IKEA, Lyft, Hilton and Warby Parker and several other businesses operating in Tennessee are speaking out against legislation affecting LGBT individuals, arguing the proposed bills will make employee recruitment more difficult and harm the state’s business climate.
These companies, which sent a signed letter to Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Glen Casada, join a growing list of major employers publicly opposed to legislation that allow child placement agencies to deny same-sex couples on religious grounds and that requires the state’s attorney general to defend school districts determining bathroom use for transgender students.
Marriott International, MassMutual, Nike, InterContinental Hotels Group, Salesforce, Unilever and Replacements also signed the letter, dated Tuesday. Warner Music Group, Curb Records and AllianceBernstein have previously issued statements voicing their concerns about the bills.
The adoption bill is authored by GOP Rep. Tim Rudd.
Pink Sonoma Saturday rstein.With a long background in the hospitality business, Saperstein leveraged his time in local institutions like the Auberge du Soleil and the Girl and the Fig to start Out in the Vineyard 11 years ago.
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The event will be held Saturday, May 4, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the General’s Daughter restaurant in the town of Sonoma. It will feature over 20 wineries pouring their current rose, a DJ, light bites, and an auction to benefit Positive Images, which provides support and advocacy for LGBTQ youth in Sonoma County.
Young people served by Positive Images will be staffing the silent auction, featuring items donated by wineries. The restaurant also donated the space for the event.
Tickets are $65, with $5 from every ticket going to Positive Images.
A family in Charleston, South Carolina, said their rainbow pride flag was torn down from the front of their house and burned in their driveway last weekend.
“We were taken aback and thought, ‘Wow, somebody must be really bothered by this to go to this end here to do this.’ But we called the police to let them know about it,” the homeowner, who lives with his wife and three young children, told NBC News.
“There’s people on our street that have South Carolina flags, United States flags, different college flags, garden flags … obviously the rainbow is what attracted them to ours,” the homeowner, who asked that his name not be printed to protect his family’s safety and privacy, added. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who did this didn’t even know who we were or who lived in the home, that it was just the fact that it was a rainbow flag, and they didn’t agree with that.”
After news of the incident spread, a local LGBTQ advocacy group, Alliance for Full Acceptance, started to offer free LGBTQ pride flags to any residents or businesses in the city seeking to “display a flag in solidarity with the affected family and LGBTQ community.”
“So far, we’ve had 200 requests for flags, and we have given so far somewhere between 80 or 90 out,” the group’s executive director, Chase Glenn, said. “It’s really incredible to see the community rally around these folks and the LGBTQ community as a whole.”
Charles Francis, a spokesperson with the Charleston Police Department, confirmed that the homeowners had filed a police report. Francis said the investigation is ongoing, and no suspects have yet been identified.
If investigators conclude the incident is a hate crime, any suspects could be charged under Charleston’s new hate crime ordinance, which was passed in November of last year.
“This is the first test of that,” Glenn said of the new ordinance. “We have a great relationship with the police and, thankfully, they are taking this seriously.”
Even though the homeowners are a heterosexual couple, Glenn stressed that the ordinance punishes those who have the intent to intimidate another person because of their “perceived” sexual orientation or gender identity.
“We want our community to feel safe, and incidents like this don’t help grow that sense of safety,” Glenn said.
As for the homeowner, he said he and his family “are definitely going to get another flag and put it back up there.”
“We hope that all the folks who have been very supportive, who have said kind things to us, we hope if they do feel that way that they do the same and show that support with action and fly a flag themselves,” he said. “I think that would send a strong message to whoever the haters are out there that those views are not shared here, and that those opinions are not those of the majority.”
