More than a dozen New York City Department of Correction officers will be disciplined for their conduct surrounding the death of Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, 27, a transgender woman who died last year while in solitary confinement at Rikers Island jail.
Three officers and one captain will be suspended without pay immediately, the department said in a statement Friday. It was not immediately clear what disciplinary actions the remaining 13 officers would face.
The announcement comes several weeks after Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark declined to file charges following a six-month investigation into the circumstances of Cubilette-Polanco’s death.
“We are committed to ensuring that all of our facilities are safe and humane,” Department of Correction Commissioner Cynthia Brann said in a statement. “Even one death in our custody is one too many and this swift and fair determination on internal discipline makes clear that the safety and well-being of people in our custody remains our top priority.”
Cubilette-Polanco died in June 2019 after being placed in solitary confinement despite the objections of at least one doctor due to her history of seizures.
In declining to file criminal charges, Clark said in a statement that “the purview of this office is not to determine whether it was a wrong decision” to put Cubilette-Polanco in solitary confinement. Instead, it was the district attorney’s role to “determine whether that decision rose to the level of criminal behavior.”
After an “in-depth investigation,” Clark’s office determined that it would unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that officers committed a crime that caused Cubilette-Polanco’s death.
Several weeks before she died, Cubilette-Polanco had been hospitalized at the Elmhurst Hospital Prison Ward for psychiatric care after “showing radical changes in behavior” including shouting, crying, rolling around on the floor, talking to herself, expressing suicidal thoughts and charging at a jail guard, according to a Board of Correction report.
After returning to Rikers Island, jail staff tried to get her sent to restrictive housing, or solitary confinement, as a punishment for charging at the guard, according to the report. However, a psychiatrist “verbally stated that due to [her] medical history as it pertains to seizure disorder, that he would not be able to authorized [sic] a cell housing placement” in a restrictive housing unit.
Cubilette-Polanco died after suffering an epileptic seizure, according to the medical examiner’s report.
“The death of Layleen Polanco was an incredibly painful moment for our city,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement Friday. “What happened to Layleen was absolutely unacceptable and it is critical that there is accountability.”
Councilman Ritchie Torres broke out to an early lead Tuesday night in the hotly contested battle for an open Bronx congressional seat, as the openly gay city lawmaker appeared to turn away a challenge from one of New York’s most high-profile conservative politicians.
Torres led the crowded field to replace retiring Rep. Jose Serrano (D-Bronx) with 30 percent of the votes cast during early voting and Primary Day, according to returns from 61 percent of precincts. Assemblyman Michael Blake (D-The Bronx) was in second place with 18 percent.
Councilman Ruben Diaz Sr., a conservative firebrand and minister best known for making homophobic statements, trailed in third place with just 15 percent of the vote.
The final result won’t be official for another week as most people voted by absentee ballot. Still, this is very encouraging. As you can see in the clip below, Diaz was in rather a foul mood last night. Bronx United, a coalition formed to oppose Diaz, has already declared him the loser, snarkily using Diaz’s standard “you should know” opening to all of his press releases.
The four justices appointed by Democratic presidents were joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee. Within two years, more than 150,000 same-sex couples got married. According to U.S. Census estimates, there are more than 500,000 married same-sex couples in the country.
The impact of those unions has been more than cultural. Same-sex weddings have generated more than $3 billion over the past five years, the Williams Institute study estimates, which also said the weddings have generated some $244 million in state and local taxes and created nearly 50,000 jobs.
The 5-4 Supreme Court ruling has been pelted by countless other minor challenges, but so far, none has seriously threatened it. In fact, earlier this month the high court ruled in Bostick v. Clayton County that employers couldn’t fire workers simply for being gay or transgendered.
In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans supported the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. By 2015, decades of activism, visibility, and engagement had grown that to a 63 percent majority.
Gallup confirmed this month that support has continued to grow and broaden. Today at least two-thirds of all Americans are in favor of marriage equality, including 83 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents, and even a 49 percent plurality of Republicans.
