Days before leaving office, Michigan’s governor has signed a directive to protect against LGBTI discrimination.
The directive signed by Republican governor Rick Snyder states that companies seeking loans, grants or other contracts must agree not to discriminate against LGBTI employees.
Snyder announced the directive on Friday (28 December) after signing it the day before.
‘Michigan’s continued reinvention and economic growth depend on talented individuals choosing to live and work here,’ Snyder wrote.
‘It is essential for state government to be a leader in welcoming all people to our state and ensuring that everyone is treated fairly and with respect.’
Snyder has less than four days left in his tenure. He will be succeeded by Democrat Gretchen Whitmer on 1 January.
Although the directive is not binding on the state’s Attorney General or Secretary of State’s offices, Snyder encouraged both departments to comply with its conditions.
Dana Nessel, incoming Democrat Attorney General, will be the first openly gay statewide official in Michigan history, The Detroit News reports.
The progress of LGBTI rights in Michigan has been mixed during Snyder’s eight-year tenure as governor.
Synder pushed for the expansion of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act of 1976 to include anti-discrimination protection for LGBTI residents.
Prior to the Supreme Court ruling which legalized same-sex marriage, Synder was also involved in defending Michigan’s ban on marriage equality during several legal battles.
The governor will be remembered for being at the state’s helm during the water crisis in the town of Flint from 2014-2017, where thousands of people were forced to drink and bathe in bottled water due to contamination of the tap water supply.
Some Flint residents still do not have access to clean water.
Historically, humans have found ways of dealing with winter, that gross time of year when it’s bitter cold, dark at 5 p.m., and depressing as all hell. Not only ways of dealing with it: we’ve found ways of turning into the best time of year.
The span of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is filled with excitement, consumerist fervor and eustress for many an American, no matter how bruised and battered we get during the contact sport that is the Black Friday to Cyber Monday stretch. The last months of the year are our designated time to chill, hang with family, eat a ton of food, and do practically nothing. But believe it or not, the holidays weren’t always so PG. In fact, both Thanksgiving and Christmas have some gay-as-hell origins.
Let’s start with Turkey Day. In addition to being a controversial holiday celebrating the brutal colonization of the Northeast, Thanksgiving is also kind of gay. We may think of it as a fun time to hang out with family (biological or chosen) eat a ton of gross food and get super drunk. But the pilgrims…well, they did all that too. But with a twist.
According to a 2015 Vice essay entitled, “The Pilgrims Were Queer,” more than a handful of early colonizers were having a real fun time on that city on the hill. While the Pilgrims came over as an exiled hyper-religious sext, there were still a few of them who were thrilled by the freer interpretation of gender roles set forth by indigenous folks in the American northeast. In a small town called Merrymount, some pretty advanced stuff went down.
Per Vice: “Thomas Morton’s founding of Merrymount remains among the most vivid: Merrymount denizens are described as having rejected the strict rules of the Puritans, declaring all servants and slaves to be free and encouraging intermingling with indigenous Algonquin people. Morton declared himself “Lord of Misrule” and his people were described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a “crew of Comus,” a reference to a mythological figure during whose ceremonies men and women exchanged clothing.”
A depiction of a homoerotic Roman Saturnalia festival.
The gayness going on was frowned upon and, in many cases, prosecuted. However, the pilgrim’s anti-sodomy laws were a far cry from the English ones. Instead of using far-fetched religious arguments to talk about the impurity of the act, Pilgrims simply forbade sex that didn’t lead to procreation. But that didn’t stop anybody from getting with it.
“My reading of this is that the Puritans were like, ‘people do this stuff, but it really shouldn’t be public,’” Michael Bronski, a Professor of Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard told Vice. “‘We don’t want to go too far punishing them, because that would hurt the community.’ The most important thing is to keep the community stable.”
But let’s dial it back a bit. If the Pilgrims were gay, they were nothing compared to the Romans, who didn’t simply look the other way when guys were getting it on. More often than not, they joined right in. The origin of the holiday we know today as Christmas came from the Greeks and Romans, who had their own way of celebrating the solstice and ringing in the New Year. And it involved some sex. To the Romans, December 25 didn’t represent the birth of Jesus. It represented the birth of the sun, and thus became a day to pay tribute to the Sun god Sol Invictus. Before that, however, there was Saturnalia, a festival spanning roughly from the 17th to the 23rd of December honoring the mischievous God through copious drinking, carousing, and rabble-rousing. And would it be a Roman party without boys?
One emperor got seriously into the spirit of the thing. Elagabalus, a 220 A.D.-era guy who loved wearing dresses and described himself as his male lover’s “queen,” threw lavish parties involving boys, booze, violets, and pet tigers.