When author and editor Lise Weil wrote about lesbian desire for the first time, it was in response to Sex and Other Sacred Games, a novel by Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal. Weil reviewed the book for Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, of which she was then editor. The year was 1991. Now some 28 years later, both Weil and Stendhal have published memoirs centered on lesbian desire: Weil’s In Search of Pure Lustrecalls the 70s and 80s in the U.S., a time when lesbian desire was the throbbing center of an entire culture and a movement. Stendhal’s memoir Kiss Me Again, Parisevokes the same women’s culture at its height in Paris, when the entire city was suffused with lesbian eros. Their memoirs are “sister books” from across the Atlantic, both celebrating, albeit with different cultural inflections, a historical era Stendhal considers the lost “Golden Age” for women.
Lise Weil: The most obvious affinity between our books is that they’re centered in the same culture/movement but in different countries. And for both of us there was a poignancy in writing about that culture/movement because it has all but disappeared, is on its way to becoming a forgotten piece of our history.
Renate Stendhal: I had been looking for years for a book that would recapture that first discovery of women’s condition as the “second sex” (Beauvoir) and as “colonized people” (as French feminists put it). That awakening to everything: a new world vision, a new language, desire and agency, in short, that golden age of women in the late 60s and 70s to the mid-80s. I found only one book that remembered, step-by-step, women’s new thinking and it was a French book: Cathy Bernheim’s Perturbation, My Soeur. And now there is your memoir, In Search of Pure Lust, which does just that for American feminism, focusing both on politics and the very personal aspects of desire and the way each informed the other.
Weil: It was a time of profound awakening on so many levels–and above all it was our bodies waking up, our bodies wanting pleasure and wholeness. It was an eroticawakening of the first order. Your book is full of erotic awakenings!
Stendhal: No kidding. For me, desire had always been there in the form of unfulfilled yearning and pining and crushes for women (and girls when I was a girl). Those sweet grapes, always just out of reach. But then suddenly overnight everything was within reach. The old concepts exploded–that’s what you describe so well: the new words and concepts giving permission to rebel against all the rules, restrictions, gender barriers and limitations that corseted women. I focused my memoir on the high point of these freedoms in Paris, when women’s empowerment seemed to be a given. We had successfully invaded Freud’s “unknown continent.” We had discovered, entered, and occupied this territory body and soul–or, as you might say, body and thought.
Weil: Well yes, because one of the things we began to understand was that our bodies needed to enter thought; Adrienne Rich at the end of Of Woman Born wrote about “learning to think through the body.” This gave rise to vision. What we were able to see we saw because we were women inhabiting our bodies in a way that had not done since possibly Sappho’s time.
Stendhal: What extraordinary daring it took to overcome our “feminine” conditioning! I was a girly-girl, all smiles (when there was nothing to smile about) and unable to say no. The famous “sisterhood is powerful,” which seems all but forgotten now, made me bold and free. I came to envision and experience my body as a boy-girl’s, as androgynous–which was everyone’s ideal in Paris at that time. We were all crossing gender boundaries.
Can you talk more about your vision in terms of love and sex and body?
Weil: Well that’s not where my vision went. It was loving women and being in bed with women that gave rise to the vision, but then the vision went out—to, well, everything that is looming over us with such menace now, the poisoning of the earth, militarism, racism, nuclearism, hatred of and violence against women, separation from nature. We saw it back then and we saw that it was all connected. We were the original intersectional thinkers, the original deconstructionists.
Stendhal: Yes, that’s what we were all doing, day and night: deconstructing the history of men and the herstory of women. The endless destruction of a male-dominated world. This was political and philosophical work and it was also, and for me majorly, cultural work.
Weil: That’s why it felt so important for me, in my memoir, to document our lives, our culture: the bookstores, the conferences, the study groups, the concerts, the book fairs, the bars. To document it in as much detail as possible–and not to leave out the bitter squabbles and conflicts, both personal and collective. It felt especially important to do this because young lesbians and queer women today generally have no idea about our lives, and the tremendously rich–if flawed–culture that emerged from them.
