Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, has urged anyone travelling abroad to party during the coronavirus pandemic to rethink their actions.
LGBT+ people across the world have watched on in horror in recent weeks as queer people – largely cis, white gay men – flocked to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico for circuit parties, despite an alarming rise in the number of people contracting the virus in many parts of the world.
The situation has become particularly stark in Los Angeles, where hospitals are struggling to cope with the surge in coronavirus cases – which led Garcetti to plead with all citizens to stay at home.
When asked if he had a message for those travelling abroad at a press conference on Thursday (7 January), Garcetti said there was “no issue towards the LGBT+ community per se”, making the wider plea: “This is not a time to be partying anywhere.”
LA mayor Eric Garcetti says a few days of fun could result in people dying.
The mayor continued: “There’s a mandatory isolation quarantine when you come back of 10 days if you leave this city, and right now the guidance is against that – full stop, period.
“Are you really going to have a few days of fun that results in somebody you know being hospitalised or worse yet, dying? Or even you? Don’t do it. I’ve said from the beginning of this, don’t be stupid.
“I know how tough it is right now, I know how much people need to be together, I know how much they want to be together. But if people die they will never be together.”
Garcetti’s comments come after an anonymous Instagram account, called GaysOverCovid, sparked a “civil war” within the LGBT+ community last week.
The account was set up in the summer of 2020 to call out queer people flouting coronavirus restrictions – but it has taken on a life of its own in recent weeks after a huge number of gay men travelled to Puerto Vallarta to attend New Year’s Eve festivities.
The account has won praise from many queer people for calling out bad behaviour that puts other people’s lives and health at risk – however, others have defended the queer people exposed on the account, criticising the anonymous curator for sharing details of their holidays in the process.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued an order on Friday blocking, in its entirety, a Trump administration rule that would have made it virtually impossible for all refugees, including those who are LGBTQ or living with HIV, to secure asylum in the United States. The rule was set to go into effect on Jan. 11.
“Today’s ruling halts the most sweeping illegal, anti-refugee volley of the Trump administration,” said Bridget Crawford, legal director for Immigration Equality. “Asylum is an international human right. LGBTQ and HIV-positive refugees fleeing persecution will always be welcomed in the U.S.”
The case, Immigration Equality v. Department of Homeland Security, was filed on behalf of plaintiffs Immigration Equality, Oasis Legal Services, The TransLatin@ Coalition, Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project, and Transgender Law Center. Had the rule been allowed to go into effect, the population these organizations directly serve, asylum seekers who are LGBTQ or living with HIV, will face insurmountable barriers to asylum in the U.S., despite the fact that they have remarkably strong asylum claims.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge James Donato wrote;
“In effect, the government keeps crashing the same car into a gate, hoping that someday it might break through … But our system has no room for relitigating the same facts and law in successive district court cases ad infinitum … Plaintiffs provide legal services and other assistance to those seeking asylum and similar protections from persecution or violence in their home countries. They have provided ample evidence that if enacted, the Rule would harm this mission … A nationwide injunction is warranted.”
“This rule is part of the Trump administration’s relentless efforts to close our doors to migrants and here, in particular, to refugees escaping persecution, even as the administration’s days wane. The rule is rooted in xenophobia and cruelty. It also is a haphazard attempt to enact a sweeping and unworkable overhaul of our asylum system, without adequate justification or compliance with the law,” said Gonzalez-Pagan in a statement. “Lives are at stake and we are relieved that the court has put this abhorrent policy on hold while we continue to make our case. We are gratified by the court’s quick action and confident that these attempted changes will never take effect.”
The rule — promulgated by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — is especially dire for people who are LGBTQ or living with HIV, who have no other recourse but to flee the unimaginable violence they experience in their countries of origin. In over 70 countries it is a crime or fundamentally unsafe to be LGBTQ or HIV-positive. The suit challenges multiple sections of the rule for creating numerous reasons why immigration judges should deny claims of refugees who otherwise qualify for asylum.
