Out Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) has proposed legislation to grant LGBTQ+ military veterans coverage for in-vitro fertilization (IVF), something the federal Veterans Administration (VA) only allows for heterosexual couples.
Healey first introduced the legislation – dubbed the HERO Act – in November, and according toThe Boston Business Journal a hearing on the proposal is set to be held this month before the Joint Committee on Veteran and Federal Affairs.
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“Our veterans have sacrificed so much for our country, and this transformative legislation marks an important step toward ensuring that Massachusetts supports them in return,” Healey said in a press release after introducing the legislation.
Calling the bill “historic,” she added, “From day one, our administration has been committed to revitalizing veterans’ services in Massachusetts and ensuring that every one of these heroes receives the benefits, resources, and support that they deserve.”
The bill would no doubt have a massive impact, as veterans in same-sex marriages have made it clear the current policies affect them deeply. In August, Massachusetts veteran Ashley Sheffield filed a class action lawsuit against the VA arguing that the denial of fertility coverage to LGBTQ+ couples is unconstitutional.
“We are entitled to equal treatment and we should no longer be treated as second-class citizens,” Sheffield reportedly said when she filed the suit.
In addition to granting IVF coverage to same-sex couples, the HERO Act proposes a myriad of other benefits, including expanded access to mental health care treatment, an increase in the tax credits small businesses receive for hiring low-income and chronically unemployed veterans, an increase in flexibility for veteran property tax exemptions, and an expanded definition of a veteran dependent.
In November 2022, Healey became the first out lesbian governor in the country, as well as the first woman elected governor in her state. Before that, she was the country’s first out lesbian state attorney general.
As AG, she championed non-discrimination protections for trans people in Massachusetts and pushed for gender-neutral markers both federally and for the state. And as civil rights chief in the AG’s office, Healey brought the first successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, helping to lay the groundwork for marriage equality nationwide.
After she won the Democratic primary, she stood before a raucous crowd of supporters and told them, “I am so proud to be able to stand before you tonight as your Democratic nominee for governor of Massachusetts.” She nodded to the sound of her latest title and added, “That sounds good.”
The former professional basketball player and captain of her team at Harvard describes herself as a “baller” and was clear-eyed about the work ahead in her remarks that night: “I ask you, as a former point guard, to leave it all with me on the court.”
A Norwegian man who called himself “The Eunuch Maker” pleaded guilty to multiple charges relating to the underground castration and extreme genital modification surgeries he performed on numerous willing participants over six years, according to the Daily Mail and other media outlets.
Maruis Gustavson, 46, appeared in the Old Bailey Central Criminal Courthouse in London on December 19 last year where he admitted his role as the ringleader of a castration cartel that made hundreds of thousands of dollars by posting videos and live-streaming the underground surgical procedures to a paying audience on the dark web.
Gustavson appeared in court via a video link from the HMP Belmarsh prison. The wheelchair-bound Gustavson suffers from limited mobility resulting from his decision to have his leg frozen and amputated. He also choose to have his penis and a nipple surgically removed.
The three men responsible for the three surgical procedures performed on Gustavson earlier pleaded guilty to the crimes, as reported by the BBC.
In April, Nathan Arnold, 48, pleaded guilty to charges related to the removal of Gustavson’s nipple. Damian Byrnes, 35, pleaded guilty to charges related to the surgical removal of Gustavson’s penis. And Peter Wates, 66, pleaded guilty to charges related to the freezing and amputation of Gustavson’s leg.
Another man, Ian Ciucur, 29, pleaded guilty on December 14 to charges related to what prosecutor Caroline Carberry KC called “castration by clamping” on two separate occasions in July 2019.
These and other surgical procedures were live-streamed or recorded on videos which were later posted to a dark website for paying customers. The men were part of a larger subculture known as “nullos” who glorify and find gratification in the removal or nullification of one’s genitals.
Police in the case believe they have identified at least 13 victims and 29 separate offenses involving castration and genital mutilation, the trade and sale of genitals and body parts, and the sale of videos and live-streams of the procedures on a since-deleted dark website.
Sitting on his living room couch, a 16-year-old high school student described all the reasons he’s fighting to change his gender identity on official documents.