Stendhal: … And the incredible writing! The discovery of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein as our woman-loving ancestresses; the discovery of all the silenced, conveniently forgotten artists–from Artemisia Gentileschi to Meret Oppenheim and the women of Surrealism. From matriarchal temple art in Asia to Louise Bourgeois’s gender-defying contemporary sculptures. From African dance to Pina Bausch’s radical dance theater. This was the exuberant new world I lived and breathed in in Paris.
Weil: We had similar ideas about what would bring down the system. Yes to activism yes to cultural upheaval—but more profoundly what we believed could change everything from the bottom up (it could be I’m just speaking for myself here) was loving women… In a world in which woman hatred was endemic and foundational this was the most subversive the most life-affirming response.
Stendhal: I talk about the huge erotic wave that had every woman in Paris in its grip. The euphoria is what I wanted to remember most of all in my memoir–this wild hope of woman-loving.
Weil: The irony in this, and it’s an irony that deeply informs my book, is that when it came to loving women I didn’t have a clue. Oh I knew how to make love to women, to want want want women… but when it came to loving in a way that was sustainable…to “loving with deep recognition” (which is what I decided early on feminism had to be about) I had everything to learn and in fact had a lot of things stacked against me. My search for love was riddled with relationship errors.
I believe your book traces a similar arc, no? Not the novice part so much but a growing understanding that the culture of seduction you were part of was getting in the way of that kind of love, which requires that the masks come off…
Stendhal: Yes. Adventures, affairs, being outrageous, daring to play: this part of liberation began to reveal its limitations. And of course it became my personal dilemma. There still was my romantic yearning for the soulmate, or twin-soul, for deep love and recognition. I would say and you might agree, longing for a kind of love that was essentially anti-patriarchal.
Weil: Yes, even if we weren’t entirely able to embody it.
Stendhal: On the other hand, the culture of seduction, as you put it, seemed a necessary part of liberating our repressed women’s sexuality. Something important was achieved in taking this freedom, even taking it too far. We were the avant-garde of what today is the polyamorous and transgender edge.
And… the patriarchs went after us for it with a vengeance. Everywhere in Europe, the money faucets were turned off for women. The whole formidable backlash was launched. I was frankly shocked to see the sexual liberation of my generation become the next generation’s raunch culture, Girls Gone Wild. Lesbian love degraded into girls tongue-kissing for their boyfriends’ cell phones. From the moment the backlash started and the term “feminist” was turned into a hostile, “lesbian manhating” label, our revolution has been silenced, denied, bought, co-opted, and perverted. It has become the biggest taboo of our new millennium to name the direct connection we drew–or the first time ever–between woman-hatred and destruction of nature and the world. But the enormity of the backlash is a measure of the enormity of our achievements.
Weil: There you go, Renate! Connect that with good old lesbian rage. But honestly, it’s something all of us need to connect to now, because it’s not just women’s lives or lesbian lives—it’s all life on earth that’s being held hostage. The vision we had in those decades was alas incredibly prescient. It’s as if we had a direct window into now; what we feared and raged against back then has come to fruition in bone-chilling ways. That’s one of the reasons why the worlds we are writing about in these books matter so much, why it feels so important that they not be forgotten.
Lise Weil was editor of Trivia: A Journal of Ideas and its online relaunch Trivia: Voices of Feminism. Her memoir In Search of Pure Lust was published in June with She Writes Press (U.S.) and Inanna Press (Canada). She is founding editor of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing and teaches in the Goddard Graduate Institute. Born in Chicago, she has lived in Montreal since 1990.
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. is a German-born, Paris-educated writer, writing coach, and critic. Among her publications is the award-winning photo-biography Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Her memoir Kiss Me Again, Parisreceived two awards and was a Lambda Literary finalist in 2018. She has translated major American feminists into German. Her cultural reviews are here.
Philadelphia can exclude a Catholic foster care agency from a program for placing children with foster families because it refuses to work with same-sex couples, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday.