The rule denies asylum to people who:
· apply for asylum based on fear of persecution due to their gender, which may be interpreted by authorities as including LGBTQ asylum seekers;
· didn’t apply for asylum in a transit country, regardless of whether that nation is safe;
· stayed in a transit country for more than 14 days, even if they were trapped in that country;
· lived in the U.S. for more than one year without permission, even if they qualify for an exception to the one-year filing deadline;
· have otherwise strong claims of persecution if they are unable to prove that government officials participated in the abuse (e.g. violence by private actors, such as civilians who perpetrate mob violence or so-called “corrective rape,” will not count as evidence toward an asylum claim);
· are unable to explain in their first interaction with immigration officials the particular social group they are a part of, requiring LGBTQ and HIV-positive people to disclose and describe their identity and intimate details about their personal lives with particular concepts and language.
Activists around the world say the U.S. Capitol siege demonstrated white supremacy remains a pervasive problem in the U.S.
Naomi Fontanos, executive director of Gender and Development Advocates (GANDA), an LGBTQ advocacy group in the Philippines, on Saturday told the Washington Blade “the attack on the U.S. Capitol was not a revelation, but a confirmation of what America is really is: A hotbed of structural, institutional and systemic racism.”
“After the massive protests brought about by the death of George Floyd, it was saddening to see that not much has changed in terms of white supremacist, toxic masculine aggression and violence and how easily these can be mobilized under a macho-fascist leader like Trump,” said Fontanos.
Tarek Zeidan, executive director of Helem, the oldest LGBTQ rights group in Lebanon, on Friday during a WhatsApp interview from Beirut cited the “scandalous double standard at how the same police dealt with the Black Lives Matter protesters over the summer.”
“This was a huge eye opener,” said Zeidan.
OutRight Action International Executive Director Jessica Stern echoed Zeidan in a statement to the Blade.
“Can you imagine how Black Lives Matter activists would have been treated if they attacked the Capitol,” she said. “Without a doubt, Wednesday’s events confirmed America’s double standard when it comes to race, again and again giving white people special rights.”
“The incoming Congress, president-elect and all of us must do better,” added Stern. “If the U.S. doesn’t respect human rights and democracy at home, we don’t have a leg to stand on internationally.”
Ahmed el-Hady, a queer Egyptian activist who lives in New York, during an interview with the Blade on Friday said the “biggest white militia in the United States is the police.” El-Hady added law enforcement’s response to the siege was not a surprise.
“It wasn’t really surprising who has privilege in this country,” he said.
Sally Goldner — a veteran transgender, bisexual and pansexual activist in the Australian city of Melbourne, in an email to the Blade said she watched the siege “with feelings of shock, sadness, disbelief and also feeling overwhelmed in a sense of feeling deluged.” Goldner, like el-Hady and others, also raised the issue of privilege in the U.S.
“I suppose people with all the privilege — in the case of the terrorists who stormed the Capitol, being cisgender, white, predominantly male and presumably heterosexual feel so threatened at the idea of losing power and privilege as they attempt an insurrection,” said Goldner.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are among the world leaders who condemned the siege that began as members of Congress were certifying the Electoral College results that confirmed the election of President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris. Trump supporters marched to the Capitol after the outgoing president spoke at the “Save America Rally” on the Ellipse.
Brian Sicknick, a member of the U.S. Capitol Police Department, died on Thursday after rioters attacked him with a fire extinguisher during the siege.
Another Capitol Police officer shot and killed a Trump supporter outside the U.S. House of Representatives chamber. Three other people died of “medical emergencies” during the siege.
The Metropolitan Police Department on Thursday announced on Twitter that it has so far arrested 68 people, recovered six firearms and two pipe bombs in connection with the siege. CNN reported the Justice Department has charged 13 people, including an Arkansas man who was photographed sitting at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)’s desk.
Social media users continue to identify rioters once pictures of them inside the Capitol go online.