As recently as 1996, at the time of the world’s first-ever freedom to marry victory in Hawaii, there were zero states, zero countries in the world, where loving and committed same-sex couples could marry. As of last month’s win in Costa Rica, there are now 29 freedom to marry countries, representing more than 1.1 billion people.
In July 2013, Jim Obergefell married his longtime partner in love, John Arthur, who was gravely ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Because Ohio at the time didn’t allow same-sex unions, the couple flew to Maryland to exchange vows.
Arthur died of the disease three months later, and Obergefell sued to be listed on the death certificate as Arthur’s husband. That case was one of six argued together before the high court. Obergefell was the lead plaintiff, meaning the case bore his name, though he was joined by dozens of other plaintiffs.
The whirlwind of that suit meant Obergefell was never alone with his thoughts. But as the focus has shifted to other minority groups, he’s had time to learn that, contrary to the self-help books, grief does not come in clean stages. “That implies it’s the same for every person, and it isn’t,” he said. “I’m still grieving, I’m still processing.”
Five years ago in June, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to strike down all same-sex marriage bans. Of the four cases, [Michigan Attorney General Dana] Nessel asserts, DeBoer was most significant, which is why it rankles her that the landmark is known as Obergefell v. Hodgesbecause of a quirk in the order in which the appeals were filed. “To my dying day, this will make me bitter,” she says.
“We were the only case that was truly just about the right to marry your same-sex partner. We were the only ones who tried the case. We put in more in terms of blood, sweat, and tears than anybody else. April and Jayne should have been synonymous with that case. If you read the opinion, the justices mostly talk about April and Jayne’s case. Ultimately, from an historical perspective, honestly, April and Jayne got robbed.”
The US Marine Corps has released a statement celebrating Pride month and a decade since the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and one officer is on a mission to shut down homophobes who disagree.
The Marine Corps released a statement in support of its LGBT+ members at the beginning of Pride month, which said: “During [Pride] month, we take the opportunity to recognise our LGBT service members and reflect upon the past.
“We celebrate their successes and recognise the contributions they have brought to our Corps.
“This year we celebrate the ten year anniversary of the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ .”
It added: “Commanders and leaders are encouraged to take time to recognise the 2020 LGBT Pride Month, and promote participation in observance events throughout their local communities.”
However, the statement went largely unnoticed until it was posted on Facebook by the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina.
The post quickly amassed more than 2,000 comments, and while a lot were supportive, many others were severely offended by the celebration of LGBT+ marines.
This year we celebrate the ten year anniversary of the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. The Marine Corps takes pride in…
One man wrote: “Never thought I’d see this BS…I’m all for doing your own thing, but for it to be celebrated… wtf, over!”
Luckily, Chief Warrant Officer (CWO) Bobby Yarbrough, who conducts communication, strategy and operations for the Marine Corps, was there to shut down the homophobes.
In a response, Yarbrough wrote: “We also celebrate Black History Month, Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Month of the Military Child, etc. Should we stop celebrating those too?”
Another anti-LGBT+ commenter wrote: “What in the heck is this about? Is this what the Corps is coming to? A social experiment?”
Yarbrough swooped in again, responding: “Nope. We still fight wars. Some of our warfighters are LGBT. We like them to know we support them.”
When another commented that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell worked just fine”, the CWO hit back: “I would imagine all the LGBT [people] that was kicked out of service would disagree. No heterosexuals were kicked out due to sexuality.
“The policy was terrible and needed to go away.”
A more positive commenter told Yarbrough: “Sir, may I please have your command photo so I may turn it into a candle and place next to my Joe Exotic one?
What’s so bad about a rainbow burrito? If you’ve been following the rift in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement over the corporate embrace of Pride, the question may have crossed your mind. Last June, the West Village was a labyrinth of rainbows, with every bank branch and Shake Shack festooned with messaging for Pride Month. Chipotle sold limited-edition Pride merch, including tank tops with a rainbow burrito and the slogan “¿Homo Estas?” The hoopla—always big, but this time bigger—marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and culminated in the annual NYC Pride March, which drew some five million revellers and boasted sponsors including MasterCard, Macy’s, Uber, and Diet Coke.
