A far right anti-LGBTQ “pro-family” lawmaker responsible for drafting Hungary’s pro-Christian constitution that bans same-sex marriage was arrested fleeing an all-gay sex party in Belgium that violated Brussels’ coronavirus lockdown.
Hungarian politician József Szájer, 59, resigned as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Sunday, after his arrest Friday, The Daily Beast reports. According to reports he was carrying a backpack with narcotics – ecstasy – which he denies.
Officers burst into the ground floor of a bar on Rue des Pierres in the Belgian capital on Friday night to discover alcohol, drugs and what has been described as “a party of legs in the air,” Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure (DH) reported, with a source claiming: “We interrupted a gang bang!”
Reports say about 20 people or more were involved at the event, held above the gay bar and near a police station. Neighbors had called to complain about the noise.
Hungary protects the institution of marriage between man and woman, a matrimonial relationship voluntarily established, as well as the family as the basis for the survival of the nation,” reads the 2011 constitution he co-wrote. It is subtitled, “God Bless Hungarians.”
Szájer has been an elected official for three decades, since 1990. He also once served as party leader of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s far right populist Christian nationalism Fidesz party.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed provided a sobering update on the coronavirus pandemic Tuesday and said the city will need to take “more restrictive action” this week to temper the explosion of coronavirus cases. New health protocols could come as early as tomorrow.
Breed said the city is reviewing a new public health order implemented by Santa Clara County on Monday and is considering similar measures, including limits on retail capacity and a more stringent travel quarantine. Restrictions on gatherings are also in discussion.
“Let me be clear, it’s not good,” the mayor said. “Cases are spiking. Hospitalizations are increasing. Our infection rate is at a higher point than where it was this summer…Our dangerous winter has arrived. The truth is we’re going to have to take more restrictive action. Santa Clara added mandatory travel quarantines. These are things we have to consider.”
Amid a surge, Los Angeles County shuttered outdoor dining and while Mayor Breed said that’s not an immediate step in the city’s plan, it’s not off the table.
“Unfortunately, we can’t rule it out,” she said. “As soon as we see it’s necessary, it could be a possibility, but we can’t say what that would mean in a timeline… We will make sure we provide as much notification as we can as soon as we can.”
The city’s Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax provided an update on the virus spread and said in the last three weeks, daily new cases have tripled with the city now reporting an average of 140 new cases a day.
“We don’t expect this to stabilize any time soon,” Colfax said. “We have more virus circulating than ever before.”
Hospitalizations of COVID patients have doubled in the last 10 days and Colfax said a bed shortage is imminent just before Christmas.
“That is a sobering thought,” he said. “San Franciscans sick from COVID-19 around the December holidays with no available beds at our local hospitals. We hope this doesn’t happen, but it’s an increasing likelihood as we see this virus spreads locally like never before.”
In Santa Clara County, a mandatory 14-day quarantine for residents and travelers entering the region from more than 150 miles away went into effect Monday. The new rule limits hotels in the county to only essential travelers. Colfax said a similar requirement could be issued in San Francisco as early as Wednesday.
The San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project at the GLBT Historical Society collects and documents the unique and diverse history of Bay Area direct-action movements that protested social and governmental inaction in the face of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s and 1990s. ACT UP/San Francisco, ACT/UP Golden Gate, Stop AIDS Now Or Else, AIDS Action Pledge, Citizens for Medical Justice, Enola Gay and related groups were part of a nationwide ACT UP movement that would go on to change the very practice of medicine and speed up the transformation of cultural attitudes about gender and sexuality.
After four years of efforts, I am pleased to share that the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project has been completed in time for World AIDS Day this December 1. Composed of interviews with 23 Bay Area activists, this new collection in the society’s Oral History Collection is among the most extensive histories of local AIDS activism in the United States. The interviews, available here, paint a communal portrait of the unique challenges, debates and triumphs of this remarkable movement.
Determined Activism
Historian Joey Plaster launched the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project to document the determination and kinds of activism that had defined queer politics during the AIDS crisis. While the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP/New York had already been documented in films such as How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, the history of the Bay Area’s response to the epidemic had received relatively little attention until the publication of Emily Hobson’s Lavender and Red. In her monograph, Hobson argues that Bay Area activists were the first to confront the epidemic using direct-action tactics — even before Larry Kramer gave the speech that is often regarded as the catalyst for ACT UP in New York.
