When police arrived, she told an officer that she had met the man who shot her at a gas station. She later died from her injuries, barely a month before her 36th birthday.
On August 30, police found the SUV parked in Wauwatosa, a city about seven miles east of Milwaukee. Investigators found ammunition and firearm magazines in Hubbird’s bedroom.
Police issued a warrant for Hubbird’s arrest on September 6.
Hubbird appeared in court on October 2, and cash bond was set at $250,000, according to FOX6.
Friends remembered Allen as full of laughter.
“I remember seeing her, and I was jut like, amazed by her, her beauty and the way that she carried herself,” said Ananna Sellers, a member of a Wisconsin Black trans leaders coalition called The Black Rose Initiative. “I really did have a soft spot in my heart for Mya.”
Sellers added, “Whenever something happens to a girl like us, it’s always got something to do with [being trans] to some capacity.”
Thirty-one trans people have been murdered so far this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). A majority of the individuals murdered have been Black trans women. The number is likely an undercount seeing as some trans people are misgendered by their families, police, or media after death while others are never identified at all.
A Russian court on Tuesday fined TikTok for failing to delete LGBTQ material, the country’s latest crackdown on Big Tech companies.
The Tagansky District Court in Moscow issued the 3 million ruble ($50,000) penalty to the short-video sharing platform following a complaint by Russian regulators.
TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd., didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the case file, state communications regulator Roskomnadzor complained about a video published on the platform earlier this year that breaches Russian laws against promoting “LGBT, radical feminism and a distorted view on traditional sexual relations.”
The Russian government has been stepping up efforts to enforce greater control over the internet and social media.
Earlier this year, a court fined chat service WhatsApp and disappearing message platform Snapchat for failing to store Russian users’ data on local servers, following complaints by Roskomnadzor.
Music streaming service Spotify and Match Group, which owns dating app Tinder, also have been hit by Russian fines.
The U.S. Supreme Court began its new term Monday, which is shaping to be historical.
Notably, associate justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will have heard her first arguments as the court’s first Black woman. But this term comes as the court has its lowest approval rating ever, with Gallup reporting a historically low approval rate of 40 percent in the wake of last term’s Dobbs decision which overturnedRoe vs. Wade and took with it decades of precedent with the stripping of reproductive rights from Americans.
This term will bring major controversies over affirmative action, voting, religion, free speech, and gay rights. The court will decide whether LGBTQ+ people are protected from discrimination in business or whether a business owner can refuse to serve a group of people based on religious beliefs. If this sounds familiar, it is.
And the court’s conservative supermajority of six judges is positioned to tower over the court.
In 303 Creative L.L.C. v. Elenis, a battleground of the culture wars returns: Do businesses have the right to refuse customer services based on their religious beliefs?
As the justices consider the line between someone’s religious beliefs and state laws protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, they will examine whether a Colorado designer can refuse to design a website for same-sex couples’ weddings.
The Colorado anti-discrimination law at issue, in this case, is the same one that was brought Masterpiece Cakeshop before the court in 2018 when the justices ruled in favor of baker Jack Phillips, who refused to bake the wedding cake of a gay couple. However, they did not resolve the larger question of when businesses may use religious objections to refuse service. Instead, the justices only decided that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission displayed bias against his religious views in ruling against Phillips.
The new case is that of Lorie Smith, who owns a website design firm that claims to serve queer customers but intends to limit its wedding-related services to celebrations of straight couples’ unions. According to her, providing those services to LGBTQ+ couples violates her right to free speech.
A disagreement arose among the justices in the majority over whether the logic of Dobbs should lead to reconsideration of other landmark decisions, including the one establishing a constitutional right to marriage equality. As a reliably anti-LGBTQ+ justice on the high court, Clarence Thomas stood out by pursuing, among other things, marriage equality in his concurring opinion in Dobbs.
The new case does not directly address that question, but it might provide hints about the court’s commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and how quickly it aims to move to the hard right with rulings potentially meant to strip Americans of further rights.