In a 3-0 decision, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Catholic Social Services failed to show that the placement freeze amounted to religious persecution or bias, violating its First Amendment rights to free speech and religious freedom.
Circuit Judge Thomas Ambro said Philadelphia was trying merely to stop what it considered a “clear violation” of a city anti-discrimination law covering sexual orientation, making a preliminary injunction inappropriate.
“The question in our case is … whether CSS was treated differently because of its religious beliefs,” Ambro wrote. “Based on the record before us, that question has a clear answer: no.”
Catholic Social Services is part of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Lori Windham, a lawyer from the Becket nonprofit representing the agency, called the decision “devastating” to hundreds of foster children waiting for placements and parents waiting to foster a child. “We will continue this fight.”
Jim Kenney, Philadelphia’s mayor, welcomed the decision.
“Philadelphia is a welcoming, inclusive city that values the diversity of its residents,” Kenney said in a statement. “This policy is the embodiment of those values.”
The case reflects persistent tensions in the United States between advocates for religious groups seeking exemptions from anti-discrimination laws, and civil rights advocates who call exemptions a license to discriminate.
Ten U.S. states let state-licensed child welfare agencies refuse placements and services that conflict with their religious beliefs, according to the nonprofit Movement Advancement Project. (here)
The Philadelphia dispute arose in March 2018 when the city suspended referrals after a newspaper report about Catholic Social Services’ policy of turning away same-sex couples.
U.S. District Judge Petrese Tucker in Philadelphia refused last July to issue an injunction.
The next month, U.S. Supreme Court without explanation denied the agency’s request to intervene, after Catholic Social Services warned that a freeze threatened its closure.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, all from the Court’s conservative wing, said they would have granted the agency’s request.
The agency drew support for Monday’s appeal from Texas and seven other Republican-led states, and from 42 Republican lawmakers including Senator Ted Cruz and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise.
Massachusetts and 16 other mostly Democratic-led states, as well as Washington, D.C., supported Philadelphia.
The case is Fulton v. Philadelphia et al, 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 18-2574.
Nevada has become the 10th state to permit gender-neutral IDs for transgender, nonbinary and intersex residents.
Starting Monday, residents of the Silver State can obtain “X” gender markers on driver’s licenses and state ID cards, in addition to the traditional “M” and “F” markers for male and female.
According to Alexandra Walden, public information officer at the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, the efforts have been years in the making.
“The Nevada DMV staff have been working diligently for quite some time in order to offer the nonbinary or ‘gender X’ option to Nevadans,” Walden told NBC News in a statement.
The new state IDs come on the heels of a progressive policy change last June that allowed applicants to update their ID gender markerwithout a court order, doctor’s note or corrected birth certificate proving their lived gender identity. That policy of allowing trans people to effectively self-identify their gender now applies to those seeking “X” gender markers, as Walden confirmed.
The changes are the result of the efforts of advocacy and education organization Transgender Allies Group, which asked the DMV to consider a series of policy updates around IDs for trans people.
“Up until recently, the gender binary was the norm throughout our society,” Brooke Maylath, the group’s president, said. “That leaves a lot of people out. You want an identification system that is authentic on a bureaucracy point, but also is flexible enough that it allows people to tell the bureaucracy who you are.”
Since Nevada first added gender identity to a list of protected categories in employment discrimination back in 2011, the state’s DMV said it has been working diligently to expand the means by which trans and nonbinary identities can be fully recognized.
In 2016, the Nevada Department of Public and Behavioral Health announced it would begin allowing transgender people to update their birth certificates from male to female or vice versa by submitting a sworn affidavit testifying to their gender identity — waiving the surgical requirement common in other states. It could also be written on their behalf by someone who knows them.
“We had intended all along to add the gender marker X, but it was a matter of computer programming,” Kevin Malone, DMV public information officer, said.
Prior to Monday’s rollout, DMVs across the state were sent a memo on the new policy. The instructions reminded government employees who issue licenses and IDs that gender and sex are protected classes under Nevada law “but also a personal choice.”