You know, your typical Roman night out. Saturnalia was also a time for gifts. But instead of doing what we do during the weeks before Christmas (namely searching frantically for last-minute gifts for people we forgot about) the Romans exchanged, according to Gay Star News, “statuettes of beautiful youths and ‘hermaphrodites’, phallic cakes, books of filthy epigrams, cosmetics and hair extensions for either sex.”
While there are a lot of things the Romans weren’t great at, we can certainly commend them for treating the end of the year like an extended bachelorette party of the highest order. So this holiday season, forget about decking the halls with boughs of holly.
Let’s all take the time to focus on making Christmas gay again.
According to the New York Times, obtained documents reveal the Trump administration is planning to roll back another set of Obama-era policies.
This time, they’re targeting protections for minority students in schools across the country.
Under the leadership of Barack Obama in 2014, the White House implemented policies aimed at making sure minority students did not face disproportionate disciplinary actions.
Trump and his Education Department, led by Betsy DeVos, however, argue the policies ‘eased up on punishment and contributed to rising violence in the nation’s schools’.
This development reportedly stems from this year’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Rather than focusing on gun control, though, Trump and DeVos created a school safety commission.
The Times reported the documents, written by the commission, focus primarily on race.
‘The federal government’s paramount obligation is to guarantee student safety, including when it is acting to ensure that educational programs and policies are administered in a racially neutral fashion,’ one of the documents reads. ‘However, where well-meaning but flawed policies endanger student safety, they must be changed.’
It is important to note none of the high-profile school shootings in the US in recent years, including Marjory Stoneman, have been perpetrated by black students.
Activists and civil rights groups are criticizing the planned action.
David Stacy, the Director of Government Affairs at the Human Rights Groups, is one such critic. He lambasted the administration for using the issue of gun control to take these steps.
‘While the revocation of this guidance would not change federal civil rights laws, this dangerous action would embolden discriminatory practices that push students of color, including LGBTQ students of color, out of the classroom,’ he said.
‘It is particularly outrageous to utilize a commission tasked with addressing gun violence in schools as a tool to undermine protections for students of color.’
Eve Hill, a disability rights lawyer at Brown, Goldstein & Levy, worked on the original 2014 guidelines.
She described this new call to revoke the guidelines as a ‘red herring.. to raise fears about our own children’.
LGBTI students of color face compounded issues and struggles not experienced by their white peers.
A GLSEN report of the school climate in the US last year found these disproportionate experiences.
Only multi-racial, Native American, and Alaskan Native LGBTI student reported feeling unsafe due to their sexuality more than white LGBTI students. More, however, felt unsafe due to their gender identity than their white peers.
Every non-white student also reported fearing their safety due to their race at much higher rates. This is also on top of their anxieties about their sexuality or gender identity.
These trends remained the same for reporting experiences of bullying, harassment, and assault. The numbers overall, though, were higher.
This is also not the first action by DeVos harming LGBTI students.
Members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws in the workplace, are routinely reconfirmed in a bipartisan manner.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, however, is bucking the norm by putting a hold on the reappointment of Chai Feldblum, the first openly LGBTQ person to sit on the commission, because of her “radical views on marriage.”
“One nominee to the commission’s five-member board wants to use the federal agency’s power to undermine our nation’s founding principles,” Lee wrote on his website earlier this year. “Don’t think for a second that you, your family, and your neighbors will be left alone if Feldblum gets her way,” he wrote.
Lee is the Senate author of the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, which would legalize anti-LGBT discrimination nationwide for business owners who act on a “sincerely-held religious belief or moral conviction.”
His bill, which has not yet been reintroduced in the US House, presently has 22 Senate cosponsors. Earlier this year Trump interviewed him for the SCOTUS nomination that eventually went to Brett Kavanaugh.
Today, Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN, with partner law firm Winston & Strawn, filed a lawsuit on behalf of two HIV-positive members of the United States Air Force who were given discharge orders just days before the holiday season.
Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN filed the lawsuit, Roe and Voe v. Mattis, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. As detailed in a Washington Post exclusive, the case was filed anonymously to protect the plaintiffs’ medical privacy.
The plaintiffs received notification just days before Thanksgiving, denying their discharge appeals despite compliance with fitness assessments and medical treatment, as well as strong support from commanding officers. Nevertheless, the plaintiffs were found “unfit for continued military service.”
“It’s disgusting that the Trump Administration is sending some men and women in uniform home for the holidays without jobs simply because of their HIV status,” said Scott Schoettes, Counsel and HIV Project Director at Lambda Legal.