The San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project provides new information and context to ACT UP’s work in the Bay Area. Plaster’s conversation with Jack Davis is a prime example. Davis planned the “Blood and Money” ritual protest that Enola Gay performed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1984, during which protestors poured blood on the road at the entrance to the nuclear-weapons laboratory to decry government research priorities emphasizing weaponry over AIDS research. Most accounts suggest that the blood was fake, but Jack clarifies — the blood was real. It was his own. “This was also the period when we didn’t know — we knew that AIDS was transmitted by body fluids, so this blood was dangerous,” Davis explains. “And most of the people watching us knew that as well.” It has been an honor to play a part in bringing these interviews to the public. I want to thank Joey for getting the project off the ground, the volunteers who supported this work over the years, and the interviewees. But the lion’s share of my thanks must go to all those activists who have fought and continue to fight the battle against AIDS.
“Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot. I feel lucky to be writing this. To be here. To have arrived at this place in my life. I feel overwhelming gratitude for the incredible people who have supported me along this journey. I can’t begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self. I’ve been endlessly inspired by so many in the trans community. Thank you for your courage, your generosity and ceaselessly working to make this world a more inclusive and compassionate place. I will offer whatever support I can and continue to strive for a more loving and equal society,” he wrote.“I love that I am trans. And I love that I am queer. And the more I hold myself close and fully embrace who I am, the more I dream, the more my heart grows and the more I thrive. To all the trans people who deal with harassment, self-loathing, abuse, and the threat of violence every day: I see you, I love you, and I will do everything I can to change this world for the better,” Page continued.
Page uses both he/him and they/them pronouns, and describes himself as transgender and non-binary, meaning that his gender identity is neither man nor woman.
Page broke out from his native Canada in 2005 with the revenge thriller “Hard Candy.” Two years later, he starred in Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s landmark indie “Juno,” for which Page received an Academy Award nomination among other accolades.
HIs notable roles include Kitty Pryde in the “X-Men” series, Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” “Whip It!” and Sony’s reboot of “Flatliners.” He has produced and starred in films such as “Tallulah” and “Freeheld,” and last year marked his directorial debut examining environmental racism faced by people of color and the First Nations communities of Canada.
Prior to transition, Page was one of the most visible out gay actors in Hollywood. The Tuesday announcement further enriches his legacy, and adds him to a small but growing number of out trans creators and stars in Hollywood. This includes performers (Laverne Cox, Trace Lysette, Brian Michael Smith) and creators (The Wachowski Sisters, “Transparent” creator Joey Soloway).
Last year, Varietybroke the news of the groundbreaking overall content production deal that Netflix signed with Janet Mock, a noted trans storyteller and director of shows like “Pose” and “Hollywood.”
Elisa Crespo, a trans candidate for New York City Council, has received an outpouring of support form the LGBT+ community after a “hatchet piece” on her sex work past.
But on Sunday (29 November) a derogatory “hatchet piece” was published about Crespo by the New York Post on her candidacy and history as a sex worker.
Crespo has been open about her time as a sex worker, and how her experience shaped her politics today. She previously told Gay City News: “I had a really rough, challenging, testing adolescence, and sex working landed me in trouble with the law.
“That changed my way of thinking, my politics, and the course of my life in general… because I realised I had to do something and I changed my life for the better.”
But the New York Post treated Crespo’s past as a scandalous revelation, describing her as “an ex-prostitute who was busted in a police sting”.
The LGBT+ community in politics and beyond jumped to Crespo’s defence and slammed the tabloid publication’s “hatchet piece”.
Congressman-elect Torres wrote on Twitter: “Across the country, LGBTQ candidates have come under siege for being who we are. I speak from first-hand experience: the voters of the Bronx won’t be swayed by appeals to bigotry.
“Both the New York Post and the scoundrels behind the hatchet piece should be ashamed of themselves. Word of advice: transphobia is not only bad morals. It’s bad politics.”
Nearly two decades after Bruce Bozzi Jr. lost his first love to AIDS, he revisited their love story in a social media post shared with tens of thousands of strangers.
“On a super hot day in July, we decided to meet on the corner of 14th Street and 5th Avenue,” Bozzi, 54, a restaurateur, wrote in the caption, paired with photos of a striking man in his 20s. “Tommy stood there with his jet black hair, his eyes brilliant with shades of green and blue and that smile you can see in this photograph. Being gay back then was hard, exciting and complicated.”