He doesn’t want his classmates to know he’s trans. He worries about the disrespectful comments he hears from people who don’t realize he transitioned years ago, the ugly rhetoric on social media that prompts him to put down his phone, and the alarming data and stories about harassment and violence.
But mostly, J. Doe — as the teen is referred to in a lawsuit his family filed last month against the Oklahoma State Board of Education — just wants to be seen as a boy, not a transgender boy.
“Because there is a big difference,” he said in an interview at his Oklahoma City home. “There shouldn’t be, but there is.”
Last fall, a few weeks after the state’s education department learned that J. Doe had obtained a court order to update his gender to male on all of his official records, the Board of Education created an emergency rule requiring school districts to get state approval before changing gender markers on students’ private files. Then the board decided unanimously — without notifying his family to give them a chance to weigh in — that J. Doe’s student records should continue to list him as female.
The new rule effectively gives the Oklahoma Department of Education notice every time a student has transitioned to a point where they want their records updated to reflect their gender identity. And it gives the board the opportunity to reject that request, as it did to J. Doe and another student in October.
“It’s hard enough to get supportive parents; once you achieve that, you are lucky enough,” said J. Doe, whose parents have backed his transition since he was a young child. “It shouldn’t be a challenge with the government, too.”
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent, voted to restrict schools from changing gender identifications on private student records.Christopher Creese for NBC News
Oklahoma has become one of the least accepting states for transgender children under a Republican-led state government that includes Ryan Walters, the combative state superintendent who has attacked what he and far-right activists label “transgender ideology.”
“We’re going to stand against this,” Walters said in October after the state board voted to prevent J. Doe’s records from being updated. “We’re not going to do the transgender game of back and forth, back and forth.”
The Oklahoma Department of Education offered a different explanation, saying it created the policy because officials learned school districts had received requests like J. Doe’s, and the state wanted to protect “the accuracy of historic records for future use.” The board is set to vote on whether to make the emergency rule permanent later this month.
J. Doe and his mother are now suing Walters and the rest of the board, arguing that the new rule is discriminatory and violated the family’s due process rights as well as a parents’ rights law. They are asking a state court to invalidate the rule and for $75,000 in damages.
Joshua Payton, an attorney for J. Doe’s family, said he believes the new rule is an abuse of the state government’s power, intended to “attack the most vulnerable students.”
The Oklahoma Department of Education declined to make Walters or anyone else available for an interview, and did not directly respond to written questions. The department previously called the lawsuit “frivolous” and sent a statement to NBC News in which Walters said he is fighting against “woke indoctrination” in the classrooms. “It is time to end gender wars and get back to the basics in education,” the statement concluded.
The five other state Board of Education members did not respond to requests for comment.
In Oklahoma, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing, asking courts to invalidate laws that limit what teachers can say about gender in schools, restrict which restrooms LGBTQ students can use and ban gender-affirming health carefor adolescents. Student athletes in the state are supposed to submit affidavitssigned by their parents that attest to their sex assigned at birth.
During his first year in office, Walters has added to those laws with policies forbidding the use of textbooks that include so-called gender ideology, and criticizing school districts that offer support services for LGBTQ students. He wants to make it easier to fire school staff members who engage in what he called “sexually provocative behaviors” outside of work, after he objected to a principal moonlighting as a drag queen. He has said his positions are meant to protect parental rights.
“Parents absolutely know what’s best for kids, and anyone who doesn’t understand has no business being involved in education whatsoever,” Walters recently said on Real America’s Voice, a far-right streaming network whose hosts are known for pushing conspiracy theories. Walters added that parents should be involved in all decision-making in schools.
But J. Doe’s parents said Walters’ policies have interfered with their rights, rather than protecting them.
“You’re telling me what I can and can’t do with my child,” Jane Doe, as J. Doe’s mother is referred to in the lawsuit, said in an interview. “And you know what, you didn’t raise this child; I raised this child.”
Oklahoma’s top culture warrior
Ryan Walters has called the teachers union a “terrorist organization” and pushed for prayer in public schools, calling the separation of church and state a “myth.”