Amid the festivities, a group of activists staged an alternative: the inaugural Queer Liberation March—a smaller, rawer, more radical cousin to the established parade. In spirit it was closer to the roots of the Pride March, which was originally called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, and began, in 1970, to mark the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The new march even re-created the original route, from Greenwich Village up to Central Park. There were no branded floats, no police contingent, no corporate funding. “One of our mottoes was ‘We’re here for queer liberation, not rainbow capitalism,’ ” one of the organizers, Natalie James, said recently. The group is now planning a second annual march, which will take place Sunday, while the main Pride March has been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic—meaning that, by happenstance, the upstart march has usurped the Goliath in the space of a year, just in time to draw on a renewed spirit of spontaneous protest.
The critique that Pride marches have become corporatized and depoliticized has been building for years, part of a perennial tension in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement between assimilation and radicalism. “A lot of longtime activists had just stopped going to Pride,” another organizer, Jay W. Walker, said. “They were kind of sickened by it.” He brought up the concept of pinkwashing, in which “corporate bad actors” use a show of acceptance to buy good will while distracting from less savory practices. For instance, Walker mentioned Wells Fargo, which has had floats in Pride marches for years while maintaining (until recently) financial ties with the National Rifle Association, which opposed gun-control measures after the Pulse night-club shooting, in 2016. “A big part of our issue with the corporations is they’re not consistent in their support for us throughout the year,” Francesca Barjon, the group’s twenty-four-year-old social-media organizer, said. “It’s about being able to profit off of us in June.”
Cathy Renna, a NYC Pride spokesperson, countered, “We’re so far past that with these corporations. They know they gotta do better than that. This is not about waving a rainbow flag in June in your window.” The Chipotle merch, for example, benefitted the Trevor Project, which provides services to queer youth. “It’s really easy for Pride to be a target, because Pride is something that everybody has some sense of ownership in,” Renna said, adding, of the breakout march, “If we’re going to continue to make the kind of progress that we want to make, I think it’s important that we not—I’m trying to think of a way to say this that’s family-friendly—crap on each other, because some people like to do things differently.”
The Queer Liberation March had its roots in the 2017 Pride March, which featured the disruptive début of the Resistance Contingent, a consortium of activist groups that formed in response to the Trump Administration. It included groups such as Gays Against Guns, which staged a die-in, and Hoods4Justice, which formed a blockade to prevent the N.Y.P.D. marching band from joining the parade, with banners reading “There are no queer friendly cops” and “Decolonize pride.” A dozen people were arrested. During the planning for the Pride March in 2018, Heritage of Pride, the organization that produces New York’s Pride events, tried “dissolving” the Resistance Contingent, James said. It was eventually reinstated, but the activists were disillusioned with what the march had become. “We realized we all were very dissatisfied with the event itself, the degree of corporate floats, the corporatization, the bank sponsorship, as well as having a fully uniformed police contingent given a place of honor right at the front of the march,” James said. The N.Y.P.D. presence struck the activists as particularly ironic, since the Stonewall riots had been provoked by a police raid. After delivering a set of demands to H.O.P., the mayor, and the police commissioner and getting brushed off, the group, calling itself the Reclaim Pride Coalition, took on the “colossal task” of organizing its own march.
James, who is an organizer for the queer caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, helped arrange the first meetings at the caucus’s space at the L.G.B.T. Center, in the West Village. One point of contention was whether to allow the Gay Officers Action League, or goal, to participate. “Eventually we came out on the side of the fact that the N.Y.P.D. as an institution, as a whole, is a racist one, and therefore having any representation of it wasn’t proper,” James said, though police officers were welcome to march as individuals, out of uniform. (Renna defended the presence of goal at the main march, saying, “It’s a free-speech march. If you’re going to let the Communists march, you’re going to let the police who are queer.”) “We wanted to get rid of the barricades, and we wanted certain police-free zones within the area,” James said. A subgroup negotiated with the N.Y.P.D. “We didn’t get a formal permit,” she said. “But we did get an assurance that they would not interfere with our march.”