“The mob assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 shocked the world,” ILGA World Executive Director André du Plessis told the Blade on Friday.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Thursday in a statementsaid the siege “demonstrated clearly the destructive impact of sustained, deliberate distortion of acts, and incitement to violence and hatred by political leaders.”
“Allegations of electoral fraud have been invoked to try to undermine the right to political participation. We are encouraged to see that the process has continued in spite of serious attempts to disrupt it,” added the former Chilean president. “We call on leaders from across the political spectrum, including the President of the United States, to disavow false and dangerous narratives, and encourage their supporters to do so as well. We note with dismay the serious threats and destruction of property faced by media professionals yesterday. We support calls from many quarters for a thorough investigation into Wednesday’s events.
Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the independent U.N. expert on LGBTQ issues, echoed Bachelet.
“The attack on the Capitol will hopefully be the last on (sic) a series of acts systematically destined to undermine the respect for human rights, the rule of law and the separation of powers,” said Madrigal-Borloz on Thursday in a tweet.
Siege ‘will forever be a stain’ on US
Former U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic James “Wally” Brewster in a statement to the Blade noted the U.S. “has been the beacon of democracy that other nations admire.”
“The images of the assault on our democracy and our Capitol, led by a tyrannical president, with our government leaders inside, will forever be a stain on that beacon of democracy by the outside world,” he said.
Brewster added the world on Wednesday “did see our leaders stand strong against the president and the other insurgents.”
“Our democracy was not deterred and our Constitutional work by our leaders moved forward to certify the electoral votes and to confirm Joe Biden as the next president and Kamala Harris as vice president,” he told the Blade. “In challenging times is when a democracy shows its strength. We showed that strength!”
Tamara Adrián, the first openly transgender woman elected to the Venezuela’s National Assembly, on Friday largely agreed with Brewster.
“The existence of anti-democratic elements in any level of public life can exist in any country,” Adrián told the Blade. “A democracy’s maturity and solidity, however, is measured by its institutions’ capacity to resist these claims of democracy’s destruction. The U.S. has given a lesson of institutional maturity and solidity in the face of the pretenses of democratic destabilization.”
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele agreed on December 15 to implement an Asylum Cooperative Agreement with the US government. It allows US immigration authorities to transfer non-Salvadoran asylum seekers to El Salvador, instead of allowing them to seek asylum in the US.
US President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to terminate the deeply flawed agreement, a deeply flawed deal that presupposes El Salvador can provide a full and fair asylum procedure and protect refugees. But for some groups, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, El Salvador provides no safe haven. Its own LGBT citizens lack protection from violence and discrimination.
A recent Human Rights Watch report confirms the Salvadoran government’s own acknowledgmentthat LGBT people face “torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, excessive use of force, illegal and arbitrary arrests and other forms of abuse, much of it committed by public security agents.” Social and economic marginalization further increase the risk of violence. Many LGBT people flee from home.
Between January 2007 and November 2017, over 1,200 Salvadorans sought asylum in the US due to fear of persecution for their sexual orientation or gender identity. In a groundbreaking judgment, a UK court recently granted asylum to a non-binary Salvadoran, finding that their gender expression exposed them to police violence and daily abuse and degradation.
Five years ago, El Salvador seemed poised to champion LGBT rights. It joined the UN LGBTI Core Group. It increased sentences for bias-motivated crimes. Its Sexual Diversity Directorate trained public servants and monitored government policies for LGBT inclusiveness.
Bukele, then a local official, pledged to be “on the right side of history” on LGBT rights. When he ran for president, his promises dissolved. He opposed marriage equality, effectively shut down the government’s sexual diversity work, and refused to support legal gender recognition for trans people. Despite the landmark conviction of three police officers in July for killing a trans woman, violence remains commonplace, and justice out of reach, for many LGBT people.
The Salvadoran government should back a gender identity law and comprehensive civil non-discrimination legislation, prosecute anti-LGBT hate crimes, and reestablish a well-resourced office to promote inclusion and eradicate anti-LGBT violence. It should axe the Asylum Cooperative Agreement.