“Tommy, I think of you every time I stand on 14th & 5th no matter what season it is in New York and much more than that. I guess it’s not the amount of time but the quality that is so important,” Bozzi’s message said. “No matter, we were robbed of you too early! Tommy Grella, January 18, 1963 to June 24, 1992. You never forget your first loves, now do you?”https://www.instagram.com/p/B9nII1-ptNY/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=8&wp=1116&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com&rp=%2Ffeature%2Fnbc-out%2Femotional-instagram-memorial-aids-victims-stories-reach-new-generation-n1249436#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A881%2C%22ls%22%3A858%2C%22le%22%3A878%7D
Bozzi is among thousands of people who have shared memories of loved ones on The AIDS Memorial Instagram account. While remembering those lost to AIDS is often relegated to World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, this social memorial honors them year-round. Every post on the Instagram page tells a heartfelt — and often heartbreaking — story of someone who was taken too soon as a result of the disease, which has claimed more than 32 million lives since the start of the epidemic.
Preserving a hidden history
The AIDS Memorial — created by Stuart, who is based in Scotland and asked that his full name not be published to protect his privacy — has shared more than 7,000 stories and amassed over 150,000 followers since it debuted in April 2017. The posts use images of those who have been lost instead of quilt squares or statistics to put faces to the epidemic.
Stuart said he gets submissions from around the world, although the majority (75 percent to 80 percent) are from the United States. He speculated that Americans are “more open, more forthcoming” about sharing personal stories. Regular submissions also come from England, Australia, Canada and Brazil.
Ron Sese, a volunteer for The AIDS Memorial, said preserving history was among the memorial’s inspirations.
“If the history books won’t write about us, how do we tell our stories? How do we share our stories? How does the next generation learn about the generation that came before them?” he asked.
As the account’s submissions and followers grew, Sese said, “we started to see a community build.”
“We started to see someone submitting a post about a sick father, a dear friend, and people who knew that person would then reach out in the comment section,” he said. “There would be a reunion of sorts, and that value is hard to come by — especially in a social media age.”
Sese said part of the beauty of The AIDS Memorial is that it’s bringing a rich and important history to younger people exactly where they are: social media.
“There is an entire group of people who don’t know life before the internet — they’ve never known a life without a timeline,” he said. “If this is where people are sourcing information and this is where people are learning day to day … then this is where we need to meet them and present them that information.”
‘The saddest I ever felt’
Most of those who submit images and share stories, like Bozzi, are loved ones of those lost to AIDS. Some share paragraphs, while others post just a few words.
On Nov. 21, which was Transgender Day of Remembrance, Marie Jose shared the story of her Uncle Boris, who died in 1996 at age 30. Jose was just 7 when Boris, an Ecuadorian immigrant who lived in Queens, New York, died of AIDS-related complications.
“This is my uncle Boris who was the best dressed, most fun and irreverent person I knew growing up. I wish I’d gotten more time with [her],” Jose wrote in the caption, along with a slideshow of images showing Boris donning attire spanning the gender spectrum. “Boris had a magic to [her] that continues to cast spells.”https://www.instagram.com/p/CH3mvSrj62O/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=8&wp=1116&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com&rp=%2Ffeature%2Fnbc-out%2Femotional-instagram-memorial-aids-victims-stories-reach-new-generation-n1249436#%7B%22ci%22%3A1%2C%22os%22%3A883%2C%22ls%22%3A858%2C%22le%22%3A878%7D
“Boris had the best, loudest laugh that sounded like a Times Square 90s bruja,” Jose said, using a Spanish word for “witch.” “Boris also went by Exotica, [her] performer name and [she] used to wear nipple tassels and the most snatched outfits. She dressed for the gawds.” (While Jose used male pronouns to refer to her uncle in the post and noted that her uncle used male pronouns while he was alive, she requested that female pronouns be used in this article.)
At the end of the caption, Jose recalled the day of Boris’ funeral and how it “rained a monsoon.”
“I still remember [her] queer childhood friends from the block, 3 of them, holding hands around [her] tombstone, crying. They were the last ones to leave,” she wrote. “I remember feeling the saddest I ever felt in my whole little life, watching them thro the car window, they were standing through the storming rain and saying goodbye to no doubt, another chosen family member lost to AIDS.”
‘Lying there in my “deathbed”‘
While most of the AIDS Memorial posts are about loss, some are about survival and perseverance. Texas native Aaron Holloway’s post, shared on Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day, is one such example.