“It is not the responsibility of the DMV to question an applicant’s gender choice,” it states. “As we all know, we cannot assume a person’s gender based on a person’s appearance.”
Ray Mcfarlane, the transgender and gender diversity program manager at the LGBTQ community space The Center in Las Vegas, said Nevada’s new ID policy should serve as a “model for the rest of the country.” By lifting the requirement of a court order or birth certificate, Mcfarlane noted, it ensures that trans and nonbinary people are able to access affirming documentation without a costly and time-consuming legal process.
“All states should let people self-identify,” Mcfarlane said. “The process should be accessible. It should be easy. It should be low cost.”
Of the nine other states and Washington, D.C., that permit a third gender option on state IDs and driver’s licenses, only Oregon and the District of Columbia allow applicants to self-identify their gender. Mcfarlane said it costs about $270 to obtain a court order, an often prohibitive expense.
Trans individuals are twice as likely as the average American to live in poverty, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. Easing the burden of updating their IDs will help trans and nonbinary people navigate the process of correcting all their documentation. The center’s 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that only 11 percent of respondents had their preferred name and gender on all of their IDs.
“Being able to change the gender marker on your ID is one of the most accessible first steps that people can advocate for themselves,” Mcfarlane claimed. “Depending on where your birth certificate is, that costs more and takes longer. Sometimes the paperwork is across state lines.”
Jane Heenan, the founder and clinical director for Gender Justice Nevada, suggested the state could further simplify the gender-marker process by removing gender from IDs and driver’s licenses altogether.
“While I do intend to go and have my license changed to reflect this new designation, I wonder what the state’s interest is in labeling anybody in a sex and gender context on identity documents,” Heenan told NBC News. “I don’t understand the state’s interest in doing so. It wasn’t that long ago that the state required persons to list an ethnic label on driver’s licenses.”
Walden said the state has to keep gender markers on IDs due to federal requirements, but otherwise agrees with Heenan. But until those requirements are waived, she explained, “Whatever they put on the paper is what we put in the system.”
“Truthfully, why make it difficult?” Walden asked. “Who are we to stand in the way?”
Nevada now joins D.C., Arkansas, California, Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, Utah and Vermont in permitting gender-neutral driver’s licenses and other state IDs (Vermont’s policy will roll out this summer). Gender-neutral birth certificates are now permitted in New York City and several states, including California, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Nevada.
The Supreme Court on Monday took up job discrimination cases that could for the first time resolve at a national level whether lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers can be fired based on their identity.
The cases come as federal courts as well as independent agencies within the Trump administration remain divided over whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which says that employers may not discriminate based on “sex,” prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
There is no national law that explicitly bars discrimination on those grounds. State and local laws barring such discrimination do exist. About half of the country’s LGBT population lives in states that allow employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, according to MAP, an LGBT advocacy think tank.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced this week that it intends to ax an Obama-era measure that called for data collection on LGBTQ foster youth and parents.
The data included the sexual orientation and gender identity of youth in foster care, along with their foster parents, adoptive parents or legal guardians.
The stated goal of the rule, adopted in December 2016, at the end of the Obama administration, was “to help meet the needs of LGBTQ youth in foster care.”
The Trump administration delayed its implementation and is now proposing to remove the LGBTQ data elements entirely.
“While we understand the importance of collecting sexual orientation data … we must balance this with the need to collect accurate data per the statue and in a manner that is consistent with children’s treatment needs,” the department said.N
A third of states have asked that the requirement be dropped over concerns that collecting data on sexual orientation may be perceived as “intrusive and worrisome to those who have experienced trauma and discrimination as a result of gender identity or sexual orientation,” HHS said.
The proposed rule reversal has raised concerns among many LGBTQ and child welfare advocates who say that current data collection practices leave them in the dark about how many LGBTQ youth there are in care and what unique obstacles they may face.