As things stand, El Salvador fails to provide effective protection to its own LGBT citizens, let alone LGBT people fleeing persecution elsewhere.
With the coronavirus raging and leaving a deadly wake in Sonoma County, the nearly monthlong lockdown set to be lifted Saturday has been extended at least another month.
County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase confirmed Friday the local public health stay-home order that strictly limits daily life and commercial activities will remain in place four more weeks. The directive had gone into effect Dec. 12 to counter an alarming increase in COVID-19 transmission and help contend with expected challenging weeks of the infectious disease.
With 3,029 new virus infections the past two weeks and deaths mounting in January at a record pace, it’s unsurprising the lockdown will continue into February.
On Friday, local public health officials reported five more people died of complications of COVID-19, raising the weekly death toll to 23 and to 27 so far this month. Now, 219 county residents have lost their lives to the contagion since the pandemic began last March.
And this winter resurgence of the coronavirus is expected to claim more lives in the coming weeks, as one local infectious disease doctor on Thursday called the number of deaths “the tip of the iceberg.”
The physician, Dr. Gary Green, at Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital predicted: “I really think that January is going to be, probably, the most deadly month in the pandemic so far.”
Mase has issued a blunt warning to county residents to adhere to the public health order because the area is experiencing “really widespread community transmission now with a case rate that is three to four times higher than what it was just six to eight weeks ago.”
Much like the widespread restrictions issued in March at the start of the pandemic, the county’s extended lockdown will deliver yet another blow to some of the county’s core economic sectors and small businesses. Restaurants, breweries and wineries only can sell food and beverages for takeout or delivery. A slew of personal care salons will remain closed for haircuts, manicures and pedicures, among other services. Hotels are barred from booking leisure travel guests.
Retail operations will be allowed to continue at 20% of customer capacity, or 35% capacity for stand-alone grocery stores.
Residents are advised to stay home, except for essential work and errands and outdoor recreation to remain healthy. All gatherings outside the home of any size are temporarily banned. Outdoor services are allowed at places of worship. Families can take their children to playgrounds.
Last month, the county’s return to a shutdown came a week after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a stay-home order for all regions of the state where hospital intensive care unit bed availability dropped below 15%. At that time, the ICU capacity for Bay Area hospitals was 17.8%. This week, as of Tuesday, the latest data available, that ICU availability has plunged to 7.4% for the region.
However, Sonoma County hospitals still have roughly 28% of intensive care beds open. For the most part, they continue performing elective surgeries and keep balancing treating virus patients and those suffering with other illnesses.
Although the rampant virus spread is assaulting a broad part of the county, once again the pandemic is tormenting skilled nursing centers and residential care homes for the elderly. The virus devastated these sites in August but had ebbed, only to come roaring back. There’s been about 150 new infections at senior care homes of the county most vulnerable residents the past two weeks, and 10 residents have died from COVID-19.
For nursing home residents, death from COVID-19 is one of extreme isolation and misery, said Jenny Fish, a local hospice physician and one of the founders of HPEACE, a health care advocacy organization. Fish works with a number of hospice nurses who care for patients in local senior care homes.
When news organizations projected that Democrat Raphael Warnock had won one of Georgia’s two critical Senate runoffs on Tuesday, Ian Webb sat in his Atlanta apartment and cried.
“I’ve grown up believing that Georgia is a red state, and that I was a blue dot,” Webb, 24, told NBC News. “Since I turned 18, I’ve been volunteering on Democratic campaigns at every level of government, and to be quite frank, I became accustomed to losing and essentially being told that as a queer individual, I don’t deserve the same rights as my straight brothers and sisters.”
Warnock and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff, who won the other runoff, ran on a platform that explicitly backed pro-LGBTQ policies, including nondiscrimination protections at the federal level.
“I also am just excited to have two senators representing Georgia who believe that love is love, trans rights are human rights, and that everyone is equal under the law and the constitution,” Webb said. “We have leaders who represent Georgia with love and conviction.”