A Tulsa-area school district faced weeks of bomb threats after Walters shared a Libs of TikTok post about a school librarian on social media.
He has also become an outspoken proponent of PragerU, a right-wing nonprofit that’s seeking to get its videos played in public school classrooms.
LGBTQ advocates in the state said the new laws and regulations have spurred some families they know to flee for Colorado and New Mexico, which have more accepting policies for transgender children.
“Honestly, there is a lot of fear,” said state Rep. Jacob Rosecrants, an Oklahoma City Democrat who has a transgender child. “It’s heavy — you can cut it with a knife.”
Rosecrants said when he worked as a teacher, making accommodations for transgender students took little effort beyond brief conversations with parents to ask if their child wanted to be called something different or needed extra time for restroom breaks.
Oklahoma’s regulation requiring state permission for schools to change students’ gender on records is unusual, said Sarah Warbelow, legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy group, but it follows a pattern of restrictions nationally.
“I think there’s this misconception on behalf of some politicians that if you take away the support system, then young people will simply stop being transgender,” Warbelow said. “When we know the reality is they continue to be transgender. They simply will live a more isolated and sometimes miserable young adulthood or adolescence.”
Surveys and research show that LGBTQ youth whose community affirms their identity and uses their chosen pronouns are less likely to be suicidal.
J. Doe was upset about being identified as a girl long before he realized he was transgender.
As a 5-year-old, he argued with other children that he was a boy. His mother remembers him coming to her in tears, asking why God didn’t make him a boy. He cried when he received the girls toy from McDonald’s Happy Meals. When he discovered what pronouns were at around age 9, he began insisting on being called “he” and “him.”
His parents — a churchgoing mother who leans liberal and a father who voted for Donald Trump — supported him at every step. His mother had a feeling he’d one day identify as gay or transgender.
“I sat back and had to wait for him to figure it out, because that’s not my job to tell him or put that in his head,” Jane Doe said. “He needed to figure that out on his own, and that’s what he did.”
He went on puberty blockers in seventh grade, and started taking testosterone two years later. Recently, facial hair came in, causing him to become preoccupied with how often he should shave, and whether it’s true that shaving causes the hair to grow back quicker and fuller.
Trans-rights activists protest at the state Capitol in Oklahoma City, in Feb. 2023, as lawmakers advanced a ban on gender-affirming health care for minors. Sue Ogrocki / AP
J. Doe’s parents found Payton, their lawyer, when they searched online a year ago for help updating J. Doe’s gender on official records, trying to head off problems at school. He had already legally changed his name in middle school to ensure that a substitute teacher never misgendered him by accident.
Payton started the Oklahoma Equality Law Center in late 2020 to provide legal services to LGBTQ people.
A governor’s order in Oklahoma bars changing the gender on birth certificates, but Payton has worked around this by asking judges to approve orders to update gender markers on other records. He has seen how significant it is for people to have their official identification affirm who they are, as well as help them pass at school or work, access proper health care and feel safer.
“It’s transformative — I’ve seen it turn lives over instantaneously,” he said.
In the past three years, Payton has gotten these orders approved for 172 people, including 25 minors, in the state, he said.
Last February, a judge approved Payton’s petition to update J. Doe’s gender to male on official records maintained by “all political subdivisions,” such as his school district, Moore Public Schools, just south of Oklahoma City. J. Doe’s driver’s permit now lists him as male, and his parents assumed everything would be taken care of at school once they gave administrators a copy of the court order.
But on the first day of school in August, J. Doe saw an “F” next to gender on his class schedule. He worried people would see it. His parents called the school administrators, who said they wanted to ask the Oklahoma Department of Education for advice, according to the family and the suit.
Moore Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.
The following month, the state Board of Education passed its emergency rule, and then the month after that, the board voted to deny the request to change J. Doe’s records. Payton and J. Doe’s family said they learned of the Oct. 26 vote as it was happening.
“It really shows where the state board’s priorities are, especially when Oklahoma is one of the worst states for education,” said J. Doe, referring to multipleanalyses that rank the state at or near the bottom for education quality. “And they’re focusing on transgender kids. I just really don’t get it.”