“Identifying those youth and being able to capture the disparity between non-LGBTQ youth and LGBTQ youth helps states and tribes to understand what their experiences are and be able to devise implement and deploy best practices,” Denise Brogan-Kator, chief policy officer at the LGBTQ advocacy group Family Equality Council, told NBC news.
In a 2014 study funded by HHS, researchers determined that one in five youth in foster care identified as LGBTQ, and they were twice as likely to suffer negative outcomes while in care.
“We knew it anecdotally, but we didn’t have the data to back it up,” Brogan-Kator said of the study’s findings. She added that systematic collection of such data is necessary to improve outcomes for LGBTQ children in care.
“We need to understand why and where those negative experiences occur and where they don’t,” Brogan-Kator added.
More than 40 child welfare organizations have already publicly opposed the rule change, which must go through a public comment period.
Christina Wilson Remlin, lead counsel at Children’s Rights, a nonprofit that has publicly opposed the rule reversal, said HSS was failing in its duty to protect children in state care by proposing to stop collecting data on LGBTQ foster youth and prospective parents.
“Many of these children have already been rejected by their families of origin,” she said. “We should do everything we can to provide them with safe and loving homes, including recruitment of diverse and affirming foster families.”
Remlin said collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity is a “critical step toward addressing the needs” of LGBTQ youth and crucial to “holding government agencies accountable.”
“To stop collecting data on LGBTQ foster youth would only serve to render this vulnerable population invisible,” she added.
An official from the HHS Children’s Bureau said the Obama-era rule would have “drastically expanded unnecessary data elements required to be reported by child welfare agencies.”
“The modifications in the proposed rule would allow state and tribal child welfare agencies to focus more of their time and resources on child welfare — from prevention to foster care services to adoption and guardianship — and less on unnecessary data collection and paperwork,” the official said.
Brogan-Kator disagreed.
“It costs states and tribes so much more to deal with the negative outcomes when these youth experience homeless and incarceration,” Brogan-Kator said. “These kinds of burdens are significant. Reducing that will more than offset any extended costs there might be around it.”
This is not the only LGBTQ data the Trump administration is seeking to reverse course on. In 2017, the HHS removed questions about LGBTQ seniors from its annual survey of older Americans. A week later, the administration announced it would not collect information on LGBTQ identification on the 2020 census. And last year, the Department of Justice moved to scrap questions relating to sexual orientation and gender identity on its National Crime Victimization Survey.
A Mississippi man’s jaw was broken in two places during a brutal beating because his attackers thought he was gay, according to his family.
Trevor Gray’s jaw was wired shut after the horrifying attack in Waynesboro, Mississippi, on April 12.
According to the Clarion-Ledger, Gray met alleged attackers Landon McCaa and Toman Sion Brown at a local bar.
Mississippi man attacked ‘because he was different’
Gray was part of a group that went on to continue drinking at McCaa’s home when the bar closed, but some of the men turned on Gray and decided to attack him.
A video of the attack filmed on a mobile phone was circulated on social media, showing what appears to be McCaa repeatedly punching Gray.
The victim’s brother Cruz Gray alleged that the attack was motivated by sexuality, noting that Brown called him a “queer” during the beating.
Trevor Gray was attacked in Waynesboro, Mississippi (Facebook)
He told the newspaper: “This was an act of cruelty for no reason, because he was different.
“He’s not gay, but it wouldn’t matter if he were. No one deserves for this to happen to them.”
McCaa and Brown have been charged with aggravated assault, but Wayne County Sheriff Jody Ashley told the Clarion-Ledger that they could also face a federal hate crime charge.
Thousands raised to cover medical expenses
The community has rallied round Gray in the wake of the attack, with a GoFundMe set up to cover his medical expenses raising more than $14,000.
One donor said: “Not only is this such a dastardly deed, I have a son who is gay and I’m donating to show my unconditional love and support for him as well as Trevor. God holds all of His children in his love.”