Both Ossoff and Warnock are on record as supporting the Equality Act, federal legislation that would modify existing civil rights protections to include protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs and obtaining credit.
The legislation passed in the Democrat-controlled House but was never given a vote in the GOP-controlled Senate. With Democrats now controlling both chambers of Congress, thanks to the results in Georgia, President-elect Joe Biden has said he hopes to sign the legislation within his first 100 days in office.
Organizers in Georgia told NBC News that the candidates’ support for the LGBTQ community goes beyond just supporting federal legislation.
Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group, said the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns were “the first time anyone from Georgia running for federal office actively engaged the LGBT community” in his 12 years leading the group.
Graham said the candidates’ efforts to actively engage with the LGBTQ community and develop platforms that cater to the community’s specific needs was an important part of their winning coalition. Georgia Equality, he added, engaged around 650,000 pro-equality voters — both LGBTQ Georgians and allies who support LGBTQ rights —as part of the organization’s comprehensive get-out-the-vote effort.
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, said it deployed a dozen staff members to the state and had hundreds of volunteers dedicated to mobilizing its 1.3 million “equality voters,” including its estimated 356,000 voting-age LGBTQ residents.
“I hope that, first and foremost, they will remember that the LGBT community helped them win their elections on Tuesday. But second of all, to really recognize that, as senators from the South, it’s incredibly important for them to continue to engage LGBT communities around the state,” Graham said. “This is not something that LGBTQ folks in Georgia, or frankly in the South, are used to having.”
The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, a North Carolina-based organization that works to promote LGBTQ equality across the South, said she would like to see the Democrat-controlled Senate prioritize LGBTQ discrimination protections at the federal level.
“For the one-third of LGBTQ Americans who live in the South, inaction from the federal government has caused significant harm, delaying solutions on everything from Covid-19 dangers, economic hardship and health care disparities to anti-LGBTQ discrimination and the violence of white supremacy,” Beach-Ferrara said. “Finally, following these important Senate victories, there is a pathway forward for addressing these societal challenges.”
‘Hoped for the best, expected the worst’
For some LGBTQ Georgians, like Roxy, a 36-year-old lesbian who lives in the Atlanta suburb of South Fulton, the election results came as a total shock. Roxy said she didn’t even bother to stay up late Tuesday night to see the results.
“I didn’t have any expectations, especially with so many more people believing the rhetoric that progress equates to losing privileges,” she said. “I cast my vote, hoped for the best and expected the worst.”
“As a Black lesbian, I am glad that we have elected politicians that will push progressive policies,” she added, noting that she voted for both Warnock and Ossoff. “I have faith that, at least for these next four years, my rights are protected, but enforcement of those protections is yet to be seen. We are living in a very polarizing time in history.”
Roxy declined to have her full name published out of fear that being publicly identified as a Black lesbian could put her in danger.
Jen, a 45-year-old bisexual woman who lives outside Atlanta, said the election of Ossoff and Warnock brought relief for her and her transgender child. She said the exhaustion she felt after participating in volunteer efforts to get both Democrats elected was offset by seeing her child’s reaction on Wednesday morning upon learning of the election results.
Jen, who asked that her full name not be published to protect the privacy of her transgender child, said the real work has only just begun. She expressed hope that Congress and the incoming Biden administration will work to reverse the Trump administration’s rollback of LGBTQ rights, including its ban on transgender service members serving openly in the military and its removal of transgender discrimination protections in health care.
“I don’t feel our job is done,” she said. “LGBTQ issues and rights are human rights — they are everyone’s rights. We should all be fighting for these rights, and I want to see them fighting for them.”
An Ontario, Canada, court has ruled that a trans woman must pay the travel costs for her two children to move in with their mother in Washington, US.
Increasingly isolated from her family, the upshot of a legal custody battle has seen Darcy feel she is drifting from her children after her former spouse divorced her in 2017.