J. Doe became depressed after the state board’s vote, he said. He feared that people who have only known him as a boy would find out he’s transgender and ostracize him, or worse. He stayed home from school for nearly two weeks.
“If the world was safer towards trans people, it would probably be a different story of who I was comfortable with knowing that I was trans,” J. Doe said, “but really I just don’t know what could happen with people knowing that.”
He did not want his identity revealed, in this article or in the lawsuit, because he does not want to become a poster child for the transgender community. He said he wants to play video games and figure out what he wants to do after high school.
“He’s never wanted to be ‘the transgender kid,’” Jane Doe said. “He just wants to be him.”
The family decided to file the suit, with help from Payton and the nonprofit advocacy group Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, because they realized that J. Doe was not going to be the last one in this situation.
“Someone needs to stand up for kids coming up behind him,” his mother said. “It’s gotten to a point where you can’t be quiet anymore. You’ve got to do something.”
Same-sex couples can now legally marry in Estonia, in a landmark moment for the Baltic states.
LGBTQ+ people in Estonia have been able to register civil unions since 2016, but the country became the first former Soviet republic to legalise same-sex marriage in June 2023 after a vote of 55 to 34 in the country’s 101-seat parliament.
The legislation officially came into force on New Year’s Day (1 January) and same-sex couples in the country can now register their marriage applications online.
It is believed the first applications will be processed and certified by early February.
Estonia is the first former Soviet republic to legalise equal marriage. (Getty)
Estonia’s minister of social protection, Signe Riisalo, said: “Laws provide clarity and influence our attitudes. I hope that unfounded fears will recede and that critics of this decision will realise that what is being taken away is not something that is being taken away, but something very important that is being added for many of us.”
Keio Soomelt, the project manager for the Baltic Pride festival, described the move as an “important” moment for Estonia.
“For the LGBT+ community, it is a very important message from the government that says, finally, we are as equal as other couples, that we are valuable and entitled to the same services and have the same options,” he said, according to The Guardian.
Estonian president Lauri Hussar (third from left) at Baltic Pride 2023, which was held in Tallinn, Estonia (Facebook)
Also speaking to The Guardian, Marielle Tuum, a teacher from the capital, Tallinn, who will register her marriage to her German girlfriend in the spring, said: “Ten years ago, I didn’t see as many same-sex couples holding hands in public. People are more open now in Estonia.
“I’m really happy that I can do a proper wedding at home and not elsewhere, that has less meaning.”
After the vote in June, prime minister Kaja Kallas sent a message to other central European nations, saying: “It’s a difficult fight, but marriage and love is something that you have to promote.”
Writing on social media, she went on to say: “We’re building a society where everyone’s rights are respected and people can love freely.”
Florida Republicans’ book bans have resulted in thousands of books being yanked from school libraries statewide. The Duval County Public Schools system alone pulled more than 22,000 titles from circulation.
Over half of those books centered around LGBTQ+ history or characters and a contractor was hired to dispose of them. Instead of burning the books, they donated them to a radical anarchist bookstore that is going to redistribute them to any kids in Florida who ask for them.
Firestorm Books in Asheville, North Carolina, was offered the books after Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ (R) radical agenda went into effect in the Sunshine State. But instead of letting the sun go down on the titles, the store has announced plans to ship them to Florida youth for free.
The Banned Books Back project will redistribute 22,500 titles to kids or parents who fill out an encrypted online form. They can choose picture books (grades 4-8) or chapter books (grades 8-12). Each shipment will include five or six books, stickers, and zines.
While the project is only currently welcoming Florida youth, they hope to expand to other states. The store is trying to raise $30,000 to help them cover the cost of shipping all the books to young readers.
“We understand book bans as a symptom of authoritarian power, so it isn’t effective to focus solely on access to individual titles without addressing the underlying power relations,” staff told Autostraddle. “Yes, we want kids in Florida to have these 22,500 books, but we also want to live in a world where there aren’t powerful adults imposing their worldviews through bans, punishment, and policing.”
Arienne Childrey is running to be the first transgender member of the Ohiolegislature — and she’s running against a state representative who sponsored a drag ban and supported bills restricting gender-affirming care and trans participation in school sports.