Another added: “You did not deserve this, and there are people that you may never meet that love you and are praying for your physical and emotional health following this horrific attack. I am one of those people.”
In a statement to the newspaper, Trevor Gray said: “For as long as I can remember, my family has taught me to see the best in others.
“My peace in this situation comes from that. So, for those wondering, I’m not angry or vengeful; I’m not sad. I’m optimistic. The events of that night are small when weighed against the incredible amount of love and support people have shown me.
“My mouth will be wired up for the next several weeks, so if you see me and I don’t smile, know that I’m smiling on the inside. Most importantly, believe in the good, give someone a hug, and stay positive.”
A husband-and-wife team of developers faced mounting backlash in Sonoma this week after a series of anti-gay online posts made by the wife went viral this month.
Stacy Mattson who, together with her husband Ken, has spent $80 million the past three years purchasing 26 properties throughout Sonoma Valley, made the controversial comments on her then-public Facebook page. In one post, she described herself as “disgusted” by the 2013 Rose Bowl Parade being “high-jacked by the gay agenda,” adding that “the last thing I want to see in the parade is promotion of sin by being forced to watch a gay marriage ceremony.”
In a 2015 post, she wrote that upon returning from a trip to China, she “found our country in an even bigger mess than when [I] left thanks to some truly horrible Supreme Court filings… Obamacare, gay marriage.”
Her most recent public political post was a photo of the couple in early 2017 as they prepared to attend President Trump’s inauguration. The posts are no longer viewable as her Facebook settings were changed to private earlier this week.
Stacy Mattson’s Facebook posts began making waves several weeks ago when screen shots of the anti-gay remarks first started to spread through the community. The posts came under wider scrutiny after the Index-Tribune published an April 8 story about the couple’s real estate buying spree in town. Since 2015, the Piedmont couple have assembled a giant portfolio of Sonoma Valley properties, with the latest wave of purchases taking over high-profile commercial sites that include Cornerstone shopping center, Ramekins culinary school and the General’s Daughter event center.
As the extent of their holdings became known, the couple and their online profiles drew even closer attention from local residents. A week after the Index-Tribune story ran, Sonoma food writer Sarah Stierch posted screen shots of the Stacy Mattson’s Facebook posts, which have since been shared almost 100 times.
The resulting backlash has been vocal and increasingly public, even coming from within some of the Mattsons’ new properties.
Kyle Kuklewski, executive chef of Ramekins and General’s Daughter, raised rainbow flags on Tuesday to show solidarity with the community.
“We 100 percent disagree with their personal beliefs and we told them that,” said Ramekins general manager David Daniel, referring to an email he said he sent to the couple on Tuesday.
Ken and Stacy Mattson declined to be interviewed but provided a statement on Thursday that sidestepped the content of the posts. Originally from Rancho Cordova, Ken Mattson has worked in the financial services industry for 35 years, most recently as a financial planner. Stacy Mattson is originally from Fairfield. They have been married for almost 30 years and have four children, all of whom are in their 20s.
“The businesses we have purchased in Sonoma have a proud history of being inclusive in terms of employees and clientele,” he wrote. “As new owners, we have insisted that this history of inclusion continue. We also know that a truly diverse community benefits from the discussion of a broad range of ideas. We hope that all our guests, clients and employees will join in on this discussion.”
The controversy has erupted in a city that has sought to make overt shows of support for LGBTQ residents and visitors. It has hoisted the rainbow-colored flag over City Hall, serves as host for the popular summertime Gay Wine Weekend and is home to a growing array of businesses that cater to the gay community.
Gary Saperstein, who runs Out in the Vineyards, the promoter of the Gay Wine Weekend and other gay-centered wine country events, said that Stacy Mattson’s posts are “disturbing to say the least.”
“To have this going on in our very own backyard is a reminder that hate exists in all corners of the world… even here in Sonoma,” Saperstein said. “I’m concerned for the employees who work in these businesses as I know that they do not stand with the owners.”