“I was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure. The nephrologist proclaimed that my kidneys were ‘gone’ and I would never urinate again,” Holloway wrote, adding that he was just a college senior at the time. “Afterwards, I was simultaneously diagnosed with AIDS by another physician in the presence of my mom and thereby outed. I will never forget what the physician said to me, ‘Wake up! It’s AIDS. Are you surprised?'”https://www.instagram.com/p/CGNxwEyDhh8/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=8&wp=1116&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com&rp=%2Ffeature%2Fnbc-out%2Femotional-instagram-memorial-aids-victims-stories-reach-new-generation-n1249436#%7B%22ci%22%3A2%2C%22os%22%3A885%2C%22ls%22%3A858%2C%22le%22%3A878%7D
“I never told my mom I was gay and she did not know,” Holloway said. “Lying there in my ‘deathbed,’ I believed my mom would abandon me. She did not.”
Holloway said that after he was given just a month to live in March 2008, his kidneys “miraculously” regained function. Not only did Holloway finish his bachelor’s degree — cum laude, no less — but he also went on to get a master’s degree.
‘Afraid to be forgotten’
Most of the stories shared on The AIDS Memorial are those of LGBTQ people, as men who have sex with men and transgender women are disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS. That having been said, the memorial includes many stories about non-LGBTQ people, too.
“It reminds you that this isn’t something that just impacts gay men,” Sese said.
One such person is Debbie, a West Virginia woman whose daughter, Renee Taylor, shared a memorial post on Aug. 5, the 17th anniversary of Debbie’s death.https://www.instagram.com/p/CDhZvbEjJTv/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=8&wp=1116&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com&rp=%2Ffeature%2Fnbc-out%2Femotional-instagram-memorial-aids-victims-stories-reach-new-generation-n1249436#%7B%22ci%22%3A3%2C%22os%22%3A1268%2C%22ls%22%3A858%2C%22le%22%3A878%7D
A federal judge has signed off on a settlement between the estate of Aimee Stephens and the Metro Detroit funeral home that fired her in 2013 after she came out to her boss as transgender.
U.S. District Judge Sean Cox on Monday approved the terms of the settlement between the estate of Stephens, who died in May, and her former employer, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, which going forward is prohibited from firing employees on the basis of transgender status.
Under the terms of the agreement, Harris Homes is to pay $130,000 to Stephens’ estate, including $63,724 in back pay with interest and $66,276 in damages. The consent decree also says Harris Homes must pay another $120,000 to the ACLU Foundation for costs and plaintiff attorney fees.
Stephens’ case was one of three involved in June’s landmark Supreme Court ruling for LGBTQ employment discrimination protections. She died in May before the ruling was issued.
Daniel Corona drove home from City Hall in West Wendover, Nevada, on a recent Tuesday evening, passing the familiar bright waving hand of “Wendover Will.”
Originally part of a local casino, the 63-foot neon cowboy sign has been a community landmark for 68 years, a brightly lit beacon letting weary travelers know they had almost made it to the city after a long, dark drive through the Great Basin Desert.
“He’s seen it all,” Corona later said. “He’s been here for all of it.”
It had been a week since Election Day, and minutes earlier, Corona had been sworn in as West Wendover’s mayor, marking the beginning of his second term. His first victory in 2016, won by just 100 votes, not only made him the state’s youngest mayor at 25, but also Nevada’s first openly gay, Latino mayor — a win he did not expect in this rural, northeastern Nevada city nestled in Elko County, one of the state’s most conservative regions.
On his drives home, Corona usually slowed to glance up at Wendover Will. Donated to the city in 2004, the sign reminded Corona of the community’s resilience, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has hit West Wendover hard, forcing its five casinos to temporarily shutter earlier this year.
Corona also saw Wendover Will as a reminder to those outside the community of a little more than 4,200 people that the city had its own identity. Elko County is a predominantly white area in whichmining remains the top industry; West Wendover is a casino town in which more than 60 percent of the population is Latino.
This year, while Elko County remained a Republican stronghold,Democratic candidates — from the presidential election to a county commissioner’s race — won in West Wendover, making it the only city in the deep red county to go blue. Though the margin was narrow, residents and city officials believe the results reflect increased voting by the community’s younger Latino residents whose beliefs lean left — similar to other states around the country where that demographic led Democrats to victory.