Her ex is now remarried to a man who works for Microsoft, theOttawa Sunreported. Darcy and her family were then plunged into a custody battle that sowed division and fear, she said, as her former partner wished to relocate to Washington as her new husband’s job is there.
In the judgment released last month, justices ruled that Darcy’s youngest children can move some 4,000 kilometres away to stay with their mother, step-father and half-sibling.
“I’m in shock, just shock,” the 37-year-old told the outlet.
“They’re moving my kids to a place I can’t go and the idea that I somehow should pay their costs to take my children away seems kind of unfair.”
Ontario Superior Court justice David Broad considered that while a joint custody agreement would be in the best interests of the children, they need to be allowed to move with their mother.
It’s a decision that has left Darcy reeling, weary of both the rampaging coronavirus keeping country borders shut as well as a US she feels is unwelcoming of trans folk.
“The likelihood of me seeing my kids now is just so low because of COVID,” she explained, finding little respite in the virtual access judges granted her alongside extended long weekends, four weeks in the summer and a week over Christmas vacation.
To her list of woes, she added that as a trans person she “doesn’t feel comfortable” in the US. “I used to travel there for work and I won’t anymore,” she added, worrying that her children would be exposed to transphobia if raised there.
But Broad disagreed. Writing in his judgement: “It was clear from her testimony that the applicant’s concerns respecting these issues are sincere and strongly held.
“However, no expert evidence was led that would suggest that living in the State of Washington, with exposure to the local culture, would adversely affect the children’s development and best interest.”
The number of coronavirus deaths in Sonoma County is soaring, a grim reminder of rampant virus transmission in the community as the infectious disease infects many more of the county’s most vulnerable residents in senior care homes and the general population.
In just the first seven days of the year, county health officials have reported 22 deaths linked to COVID-19. Ten were reported by county officials on Thursday after eight on Tuesday, boosting pandemic deaths to 214.
The 10 fatalities are the most county officials have revealed in a single day since the pandemic started last March, mirroring California’s record deadly virus trend.
With virus-related deaths clearly mounting, the county Sheriff’s Office recently acquired a refrigeration trailer that can hold 56 bodies if the county morgue gets “bombarded with deaths” and reaches its limit, Sheriff’s spokesman Juan Valencia said.
“We have not peaked in the second wave yet; we haven’t seen the worst of it,” said Dr. Gary Green, an infectious disease specialist at Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital. “I really think that January is going to be, probably, the most deadly month in the pandemic so far.”
Raising the alarm, Green and other health care experts said COVID-19 is spreading in the community at a greater extent now compared with the summer months. That means more residents sick with the virus are being hospitalized, and eventually more people will die, Green said.
Dr. Sundari Mase, the county’s health officer, said the spike of deaths and people hospitalized with the respiratory disease shows how prevalent the virus is in the county. Mase stressed the importance of adhering to public health orders and personal safety rules, including masking, hand-washing and social distancing.
“We have widespread, really widespread community transmission now with a case rate that is three to four times higher than what it was just six to eight weeks ago,” she said.
Mase and other health care experts said a larger share of the local deaths linked to the virus now are occurring in the general population, compared to last summer when COVID-19 fatalities were mainly driven by infections in skilled nursing centers and residential care homes for the elderly. These residents still remain vulnerable to being hospitalized and dying from the virus.
Coronavirus-related deaths among senior care home residents comprised 40% of the 40 fatalities since Dec. 10, showing the dramatic swing from the start of the pandemic to last month when such elderly residents accounted for 65% of virus deaths. Among these 40 latest deaths, 15% originated from household transmission of the virus, 8% were tied to Thanksgiving gatherings, while the virus source is unknown for 35% of these fatalities, local health officials said.
Of the 18 fatalities reported so far this week, at least nine were residents living in either skilled nursing or residential care sites, while eight were people in the general population. One was disclosed late Thursday night and no information was immediately available about that fatality.