“If you’re going to attack our communities, then you’re gonna have to compete against someone from our community,” Childrey told the Ohio Capital Journal.
Childrey has declared her candidacy in the Democratic primary in Ohio House District 84, located in the northwestern part of the state. No other Democrat has entered the race so far. The incumbent is Republican Angela King.
King and Rep. Josh Williams are the lead sponsors of House Bill 245, which would ban drag performances outside of adult entertainment venues. Penalties for violation would include criminal charges. It’s awaiting action in a House committee. In testifying for the bill in November, King voiced objections to a drag show held during a Pride event in her district last summer. Childrey organized a protest against the bill.
King also supported a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors and one that would bar trans girls and women from participating in female sports in public schools. The legislature has passed these bills, but Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed them last week. An override is possible.
Childrey, a Virginia native, has lived in Ohio since 2014. She is the founder of Northwest Ohio Trans Advocacy. This is her first run for elected office.
“It’s well past time that we’ve got somebody who goes to the statehouse who’s actually interested in dealing with those issues — issues that actually impact people that can help our lives — rather than somebody who’s more focused on who they can hurt rather than who they can help,” Childrey told the Capital Journal.
Her priority issues, in addition to LGBTQ+ rights, include support for public education and job creation, expanding broadband access, and strengthening unions. “I’m committed to being accessible to our constituents, so that together we can make a real difference in our district, and state,” her campaign websitesays.
“You should have representation that actually cares about your day-to-day life and people that are actually working to make things better,” she said in the Capital Journal interview. “Together, we can actually make some real change one step at a time.”
Childrey, who is 40, transitioned at age 34. “I know what gender-affirming care is for me,” she told the publication. “I know that it was lifesaving. I know the years that I wasted … before I transitioned. … I’ve never regretted my transition.”
“The only thing that could possibly make me more happy than being the first trans woman elected in the state of Ohio is to not be the only trans person elected in the state of Ohio,” she added.
French President Emmanuel Macron appointed 34-year-old Education Minister Gabriel Attal [photo] as his new prime minister on Tuesday, seeking to breathe new life into his second mandate ahead of European parliament elections.
The move will not necessarily lead to any major political shift, but signals a desire for Macron to try to move beyond last year’s unpopular pension and immigration reforms and improve his centrist party’s chances in the June EU ballot.
Attal, a close Macron ally who became a household name as government spokesman during the COVID pandemic, will replace outgoing Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne. Attal will be France’s youngest prime minister and the first to be openly gay.
A transgender man’s murder in August has become a teaching opportunity in progressive Wayne County, Michigan, as mourning friends and family members were forced to defend his gender identity after death.
The senseless killing of 26-year-old Jean Butchart, shot in the head by a stranger on a hot August evening in Belleville, shocked his loved ones. But a cascade of misinformation based on conflicting reports about his gender worsened their heartbreak.
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As police searched for Butchart’s killer, conflicting information on the victim’s driver’s license led police and the media to misgender him as a woman.
“It was an honest mistake,” Julisa Abad, a trans woman who serves as director of transgender outreach for the advocacy group Fair Michigan, told news outlet MLive.
On the day of his murder, Butchart had started a new job doing landscape maintenance at a mobile home park. First responders found him motionless on the ground with no pulse and a gunshot wound to the head. He was declared dead at the scene.
While Butchart’s driver’s license identified him as male, his name had yet to be changed on the document. As such, his license reflected his deadname. Though Michigan has made changing sex on identity documents relatively easy and affordable, a name change is more complicated, time-consuming, and, for some, prohibitively expensive.
Witnesses at the crime scene identified Butchart as Jean, using the French pronunciation common in the Great Lakes region close to Quebec, so police were aware of the victim’s male gender identity.
“They called him Jean,” Van Buren Township Police Chief Jason Wright said. “That’s how we knew.”
Over the next few days, as the crime was reported internally and to the public, conflicting information on his driver’s license became a source of grief.
First, the Van Buren Township Police Department posted a news release about Butchart’s death in association with the capture of Matthew Torrey Tiggs Jr., 22, who was charged with Butchart’s killing as well as an attempted murder and assault in two other incidents over 10 days in August.