The start time was set for 9:30 a.m. That morning, things did not start off promisingly. “We were there at the intersection, and there was just us,” Jon Carter, one of the marshals, recalled. “We looked around and we could see empty streets, and there was a real question about what the day would look like.” Then, after thirty-five minutes, there was an “If you build it, they will come” moment, as marchers materialized. (The group estimates that forty-five thousand people attended.) “We were very intentional about having trans people in the front,” Barjon said. It ended with a rally on the Great Lawn, with speakers who included the act up veteran Larry Kramer. Walker recalled, “Larry did his normal thing that he always does, which is to scream at queer people and go, ‘You’re not doing enough!’ ”
The group was busy planning a 2020 edition of the march when covid-19 struck. After New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, temporarily banned large gatherings, the Pride March and its rambunctious challenger both cancelled. The Reclaim Pride Coalition decided to hold a virtual event, called Livestream for Queer Liberation. (The group also protested the controversial field hospital that was set up in Central Park by Franklin Graham’s organization Samaritan’s Purse, which asked volunteers to sign a statement opposing same-sex marriage.) But the calculation changed in early June, after the killings of George Floyd and other black Americans by the police sparked a wave of mass protests. “There was unanimity that we needed to have a march,” Walker said. “And we needed to have it centered on the movement for black lives.”
With only weeks to plan, the march’s scrappy, D.I.Y. quality worked in its favor. “The simplicity of our approach to organizing marches and actions makes things very fluid and flexible, and we’re able to pivot in a way that a more complex plan wouldn’t allow us to,” Carter said. The main Pride March, which Carter called a “polished spectacle,” is still not happening this year. It’s as if the covid-19 meteor killed off a twelve-million-dollar dinosaur, and a smaller, more resourceful organism survived to fill the parade-size void. Nevertheless, the group has adapted to the new circumstances: it’s gathering masks and hand sanitizer and will still put material online for people who can’t take the health risk of attending in person. It isn’t seeking any type of police blessing, advertising only the starting point (Foley Square). Also, James said, “We have voted on a start time, 1 p.m., so for the queers that utterly took umbrage at our 9:30 start time last year, I’m sure they’ll be relieved.”
The group’s timing is apt. Outside Stonewall, there’s now a sign reading “pride is a riot!”
An incredible 90 per cent of people in the United States agree with the Supreme Court ruling banning workplace discrimination for LGBT+ people, according to a new poll.
Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled that LGBT+ people are entitled to protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace.
The surprise ruling extends sex-based employment discrimination protections to LGBT+ people in all 50 states.
And a new nationally representative poll of 1,001 adults in America has found that the vast majority of the public support the ruling.
The poll, which was conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), found that 9 in 10 adults (90 per cent) agreed that it should be illegal to fire people because of their sexual or gender identity.
The poll also found that 7 in 10 Republicans agree that discrimination against LGBT+ people in the workplace should be illegal.
However, Republicans are also less likely to believe that LGBT+ people, as well as Black and Hispanic people, face discrimination.
Elsewhere, pollsters found that 69 per cent of adults support laws that ban discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual people, while 68 per cent believe trans people should be legally protected from discrimination.
That figure is similar to the percentage of people who support laws banning discrimination based on race (71 per cent) and disability (76 per cent).
Meanwhile, 79 per cent of those surveyed believe trans people face at least some discrimination in the United States, while 74 per cent thought the same was true for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
The public is shifting more quickly on these issues than the political and legal landscapes are.
The poll revealed that 49 per cent of Americans believe society has “not gone far enough in accepting people who are transgender”, up 10 percentage points from a 2017 poll.
Conversely, just 15 per cent said society has “gone too far” in accepting trans people, while 32 per cent said it “has been about right”.