All who were living in senior care homes were 64 or older, as were four of the eight people living at home. Three of the deceased who lived at home were between 50 and 64 and one was between 18 and 49 — a stark reminder the virus can be deadly in young residents.
On Thursday, California public health authorities reported a record two-day total of 1,042 coronavirus deaths, as many hospitals statewide grapple with unprecedented numbers of patients afflicted with the virus.
The state Department of Public Health’s website listed 583 new deaths, after 459 deaths Wednesday. The previous two-day record total was 1,013 deaths at the end of December. California’s death toll since the start of the pandemic has eclipsed 28,000.
Under the cover of chaos the day after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the Trump administration has officially nixed regulations barring federal grantees in the Department of Health & Human Services from discriminating against LGBTQ people, including in adoption services.
HHS went public on Thursday with the final rule, which rescinds regulations implemented in the Obama administration barring discrimination among HHS grantees with respect to sex, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity. The change also rescinds the Obama-era regulations requiring HHS grantees to “treat as valid the marriages of same-sex couples.”
Although Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which governs federal programs, prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, it doesn’t prohibit anti-LGBTQ discrimination, so the regulation allows considerable discrimination in federal programs against LGBTQ people.
“Given the careful balancing of rights, obligations, and goals in the public-private partnerships in federal grant programs, the department believes it appropriate to impose only those nondiscrimination requirements required by the Constitution and federal statutes applicable to the department’s grantees,” the federal rule says.
Most prominently, the new regulation would allow taxpayer-funded child welfare services to replace placement into LGBTQ families or discriminate against LGBTQ youth. Religiously affiliated adoption and foster care centers have been pushing for this change in regulation, including Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia, which currently has a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a First Amendment right to reject same-sex couples on religious grounds.
Rachel Laser, CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church & State, criticized the regulation in a statement for allowing discrimination in the child welfare system.
“The federal government should protect our country’s most vulnerable people instead of issuing rules that license discrimination,” Laser said. “People should never be turned away from the services they need. That is especially true for children in foster care and the families who want to provide them with loving, safe homes. Rather than prioritizing the best interests of children and families, the Trump administration’s new rule invites taxpayer-funded foster care agencies to discriminate against them.”
But the proposed regulation will have far-reaching implications in health services, allowing anti-LGBTQ discrimination in HIV and STI prevention programs, opioid programs, youth homelessness services, health professional training and substance-use recovery programs.
The finalization of the rule, first proposed in November 2019, was expected. The Office of Management & Budget, which coordinates the rule-making process among federal agencies indicated on its website it had received the proposed rule and it was scheduled to be made final in the lame duck session before Trump’s exit.
But the Trump administration had already ceased enforcing the non-discrimination components of the Obama-era rule when it proposed the regulation in 2019, arguing the previous administration didn’t go through the correct rule-making process when it was made final in the eleventh-hour of the Obama administration in December 2016.
The Trump-era rule seeks to justify itself by saying the Obama-era regulations aren’t based on statutes and religious-affiliated groups have complained and filed lawsuits over meeting those requirements. These groups, HHS noted, assert the policy is unlawful under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment.
“In the statutes establishing certain programs and grants, Congress has specified the protected categories with respect to which discrimination is prohibited,” the rule says. “Congress has not expressly included discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or same-sex marriage status, in any statute applicable to departmental grants.”
HHS had already granted an exemption from the Obama-era rule to South Carolina, which sought to get out of the regulation on behalf of the Miracle Hill Ministries adoption agency.
Laser cited the exemption granted to South Carolina and Americans United’s lawsuit against it in her criticism of the final rule.
“Discrimination should never be funded or supported by our government, but that’s exactly what this rule does,” Laser said. “Families, senior citizens and children could lose protections against discrimination and suddenly be turned away from taxpayer-funded programs they need. That includes people like Americans United client Aimee Maddonna, who was turned away from helping children in foster care by a government-funded agency solely because Aimee is Catholic – the ‘wrong’ religion according to an evangelical Protestant agency in South Carolina.”