That release identified the victim as “26-year-old Jean Butchart” with no gender indication.
Then, when the prosecutor’s office issued a news release, the release identified Butchart by their deadname with “Jean” added in quotes, as is customary with nicknames.
“Because the names were female names with no explanation of the gender identity of the victim, it was wrongly assumed that the entry ‘male’ [for Butchart] was a mistake,” explained Maria Miller, the prosecutor’s office director of communications.
That misinformation was amplified in news reports and on social media, leading to frustration and anger among Butchart’s friends and family, who overwhelmed officials with an email campaign demanding a correction and a formal apology.
“We apologize to his family, friends, and to the transgender community,” Miller said in an email. “We immediately corrected this error after we confirmed Mr. Butchart’s gender identity. There was never any intent to misgender Mr. Butchart.”
While the mistake was traumatic for Butchart’s friends and family, Miller called the case “helpful” in spurring cultural competence training for officials in Wayne County.
Now, 18 area police departments have attended a special training session, with more planned for other Wayne County police departments and the sheriff’s office.
“We have to realize that not everything is coming from a place of malice,” said Fair Michigan’s Julisa Abad. “We’re all still learning all the alphabets of the LGBTQ+ umbrella – I don’t even know all of it.”
A new rule requiring child welfare agencies to place LGBTQ children in “environments free of hostility, mistreatment, or abuse” based on the child’s sexual orientation, gender identity or expression is drawing opposition from Republicans.
The proposed rule, issued in September by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), also would require caregivers to undergo cultural competency training to ensure LGBTQ youths are placed in homes where their identities are affirmed.
In a statement, Health Department Secretary Xavier Becerra said the proposal puts “children’s well-being first.”
Studies have shown that LGBTQ young people are overrepresented in the child welfare system. Lesbian, gay and bisexual children are more than twice as likely to experience foster care placement compared with their heterosexual peers, a 2019 study found, and roughly 30 percent of foster youth identify as LGBTQ, according to the Children’s Bureau, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the child welfare system in the U.S.
About 5 percent of foster youth identify as transgender.
But the rule has met some opposition in the GOP.
A bill introduced last month by Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is currently running for an open Senate seat, would prevent foster and adoptive families from being required to affirm a transgender child’s gender identity. The measure, called the Sensible Adoption For Every Home Act, has four Republican co-sponsors.
Banks in a statement to Fox News said the bill was drafted in response to the HHS proposal, which he said discriminates against prospective caretakers that are “opposed to irreversible sex change procedures on kids.”
LGBTQ rights advocates have denounced the Indiana congressman’s bill and his justification for introducing it, which they say reflects misconceptions about gender-affirming health care for youth and misrepresents what the Health Department’s draft rule aims to achieve.
“No part of this says anything about changing the sex of a child,” said Allen Morris, policy director at the National LGBTQ Task Force. “It’s talking about making sure that [LGBTQ youths] are not in an abusive home or somewhere that’s going to mistreat them.”
Other Republicans have argued that the proposed rule would discriminate against faith-based providers.
A bill filed in the House and Senate in November by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), a former GOP presidential candidate, would prevent government agencies from penalizing child welfare service providers that are unwilling to “take action contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs,” including affirming a child’s gender identity or sexual orientation. The duo introduced identical legislation in 2019 and 2021.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the bill’s 17 Republican co-sponsors in the Senate, wrote in a December editorial that the measure would effectively overrule the Biden administration’s “new woke standards.” Rubio’s Lifting Local Communities Act, introduced last January, would similarly bolster the ability of religious organizations that receive federal funding to operate in accordance with their religious beliefs.
In a Dec. 8 letter to Becerra, however, 19 Democratic senators voiced their support for the Health Department’s proposed rule, writing that its stipulations are needed “to protect children in the foster care system more than ever.”
“As members of Congress we are committed to ensuring all children, including LGBTQIA+ children, thrive in safe and stable environments,” the senators, led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), wrote in the letter.