Corona is only about a month younger than West Wendover, which incorporated in 1991.
Less than 8 square miles, West Wendover sits on the edge of the Utah border, so close that the city runs on Mountain Standard Time instead of Pacific Standard Time like the rest of Nevada. Prior to the pandemic, the dusty, desert city saw about 15,000 to 20,000 tourists, mostly from the Salt Lake City region, coming to its casinos each weekend.
A close-knit community in which everyone knows one another by one to two degrees of separation, West Wendover is a place where neighbors leave groceries on the doorsteps of families struggling financially without being asked, residents said.
When Corona told people in high school that he was gay, he was comforted by how accepting most of his classmates were. He found the same reception during his mayoral campaign in 2016, with few residents focusing on his sexual orientation. If anything, he said, they had more concerns about his age or that he still lived with his mother.
“Or they wanted to know more about how I was a Democrat,” Corona said, laughing.
The city voted for Republican presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012 and has only recently begun to lean more liberal in local and national elections, as the number of registered voters rose from 661 in 2008 to 1,125 in 2020. Residents also say that the city’s younger voters — the median age in West Wendover is 31 — became more active in the political process.
Corona became interested in politics at 16 when he heard a speech by Barack Obama. After high school, he moved to Salt Lake City and then Las Vegas to attend college, but he returned to West Wendover in 2015 to be closer to family.
Tired of casino interests influencing West Wendover’s local government — people in upper management at the casinos often won city council seats — and pledging to diversify the city’s economy, Corona signed up to run for mayor. During his 2016 campaign, residents saw him canvassing the city for months, knocking on almost every door, learning about what the community wanted.
“I’d never seen or heard of anyone really doing anything like that in town before,” Carolyn Santillanez, 51, who was raised in West Wendover, said. “I think a lot of people came out to vote for him because he was actually talking to people.”
Wendover Boulevard, the city’s main strip.Kim Raff / for NBC News
Corona believes he won over the city’s residents with his support for a 2016 state ballot initiative that legalized recreational marijuana, which he promised to bring to West Wendover as a new industry. While the initiative failed in Elko County, it passed in West Wendover with about 56 percent of the vote, and in Nevada as a whole.
By December 2019, Corona helped open the first marijuana dispensary in the county. The dispensary not only created at least 50 new jobs, but it has also generated $500,000 in tax revenue since it opened, even with a two-month Covid-19 closure, city officials said.
Corona also made local government more accessible — posting city news updates on social media — and exposed the community to more liberal viewpoints. In July 2019, Corona invited then-Democratic presidential hopeful Julian Castro to West Wendover, which marked the first visit of a presidential candidate.
In 2017, Corona spearheaded and passed a city resolution that supported the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA, which allowed immigrants who came to the United States as children but later lacked legal status to remain in the country, after President Donald Trump tried to shut it down.
“To me that really meant a lot that Mayor Corona and the city would even just put their support out there,” Alan Rojas, 25, said. A DACA recipient, Rojas was born in Mexico but had lived in West Wendover since he was a year old. “I still couldn’t vote this year, but I made sure that I told everyone I knew here that they should.”
West Wendover City Councilwoman Kathy Durham, who was elected in 2018, believes Corona inspired more civic engagement, especially with the city’s younger Latino voters.
Councilwoman Kathy Durham is also a teacher at West Wendover High School.Kim Raff / for NBC News
“They identify with him and see that he can make changes,” Durham, who teaches U.S. history, government and broadcast journalism at the local high school, said.
Jorge Aguirre, 20, said that the recent changes in the city, from the dispensary to the promise of a dog park, made him excited to vote this year. He organized a Black Lives Matter rally in June with three friends, the first of any kind of protest in the city that residents can remember.
“We really wanted to make our own community aware of what was going around in the rest of the country even if they felt like it didn’t affect them,” Aguirre said.
Jorge Aguirre, 20, helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally in West Wendover.Kim Raff / for NBC News
All of Corona’s other mayoral duties seemed simpler compared to leading West Wendover through the Covid-19 pandemic. Nearly 75 percent of the city’s residents are casino employees, and when Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak ordered a shutdown in March, most were furloughed or laid off.
That included Corona, who at the time worked as a poker room manager (the mayor’s position only pays $7,200 per year). He lost his job, like hundreds of his constituents. For months, he waited for his unemployment insurance to come through — making choices on which bills to pay — while helping other residents navigate the same process. Corona visited the local food bank, which had gone from seeing 20 families a week to 300, to ensure it had enough supplies for the community, while also picking up food for himself.