“These decisions should be based on science, not stigma. Lambda Legal is suing to stop these separations and will not stop fighting until President Trump understands that there’s not a job in the world a person living with HIV cannot safely perform, including the job of soldier.”
President Donald Trump’s new acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has a history of anti-LGBT legislation and statements, including saying that encouraging countries to drop homophobic policies is “religious persecution.”
Mulvaney, who will become Trump’s third chief of staff in less than two years when he replaces General John Kelly in January, has also co-sponsored bills to ban same-sex marriage and allow anti-LGBT discrimination on the basis of religion.
In July, at the State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, he lashed out at President Barack Obama’s government because “our US taxpayer dollars [were] used to discourage Christian values in other democratic countries.”
“That’s a different type of religious persecution.”
— Mick Mulvaney about opposing anti-LGBT policies
“It was stunning to me that my government under the previous administration would go to folks in sub-Saharan Africa and say… ‘We know you have a law against gay marriage, but if you enforce that law, we’re not going to give you any money,’” continued the 51-year-old.
“That’s a different type of religious persecution… That is a different type of religious persecution that I never expected to see.”
As director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role he’s held since February 2017, Mulvaney released a budget for the 2019 fiscal year which included cuts to domestic HIV/AIDS programmes and slashed $1 billion from global HIV programmes.
Human Rights Campaign (HRC)’s government affairs director David Stacy said at the time that the budget showed “a callous disregard for critical programmes that impact LGBTQ Americans” and created “a direct threat to the safety and well-being of LGBTQ people here and around the world.”
He also told lawmakers that the state government should stop “advertising South Carolina to gay tourists in Europe” before winning election to the House of Representatives in 2010.
The former South Carolina lawmaker scored zero on HRC’s Congressional Scorecardfor all three of his terms in the House, unwaveringly opposing LGBT+ rights.
It was while he was a congressman that he urged President Obama to enforce the Defence of Marriage Act, a federal law which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, and which was eventually ruled unconstitutional.
The letter criticised the guidance, which was revoked by the Trump administration just weeks into the president’s term, for forcing schools to “disregard the privacy, ‘discomfort,’ and emotional strain imposed on other students during use of bathroom, showering, and changing facilities.”
During a debate with Democrat Fran Person in 2016, Mulvaney said that he was supporting Trump in the upcoming presidential election despite thinking he was “a terrible human being,” The Daily Beast has reported.
On Tuesday (11 December), he signed the PEPFAR Extension Act of 2018. This program provides billions in funding and research for HIV prevention and treatment.
Created in 2003, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is the largest global health program targeted at one specific disease. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama previously renewed it in 2008 and 2013, respectively.
This new bill extends the program and its funding until 2023.
Trump’s previous budget proposal for 2019 suggested cutting hundreds of millions from PEPFAR. According to reports, these cuts could have led to 300,000 AIDS-related deaths and 1.75 million new infections each year.
As a program, PEPFAR is the United States federal government’s answer to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. President Bush and the Global AIDS Act of 2003 first established it.
According to their website, PEPFAR currently provides antiretroviral treatment for 14.6 million people.
Since its creation, it has received rare bipartisan support.
‘This is one of those rare examples in Washington. There’s been an incredible history of bipartisanship around PEPFAR that stands outside the rancor we hear about,’ Jennifer Kates, vice president and director for global health and HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Vox.
It also works.
A 2009 study showed a significant reduction in the HIV death rate of African countries receiving PEPFAR support. The rate dropped by 10.5%.
Trump’s action signing this bill into laws comes of the heels of threats to slashing otherHIV funding. These other research programs, however, are completely separate from PEPFAR.
They are much smaller in scale, with most of them taking place at university labs. The threats to their funding come from pro-life advocates and lobbyists angry about the labs using fetal tissue in their research.
A committee in the United States House of Representatives has delayed a hearing on the national minimum wage after discovering anti-gay and sexist remarks a witness wrote 16 years ago.
Joseph Sabia, San Diego State University economist, was supposed to testify today for the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections.
When they unearthed comments from 2002 on his blog, No Shades of Gray, however, they decided to postpone.
Several posts with these comments are archived online.
In in August 2002 post, he compared taxing the fast food industry for its bad health outcomes to taxing homosexual activity.
‘When two random men get together and choose to have sex, there is not an insignificant risk of infection and death,’ he wrote. ‘In gay sex, we have an activity that is clearly leading to disastrous health consequences. What rational person would engage in this sort of activity?’