Daniel said that the Mattsons have treated the staff “with respect and kindness since day one,” and are hands off — trusting him to make the right decisions for their business. “We have a total inclusive and supportive culture here which will continue. Kyle and I are both huge advocates for that.”
But adding to the furor over Stacy Mattson’s expressed views on gays and gay marriage was news that the couple’s business partner, Tim LeFever, has served as chairman of the board of the Capitol Resource Institute, which has lobbied to repeal state legislation that ensures gay people and gay rights are included in school textbooks and that sexual orientation is protected against discrimination in the schools. LeFever was also part of a group, Privacy for All, that in 2015 proposed a state initiative which would have banned transgender people from using bathrooms in government buildings that matched their gender identity.
LeFever’s current ties with the groups could not be independently confirmed this week.
Marcelo Defreitas, a local philanthropist and the city of Sonoma’s 2018 alcalde, or honorary mayor, conveyed his distress over the posts.
“We don’t need this kind of divisiveness here,” Defrietas said. “We are one in this community. We work together. Those posts are not what our values are.”
Defreitas, who is gay, said that he has been accepted in Sonoma since he moved here 20 years ago. “From day one,” he said. “It wasn’t even a question.”
Out in the Vineyards’ May 4 spring soiree, Pink Sonoma Saturday, was booked to take place at the General’s Daughter prior to its sale to LeFever-Mattson. The space was donated to Saperstein.
“I am glad that the owners are not making money from my event,” he said, adding that the event is also a fundraiser for support and advocacy for local LGBTQ youth. “As one friend said to me, ‘All the more reason to gay it up at Pink Saturday and show ‘em just how gay friendly Sonoma is!’”
According to Daniel, several same sex weddings are on the books at Ramekins and General’s Daughter and they will take place as scheduled, and new bookings continue to be accepted.
Sonoma-based developer and lobbyist Darius Anderson oversaw the January sale of Cornerstone, Ramekins and General Daughter to the Mattsons and LeFever. He said his team does background research on prospective buyers, but they don’t look into or take into consideration religious beliefs or political background when evaluating a transaction.
“But over the past 20 years, Kenwood Investments has been a leader in supporting diversity and equality, and in our own company policy we provide benefits for domestic partners,” Anderson said of his development firm. Anderson is managing member of Sonoma Media Investments, owner of the Index-Tribune.
Several community leaders said they intend to take action in the wake of Stacy Mattson’s comments coming to light.
Mayor Amy Harrington said that she and fellow council member Logan Harvey have asked City Manager Cathy Capriola to agendize a request to discuss the city’s current policies with regard to discriminatory practices at a future City Council meeting. The request will be discussed at the May 6 council meeting.
Meanwhile, Springs resident Dmitra Smith, vice chairwoman of the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights, designed a poster to offer Sonoma Valley businesses with a “We Welcome All” message, in both English and Spanish.
“When they go low, we go high,” said Smith.
She said that two dozen local businesses have already ordered the posters, slated for distribution next Thursday.
“Portland originally made these and they are long overdue in Sonoma Valley,” Smith said.
Community activist Jennifer Gray Thompson said she has met numerous times with Ken Mattson to discuss his development projects in the Springs. While she said she disagrees wholeheartedly with Stacy Mattson’s posts, she does not support boycotting the businesses who rent from the Mattsons — a measure some critics of the posts had initially proposed.
In a lengthy Facebook comment this week, Gray Thompson described herself as having “outrage fatigue.”
“And have come to the conclusion that, for me, the best road is the toughest one: I choose humanity, listening and compassion,” she wrote before speaking with the Index-Tribune on Tuesday. She said she will continue to meet with Ken Mattson and have “tough conversations,” but, she continued, “I will not dehumanize them in an effort to get them to see the humanity in others. The more fundamental the disagreement, the more talking we need to do.”