The poll was conducted between June 16-21 through telephone interviews in English and Spanish.
“Most Americans – including most Republicans – oppose discrimination against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender,” said KFF president Drew Altman.
“The public is shifting more quickly on these issues than the political and legal landscapes are.”
The ruling found that an employer who fires an LGBT+ employee because of their identity ‘defies the law’.
The poll comes just over a week after the Supreme Court delivered its surprise ruling.
In the court’s 6-3 ruling, conservative justice Neil Gorusch said: “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.
“We do not hesitate to recognise today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” he said.
Trump’s Department of Justice had sought to assert that the Title VII provisions should only apply based on the “ordinary meaning of sex” as male or female, not covering sexual orientation or gender identity.
A crowdfunding campaign has been launched to save the historic Stonewall Inn, where the modern LGBT+ rights movement began, as it struggles during the coronavirus pandemic.
But, after being shut down for three months, the historic New York venue is struggling
The venue said that because of its “uncertain future” it was desperately in need of “community support” to “help to save one of the LGBTQ+ communities most iconic institutions and to keep that history alive”.
In a statement, owners said: “We are reaching out because like many families and small businesses around the world, The Stonewall Inn is struggling… Even in the best of times it can be difficult to survive as a small business and we now face an uncertain future.
“Even once we reopen, it will likely be under greatly restricted conditions limiting our business activities.”
They added: “We resurrected the Stonewall Inn once after it had been shuttered – and we stand ready to do it again – with your help.
“We worked diligently to resurrect it as a safe space for the community and to keep the Stonewall Inn at the epicentre of the fight for the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
June is recognised around the world as LGBT+ Pride month, dating back to the Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969.
That night, approximately 200 queer folk, among them trans women, lesbians, gay men, drag queens and queer youths, largely of colour, had gathered in the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City.
At the time, police in New York were cracking down on the city’s queer venues, but that night the LGBT+ community fought back, fuelling the queer rights movement we know today.
The Inn’s owners added: “It has been a community tavern, but also a vehicle to continue the fight that started there in 1969.
“Stonewall is the place the community gathers for celebrations, comes to grieve in times of tragedy, and rally to continue the fight for full global equality.”
Michael Pack, the head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) who was chosen by Donald Trump, has appointed a new federal agency director with ties to an anti-LGBT+ organisation.
The USAGM is an independent agency which oversees state-run media outlets, for example Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and it says its mission is “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy” in accordance with “broad foreign policy objectives of the United States”.
According to CNBC, Pack terminated longtime board members within weeks of being appointed and replaced them with Trump loyalists.
Now, he is reportedly moving to appoint two new members to the federal media agency board of directors who are vehemently anti-LGBT+.
Sources “familiar with the matter” told the publication about the new appointments, but chose to remain anonymous as they have not yet been formally announced.
According to the sources, Jonathan Alexandre is set to become a corporate board member for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
However, Alexandre is currently the senior counsel for governmental affairs at Liberty Counsel, which is listed as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC).
The SPLC describes it as “a legal organisation advocating for anti-LGBT discrimination under the guise of religious liberty”.
A second board member reportedly set to be appointed by Pack has a history of anti-trans activism.
Bethany Kozma is reportedly also going to join the board of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
In 2016, she started a campaign to overturn President Barack Obama’s guidance allowing trans students to use the bathroom of their choice.
In an op-ed for conservative news site The Daily Signal, started by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, Kozma engaged in the kind of scaremongering used by anti-trans activists all over the US.
Kozma wrote: “Our message was that this radical agenda of subjective ‘gender fluidity’ and unrestricted shower and bathroom access actually endangers all.”
She added: “Predators could abuse these new policies to hurt children.”
The Trump administration rescinded Obama’s guidance in 2017.
Hope for Wholeness, a prominent ex-gay ministry that boasts one of the most expansive networks of conversion therapy offerings in the United States, is disbanding.
The Spartanburg, South Carolina-based organization, founded in 1999 as Truth Ministries, told members in an email Monday and obtained by NBC News that Hope for Wholeness would be closing its operations, citing the group’s difficulties in retaining a director to lead their efforts.