Although the U.S. Supreme Court decision this year Bostock v. Clayton County, which found anti-LGBTQ discrimination is a form of sex discrimination, against anti-LGBTQ discrimination has widespread implications across all areas of federal law, the decision doesn’t apply to federal programs, such as HHS grants, because Title VI doesn’t bar sex discrimination in federal programs.
HHS notes the Bostock decision, which hadn’t yet come down when the rule was first proposed, in the final text of the regulation.
“Nothing about the Bostock decision undermines the department’s choice in this final rule to refer to statutory nondiscrimination requirements and state that the department will follow applicable Supreme Court decisions in administering its award programs, rather than delineating the specific protected categories from discrimination in the rule or applying two specific Supreme Court decisions,” the rule says. “If anything, Bostock shows the utility of the Department’s approach in this final rule.”
The Equality Act, legislation Biden has pledged to sign within 100 days after being inaugurated on Jan. 20, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban anti-LGBTQ discrimination in federal programs specifically as a form of sex discrimination.
The Trump-era rule is set to go into effect 30 days after the date of publication in the Federal Register. The White House deferred comment to HHS, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.
It is 20 years today since the age of consent was finally equalised in the UK after a bruising, years-long campaign from LGBT+ activists.
Today, queer people enjoy many of the same rights as their straight counterparts in the UK – but that wasn’t always the case. Homosexuality was illegal in all circumstances up until 1967, and same-sex marriage was once just a distant dream.
Among the many legal hurdles queer people had to overcome was the battle to equalise the age of consent. Gay and bisexual men had been governed by a separate age of consent for decades, pushing them further into the shadows in the process.
On 8 January, 2001, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act finally came into force after it was passed by parliament on 30 November, 2000, lowering the age of consent for gay and bisexual men to 16 in England, Scotland and Wales, and 17 in Northern Ireland – finally granting queer people the autonomy over their bodies they so desperately craved.
The debate surrounding the age of consent for gay and bisexual men in the UK began as early as 1957, when the Wolfenden Report first recommended that the ban on homosexuality be overturned. Crucially, that same report also recommended that the age of consent for gay and bisexual men be set at 21, a full five years later than for straight people.
A decade on, the recommendations made in that report finally made it into law in the form of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. As was recommended in the Wolfenden Report, gay and bisexual men would be allowed to have sex, but only in certain circumstances – and only when they were aged over 21.
According to historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, this “discriminatory provision” was added to the law to reflect “the longstanding association between homosexuality and corruption, particularly the corruption of the young by the older, supposedly ‘hardened’ homosexuals”.
The House of Lords blocked efforts to equalise the age of consent
In the years that followed, the debate around the age of consent continued – but it wasn’t until 1994 when the law finally started to change. Conservative MP Edwina Currie, joined by more than 40 Tory MPs, proposed an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill to equalise the age of consent in 1994. The amendment was voted down by parliament, but MPs did agree to lower the age of consent for gay and bisexual men to 18.
However, the fight was not yet won, with queer men still not granted the same rights as their straight counterparts.
In 1998, Labour MP Ann Keen introduced an amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill in an effort to equalise the age of consent, and it passed with a majority of 207 in the House of Commons. But when it went to the House of Lords, it was firmly rejected by a majority of 168.
The government dropped the bill temporarily, but it was revived later that year and once again sailed through the Commons only to be blocked by the Lords. This second rejection prompted the government to invoke the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, which limited the powers of the House of Lords to block acts. Finally, the age of consent was on track to be equalised.
On 30 November, 2000, speaker Michael Martin announced the passage of the act and it received Royal Assent several hours later.
This is a piece of legislation driven by Metropolitan, London attitudes and is completely out of step with the rest of the country.
But the government’s decision to effectively bypass the House of Lords did not pass without controversy. Baroness Young, the former Tory minister who fought tirelessly against equalising the age of consent, said the government’s invoking of the Parliament Acts was a “constitutional outrage”.