Sabia’s post about taxing homosexuality | Photo: No Shades of Gray/Web Archive
In another post, Sabia said universities with women’s studies departments encourage young women to be ‘whores’.
He also wrote: ‘Feminist thought has taught young women that equality is achieved by acting like promiscuous sluts.’
Sabia addressed these writings in an emailed statement to Politico.
‘I regret the hurtful and disrespectful language I used as a satirical college opinion writer,’ he said.
He added, however, that now as an ‘out gay man… accusations of homophobia stemming from college nonsense I wrote nearly 20 years ago are hurtful to my family today’.
At San Diego State, Sabia is director of the Center for Health Economics and Policy Studies. His research focuses on ‘the economics of risky health behaviors, minimum wage policy, labor market discrimination against sexual minorities’, which he also mentioned in his statement.
‘My academic research has studied a variety of subjects, including discrimination against the LGBTQ community. My peer-reviewed scholarship on this topic brings me great pride.’
Deciding to postpone
According to Kelley McNabb, communications director for the committee’s majority, the decision to postpone stemmed from members being ‘uncomfortable moving forward’.
Democrats, though, are angry Republicans postponed the hearing entirely.
‘My Republican colleagues on the committee should have issued a strong rebuke disavowing this witness and let the hearing go on,’ said Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA).
‘It is unfortunate that this hearing will not be happening because of my Republican colleagues’ oversight of the repulsive views of one of their witnesses.’
The hearing was meant to discuss raising the hourly minimum wage to $15, something long advocated by Democrats.
San Diego State also released a statement in response:
‘The language and sentiments expressed in these posts are counter to the values of any institution which supports the principles of diversity and inclusion.
‘SDSU unequivocally rejects any sentiment which seeks to undermine or devalue the dignity of any person based on their gender, orientation, ability, or any other difference among people which has been an excuse for misunderstanding, dissension or hatred.’
152 elected officials in the US have signed an open letter urging the incoming Congress to prioritize a series of LGBTI rights initiatives.
The list of priorities include protections of trans constituents, amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, focussing on HIV/AIDS treatments, and supporting asylum claims from LGBTI people who face persecution in their home nations.
The letter lists its signatories as including ‘Members of Congress, Governors, State Legislators, Mayors, City Councilmembers and School Board Members’.
The officials wrote the letter last week at a conference which was hosted by the Victory Institute, an organization which focusses on the training and support of LGBTI candidates.
The letter will be sent to the 116th Congress at a later date, The Hill reports.
In a statement, president and CEO of the Victory Institute, Annise Parker, said that the letter was a further indication of greater LGBTI representation and influence on US politics.
‘LGBTQ political power is growing thanks to the rainbow wave of LGBTQ people who won elected office in November — and this letter is the first sign of us wielding that new power,’ said Parker, who is also the mayor of Houston.
‘The current U.S. Congress failed to advance equality policies and legislation that most Americans support: non-discrimination protections, addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis, protecting trans people from abusive policies, and being a moral voice on the global stage.
‘The next Congress can remedy these wrongs and LGBTQ elected officials are determined to add their voice and energize their constituents around these important measures,’ she added.
Of the 432 openly LGBTI candidates to run, 240 (or 56.5%) won their elections.
This included Kyrsten Sinema, who will be the first openly bisexual senator in US history. Sinema was also the first Democrat to be elected to the Senate by voters Arizona since 1988.
A Kansas lawmaker has defected from the Republican party to the Democrats over the GOP’s anti-trans efforts.
Senator Barbara Bollier, who represents Mission Hills in Kansas City, also stated Trump as a major factor in her decision to defect.
Talking about her defection, the lawmaker told the Shawnee Mission Post: ‘Morally, the party is not going where my compass resides.
‘I’m looking forward to being in a party that represents the ideals that I do, including Medicaid expansion and funding our K-12 schools.’
However, her decision came after the state party adopted a heavily-criticized resolution in February 2018 that would attempt to eliminate trans identities. It read: ‘We believe God created two genders, male and female.”
Bollier said this motivated her decision: ‘That was my final, last straw. I support the people of Kansas. I do not condemn whoever they are.’
The defection still keeps the Republicans in control of the state government. There are now 10 Democrat seats to 40 GOP. The state senate is the upper house in the USA’s individual states’ legislature.
Bollier has been at odds with Republican leadership for awhile now. In the 2018 Midterms, she backed Democrat Laura Kelly for Governor of Kansas. Kelly won the election, including a majority in the district Bollier represents.
That same district also overwhelming voted for Sharice Davids, who is a lesbian woman and native American, for Congress in the midterms.