“It has been a tumultuous several years for us. We lost the founding director, searched for two years for his replacement, hired a new director and then lost that director as well,” the memo, which was signed by the group’s board, states. “After much prayer and discussion, we have made the difficult decision to dissolve the organization. This was not an easy decision. But we do believe it is the right decision.”
Hope for Wholeness’ credo, prominently displayed across the top of its website, is “freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ.”
Conversion therapy — made up of various universally discredited and harmful methods of counseling and ministry meant to eradicate or suppress LGBTQ identities — has been banned for minors in 20 states and Washington, D.C. California was the first state to prohibit the practice in 2012, but over half of the bans have only been in effect since 2018. In June 2019, data from UCLA’s Williams Institute estimated that at least 698,000 adults in the U.S. have been subjected to some form of conversion therapy.
The Hope for Wholeness memo did not lay out a timeline for the dissolution process, though it implied the action was effective immediately. A representative for Hope for Wholeness declined to comment on Thursday.
The organization pledged in its letter to redirect any remaining funds, though that amount is unknown, to another conversion therapy group called Abba’s Delight in Louisville, Kentucky — which brands itself as a ministry “dealing with unwanted same gender attractions” — in hopes of laying the groundwork for similar programs in the future.
While the collapse of Hope for Wholeness is a major victory for advocacy groups pushing for legislative efforts to ban conversion therapy on minors, their sights are set on what other ex-gay groups stand to gain from Hope for Wholeness’ absence.
“This is enormous for a lot of reasons,” said Mathew Shurka, co-founder of the Born Perfect project, which aims to end conversion therapy in every state. “Hope for Wholeness is a well-known conversion therapy organization that has cheated lots of people.”
Hope for Wholeness was originally an offshoot of Exodus International, which, for decades, was the center of the ex-gay movement and had more than 120 ministries in the United States and Canada. Exodus was dissolved in 2013 after the organization’s leader announced at a conference he would resign and apologized to those who spent “years working through the shame and guilt when your attractions didn’t change.”
Hope for Wholeness would eventually grow to become one of the nation’s most expansive ex-gay groups — Exodus’ heir apparent — with members and affiliates in at least 15 states. Like Exodus, Hope for Wholeness’ main event every year was a national conference that drew hundreds.
How much money the nonprofit has raised and how many people ascribed to its teachings in recent years isn’t entirely clear. Legally, the group isn’t required to disclose how many individuals it “treats” annually — but a tax filing from 2007 shows that the ministry provided more than 500 sessions and 60 group meetings for “religious counseling and training.”
Shurka pointed to what he called the “domino effect” triggered by the closure of Exodus International in 2013. Hope for Wholeness was born only after select members of Exodus wanted to continue the group’s mission after it closed.
“Conversion therapy is an industry, and whether those individuals are licensed professionals or they’re nonprofits, there’s still money to be made,” said Shurka, 32, a survivor of conversion therapy. “All on the false promise that they can make gay people straight, [which] is fraudulent … So the fact that Hope for Wholeness has reserve funds that’s going to go somewhere else speaks to that fraud.”
“It’s a vicious cycle,” he added.
Hope for Wholeness’ founder and former director, McKrae Game, 51, echoed Shurka. Game made waves late last year when he denounced the group he founded and came out as gay himself. He had resigned his post in 2017.
“Everything takes money,” Game said. “And so, you know, not too many people want to throw money at the Titanic as it’s taking water — and that’s essentially what ex-gay ministry is.”
A coalition of advocacy groups sued the Trump administration on Monday over its rollback of LGBTQ patient protections, arguing that last week’s Supreme Court decision extending workplace legal protections to gay and transgender employees invalidates the new rules.
Big picture: The suit marks the first challenge stemming from the 6-3 high court decision that anti-discrimination protections based on sex also apply to a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation.
The decision authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch is expected to have ramifications for LGBTQ legal challenges ranging from health care to education.