“It was a really humbling experience and in the end I feel like it brought me closer to the community, because we all knew we were going through the same thing,” he said.
The city’s casinos reopened this summer. Most residents complied with Corona’s daily reminders on social media to follow the governor’s mask mandate and social distancing guidance. Some West Wendover residents said that when traveling to other parts of Elko County for groceries or work, they’ve noticed people not taking the same measures. Last week, top state health officials criticized the county for not having clear messaging on Covid-19 safety precautions, noting that cases in the county had quintupled compared to the previous month.
But Elko County commissioners continue to push back on the state’s safety restrictions. After Nevada’s governor limited capacity in casinos and restaurants across the state to 25 percent, Commissioner Jon Karr said in an email that he and the other commissioners were working with the state to come up with a more “reasonable” plan.
The county’s human resources director, Amanda Osborne, told The Associated Press that in Elko County, “local political leadership is very divided. It’s very difficult to have an enforcement plan.”
Since March, the virus has infected more than 300 West Wendover residents, and taken the lives of four.
“Because we’re so small, everyone who passes away is a face, not just a number, and that’s probably been one of the hardest parts of all this,” Corona said.The voters’ choice
When Election Day approached, Corona was nervous. He knew the results would depend largely on how residents believed he’d handled the pandemic.
Corona wound up beating his opponent, Mike Katsonis, by a 387-vote margin, more than triple his margin in 2016. Katsonis, 69, a Republican, said he ran in the nonpartisan mayoral election so that Corona did not go unopposed. He knew that winning would be a long shot because Corona was popular and the city seemed to be leaning blue.
“In fact, I even told him after he won, ‘If I had won, I would’ve demanded a recount,’” Katsonis, a retired pharmacist, said.
The results showed the city still has a strong red contingent: Joe Biden beat Trump in West Wendover, but only by 10 votes, much less than Corona’s margin.
Kris Andersen, 55, who’s lived in the community for 29 years, said she liked Corona and appreciated his efforts to diversify the town’s economy, but did not vote for him.
“I think he’s very, very liberal and I’m much more conservative,” Andersen, a substitute teacher, said. She wanted to make sure that conservative voters remained heard in West Wendover. “I think he’s a good guy, but I just don’t think we have the same political ideas.”
As he drove home after being sworn in as mayor earlier this month, with the casinos’ neon lights in his rearview mirror, Corona worried about the record-setting rise in coronavirus cases in Nevada and the possibility of another shutdown. Corona is not sure if the city’s casinos can survive another closure.
Mayor Daniel Corona in front of City Hall.Kim Raff / for NBC News
But he took heart in the mandate from voters he saw in the election results: He received 620 votes, while Biden received only 427 and Trump received 417 in West Wendover.
“To me that means, a lot of people who voted for Trump also voted for me, which is strange because I think of myself as the opposite of him,” Corona said. “But it also shows me that there’s a lot of people who understand that I’m not just a mayor for one group or party, but working for everyone who lives here.”
Of nearly 16,000 respondents polled in the Gallup Daily Tracking Survey, 47 percent were either moderately or highly religious. Those who were older, Black or lived in the South were the most likely to be religious, researchers found.
To determine religiosity, respondents were asked about service attendance and the importance of religion in their daily lives.
Respondents who said religion was not an important part of their daily life and they never or seldom attended services were categorized as “not religious.” Those who indicated religion was important — even if they attended services less than once a month — were classified as “moderately religious,” as were those who attended services weekly, even if they said religion was not important in their lives.
Respondents who said religion was an important facet of their daily life and they attended regular services were categorized as “highly religious.”
By that metric, 27 percent were classified as moderately religious, 20 percent as highly religious and just over half (53 percent) as not religious.
According to the authors of the report, the 5.3 million religious LGBTQ adults in America “are found across the age spectrum, in every racial-ethnic group, among married and single people, among those who are parenting, and among rural and urban dwellers.”
Still, certain patterns emerged, particularly among generations.
Only 38.5 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and about 40 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds were religious. That compares to more than half (51 percent) of those 35 to 49 who could be classified as religious and 56 percent of those 50 to 64.
Religiosity was highest among people 64 and older: Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) were moderately or highly religious.
That surprised lead author Kerith J. Conron, research director at the Williams Institute, considering how unwelcoming most churches have been toward LGBTQ people historically.