Compared with their cisgender and heterosexual peers, LGBTQ children and adolescents in the child welfare system are more likely to report poor treatment related to their sexual orientation or gender identity. In a 2014 study of LGBTQ foster youths in Los Angeles, nearly 38 percent reported poor treatment connected to their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
Twenty-eight states and Washington, D.C., have explicit laws or policies in place to protect LGBTQ youths in foster care from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and another six have laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation only, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit organization that tracks LGBTQ laws.
In 13 states, state-licensed child welfare agencies may legally refuse to place and provide services to children and families — including LGBTQ people and same-sex couples — if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs.
Republicans at the state level have also sought to push back on the rule.
In a November letter to the Children’s Bureau, more than a dozen Republican state attorneys general said the Health Department’s proposal discriminates against Christian caretakers and provides solutions to a problem that does not exist.
The letter, led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R), references a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that sided with a Philadelphia Catholic social services agency that had refused to accept same-sex couples as foster parents.
“This proposed rule seeks to accomplish indirectly what the Supreme Court found unconstitutional just two years ago: remove faith-based providers from the foster care system if they will not conform their religious beliefs on sexual orientation and gender identity,” the attorneys general wrote in the Nov. 27 letter.
A Health Department spokesperson declined to comment on the letter but said members of the public are encouraged to express their views on the draft rule. A 30-day public comment period ended Nov. 27.
Responses to the proposed rule from Christian organizations have been mixed, although most submitted to the Health Department center around concerns that the rule, if implemented, would discriminate against faith-based providers and hinder the recruitment and retention of foster families, many of whom are religious.
“Among the most concerning — and most likely — negative impacts of the proposed regulations would be a significant chilling effect on the involvement of people of religious faith in the foster system,” one group wrote in a Nov. 20 letter to Becerra. “This rule would push many of them away.”
Nonreligious service providers, meanwhile, have largely argued that the draft rule is needed to protect LGBTQ young people already vulnerable to abuse.
“With all of the pain, rejection, broken promises and separation that many youth in foster care experience, a targeted and specific plan for LGBTQI+ youth’s health and wellbeing through safe and appropriate placements can ensure youth are acknowledged and affirmed when they express their needs,” wrote a coordinator for a Cleveland-based nonprofit that works with foster youth.
“Then, when this plan is followed through, youth will actually experience their needs being met, their voices mattering and a caring network of individuals,” they wrote. “This is vital for all youth, but especially youth who identify LGBTQI+ because we know that so often this is not the case.”
But some nonreligious and Democratic organizations have been critical of the proposal, which they say does not go far enough because it still allows for individuals who do not support LGBTQ identities to become foster parents.
Multiple groups in comments submitted to the Health Department referenced a 2021 survey of young people who concealed their LGBTQ identities prior to placement over fears of “how their social worker may react” and “concerns about losing their placement.”
“The flexibility allowed within the rule presumes that those who are LGBTQI+ and not yet out would be served well when placed with any family — including those who opt out of being ‘safe and appropriate,’” the executive director of one children’s rights organization wrote. “However, not requiring that every provider be a safe and appropriate placement for LGBTQI+ children will mean that LGBTQI+ youth are placed in inadequate placements.”
Former county clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples in Kentucky, must pay more than $260,000 in legal fees and expenses after one couple sued her.
That’s on top of the $100,000 in damages already awarded to David Ermold and David Moore.
The gay couple took the former Rowan County clerk to court in 2015 after she declined to issue them a marriage licence.
Davis’ legal woes began that year when she started denying marriage licences to queer couples – despite a landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage across the US.
Now, Davis must pay an additional $246,026 in attorney fees and $14,058 in expenses.
Michael Garland, part of the legal team representing Ermold and Moore, told USA Today in September that his clients “couldn’t be happier” with the ruling.
Davis’ legal team argued that the fees and costs sought by the couple’s attorneys were excessive, but Bunning disagreed. The judge said Davis must pay the fees and costs because the couple prevailed in their lawsuit, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
It’s likely that attorneys for Davis will appeal against the decision.
Davis drew international media attention when she was briefly jailed in 2015 over her refusal to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples. She argued that doing so would violate her religious beliefs as a Christian as well as “God’s definition of marriage”.
