The US Social Security Administration is facing legal action, after refusing to approve survivor’s benefits for a woman whose same-sex partner died before they could legally marry. Helen Thornton, of Washington, was with her partner Marge Brown for 27 years. The couple raised a son together, and Thornton served as Brown’s carer for three years(…)
A gay police officer has won $19 million in damages from his employer, after he was told to “tone down” his sexuality. Sgt. Keith Wildhaber, an officer within Missouri’s St. Louis County Police Department, had filed a lawsuit in 2017 after he was passed over for promotion to lieutenant despite 15 years’ service. Police officer(…)
Pete Buttigieg has surged into third place in the key state of Iowa, according to polling. The out South Bend mayor is proving surprisingly popular in the traditionally-conservative state, surpassing Bernie Sanders to make it into third place. Pete Buttigieg is third in Iowa, ahead of Bernie Sanders. According to the Suffolk University/USA Today poll, 13 percent of Iowans(…)
High school football players allegedly shouted homophobic slurs at a male cheerleader, aged just 14. The incident on October 18 at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California, saw the teen targeted with homophobic chants from varsity football players, who branded him a “fag” for being part of the cheerleading squad. According to local newspaper Mercury News,(…)
The parents of murdered gay man Matthew Shepard snubbed a Trump administration ceremony in his honour, accusing the GOP-led Department of Justice of exploiting his memory. A ceremony was held at the Department of Justice on Thursday to mark ten years since the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention(…)
A Wisconsin man was so badly beaten in an an alleged anti-gay hate crimeattack that he had to have all his teeth removed. Cedrick Green of Racine, Wisconsin, is facing a hate crime charge of battery causing great bodily harm over the incident, as well as a charge of bail jumping. Local outlet The Journal-Times reports that the(…)
Facebook has made more than half a million dollars in advertising revenue from listed anti-LGBT+ hate groups in just over a year, according to reports. Analysis of Facebook’s advert transparency data by Sludge revealed that the social media giant took a total of $1.6 million from groups defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center extremism watchdog as hate(…)
Beirut Pride organisers say they have been forced to cancel their opening concert after religious authorities raised objection to the “debauched and immoral” event. It is technically legal to be gay in Lebanon, but the annual Pride festival in the country’s capital has faced repeated crackdowns, with its lead organiser arrested in 2018. The 2019 event now also appears(…)
An analysis of a decade’s worth of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News coverage by The GDELT Project shows the flatlining focus on LGBT+ issues on all three networks coinciding with the 2016 election, when Trump began to dominate the news agenda. The analysis, drawing on transcripts from the Television News Archive, looked at the frequency with which(…)
US vice president Mike Pence addressed a fundraiser for an anti-LGBT hate group that has linked gay people to paedophiles, a week after the White House denied he is homophobic. On Thursday, September 13, Pence was the headline speaker at the black tie gala for evangelical group Concerned Women of America, which lobbies against LGBT+(…)