“Their faith must have been pretty strong when they were younger and coming out and there were even fewer accepting places,” she said. “It persisted despite discrimination and rejection.”
She predicts those numbers will decline drastically in future years.
“My hypothesis is that fewer and fewer people in young adulthood are choosing religion. It’s a pattern we see in non-LGBT people, as well,” Conron said. “People are consciously deciding to step away from the religion of their youth because it doesn’t embrace their values.”
Even straight Americans have cited their church’s treatment of the gay community as part of the reason they’ve left, she added.
According to a 2019 Pew Research Center analysis, 26 percent of Americans identify as agnostic, atheist or “nothing in particular,” up from 17 percent just a decade earlier.
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, New York’s LGBTQ synagogue, said the barriers gay people face when participating in their faith have only started to fall.
“There’s been progress, but I deal with people all the time from liberal religious families who have faced horrible bigotry and rejection,” she said.
But, she added, the hunger for spirituality is deep among gay people — perhaps even deeper than among the larger population.
“Everyone has that desire for meaning or purpose, but for LGBT people, it’s right there on the surface,” Kleinbaum told NBC News. “Anyone who goes through the process of discovering a deeper truth about themselves, especially if it’s at odds with the larger world, understands a sense of revelation, of deeper truth. It’s our going to Mount Sinai.”
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the LGBTQ-affirming New Ways Ministry, agreed.
“LGBTQ people have many spiritual gifts which can renew religious institutions, if these groups would just perform the simple and holy acts of welcoming and listening,” DeBernardo said.
The vast majority of religious LGBTQ Americans are Christian — split fairly evenly among Catholics (25 percent), Protestants (28 percent) and other Christian denominations (24.5 percent). Only about 2.5 percent identify as Jewish and 2 percent as Muslim.
But the percentage of gay Americans who identify as part of any faith tradition is still considerably lower than in the general population, of which 67 percent is religious, according to a 2017 Gallup analysis.
Even LGBTQ Black Americans, the most likely demographic to be religious (over 70 percent), still lag behind Black people in the general population: More than 82 percent are religious.
“The reason there has been such tension between LGBTQ people and institutional religious groups has not been because LGBTQ people are not religious,” DeBernardo said, “but because faith groups have vilified them and excluded them.” Working on inclusion in the Catholic Church, he said, “I have seen an enormous number of LGBTQ people whose faith and religious identity are so strong that they continue to push for acceptance even against mammoth walls of opposition.”
Whether it’s too late for churches and synagogues to attract gay parishioners remains to be seen. But if there’s any hope, Kleinbaum said, “We have to go beyond tolerance.”
“We need to say, ‘This is who God created,’ and celebrate them.”
Indiana’s attorney general has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that allows same-sex couples to both be listed as parents on their child’s birth certificate.
The ruling came after a four-year legal battle fought by two lesbian parents, Ashlee and Ruby Henderson, who sued county health officials when they refused to include them both on their son’s birth certificate.
Their lawsuit argued that it was discriminatory to force one mother from a same-sex marriage to fork over $4,000 to $5,000 to legally adopt their child.
Seven additional couples joined the suit as plaintiffs, and in January 2020 the courts finally ruled that since Indiana law presumes a husband to be the biological father of a child born in wedlock, a same-sex spouse should also be considered a parent on the birth certificate.
Ten months later, Indiana attorney general Curtis Hill is seeking to overturn it all.
He’s submitted a brief asking the Supreme Court to review the landmark decision — a move that had the Hendersons’ attorney wondering why state officials “continue to fight against families headed by same-sex spouses,” Indystar said.
Hill’s 46-page brief argues that upholding the lower court’s decision would violate common sense and throw into jeopardy parental rights based on biology.
“A birth mother’s wife will never be the biological father of the child, meaning that, whenever a birth-mother’s wife gains presumptive ‘parentage’ status, a biological father’s rights and obligations to the child have necessarily been undermined without proper adjudication,” he wrote.
When a similar case from Arkansas came before the Supreme Court in 2017, judges determined that precluding one parent from a birth certificate infringes upon their rights as a married couple. But the courts could reach a very different outcome in Indiana now that Trump has stacked the judiciary in his favour.
It’s among the first cases submitted to the Supreme Court dealing with same-sex marriage since the confirmation of justice Amy Coney Barrett, and is likely to be a test of things to come.
