Surprise surprise, Donald Trump has appointed a campaign advisor who promotes conversion therapy and thinks HIV in gay men is “God’s moral law.”
Anti-LGBT+ extremist Jenna Ellis is a right-wing news pundit and former constitutional law attorney. She does nothing to hide her strongly homophobic views and has a long history of tirades against “the homosexual lifestyle” and the “LGBT agenda.”
Trump appointed her for the senior role as he was impressed by Ellis’ TV appearances, Axios reported. He also indicated that he wanted to give her a bigger job, and his team briefly discussed bringing her into the White House.
Ellis is a vocal Christian who believes gay and bisexual men have higher rates of HIV because “we cannot escape God’s moral law and His supremacy.” She has also claimed that Christians cannot follow God while they accept, condone, or participate in homosexuality.
She attacked the out Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg for being a gay Christian, writing on Facebook: “If Pete Buttigieg is going to invoke the name of his Creator, he should read for himself what his Creator says about homosexuality in the Bible. Truth doesn’t change, regardless of the culture or the Dems’ identity politics.”
When same-sex marriage was legalised in the US, Ellis lamented that the decision “told the LGBT community that their homosexual lifestyle was not just legal privately, but morally validated openly through government recognition and social celebration and therefore equally as valued as heterosexual unions.”
And after the mass shooting at Pulse LGBT+ nightclub in 2016, she responded with a column entitled ‘Two Wrongs Do Not Make an LGBT Right,’ which bemoaned the fact that the massacre was being used to “embrace” homosexuality.
“Let me be clear – the Orlando shooting was absolutely terrible and tragic. But the response to this tragedy should not be embracing and advocating for gay rights,” she said.
Not content with merely making vile comments, Ellis has actively worked against conversion therapy bans, testifying in 2019 at a Colorado House committee hearing against a bill protecting youth from the harmful and discredited practice.
“She gets it,” Donald Trump reportedly told a Daily Beastsource.
California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter sent his formal letter of resignation on Tuesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom, effective next Monday, Jan. 13.
The longtime anti-LGBTQ representative from San Diego County’s 50th Congressional District pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court last Dec. 3 to one count of conspiracy to misuse campaign funds. In August 2018, Hunter and his wife, Margaret, were indicted on 60 federal counts of using campaign funds in excess of $250,000 for personal use from paying for their children’s tuition to plane fare for their pet rabbit to paying for hotel rooms and other expenses for Hunter’s five mistresses.
During the three-year investigation, Hunter pointed out that his wife was responsible for handling the campaign’s finances. Eventually Hunter and his wife each pleaded guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy rather than face trial in the District Court for the Southern District of California starting on Jan. 22.
Hunter will be sentenced on March 17. He faces up to a maximum of five years in federal prison. However, the Alpine Republican, who was sworn into office Jan. 3, 2009, has garnered at least 11 years in office which goes toward an annual congressional pension of $32,538 once the 43-year old turns 62.
Hunter succeeded his equally anti-LGBTQ father Duncan Hunter Sr., who held that seat for 39 years.
Hunter Jr. was re-elected in 2018, despite being federally indicted, barely escaping a take-down by Obama administration official Ammar Campa-Najjar who is running again in 2020. The Democrat’s GOP opponents in the hotly contested 50th CD race include former California Congressman Darrell Issa and out former San Diego city council member Carl DeMaio.
In his two-page resignation letters to Pelosi and Newsom, Hunter did not mention the scandal, nor apologize. Instead he outlined his accomplishments and thanked his constituents. “It has been an honor to serve the people of California’s 50th District, and I greatly appreciate the trust they have put in me over these last 11 years,” he wrote.
Newsom has yet to announce if he will call for a special election to fill Hunter’s seat or leave it vacant until the elections in 10 months. Carl Luna, a political science professor at the University of San Diego told KPBS last month that if a special election were held, election results history shows that Republicans in the race would have the advantage.
“On special elections, you have a smaller turnout and usually the smaller the turnout the better it is for Republicans. Democrats need a whole bunch of people to show up…to win elections in contested districts,” Luna said. – Karen Ocamb contributed to this report.
The Trump administration’s latest bid to have two HIV-positive airmen discharged from service has been blocked by courts for a second time.
The two men, referred to by the pseudonyms Roe and Voe, were given discharge orders in 2017 on the basis that they couldn’t be deployed to the Middle East due to their HIV-positive status.
Both men are on antiretroviral treatment, have no symptoms, and have been pronounced physically fit to deploy by their doctors.
Their discharges were blocked by a preliminary injunction in February last year, which the Department of Defence and the Air Force appealed.
On Friday, January 10, a federal court moved to uphold the injunction, judging that the ban on deployment was based on an “obsolete understanding” of HIV/AIDS.
“[It] may have been justified at a time when HIV treatment was less effective at managing the virus and reducing transmission risks. But any understanding of HIV that could justify this ban is outmoded and at odds with current science,” said Judge James A. Wynn Jr.
“Such obsolete understandings cannot justify a ban, even under a deferential standard of review and even according appropriate deference to the military’s professional judgments.”
The servicemen, like other HIV-positive people with undetectable viral loads, have no symptoms of HIV. They take a daily medication which means they cannot transmit the virus through normal daily activities, and their risk of transmitting the virus through battlefield exposure is extremely low if at all possible.
“But the Government did not consider these realities when discharging these servicemembers, instead relying on assumptions and categorical determinations,” the ruling stated.
“As a result, the Air Force denied these servicemembers an individualised determination of their fitness for military service.”
Roe and Voe were represented by Lambda Legal, a civil rights organisation that fights on behalf of LGBT+ people. Scott Schoettes, Lambda Legal’s HIV Project director, said that the government was unable to give a reasonable justification for the servicemen’s “discriminatory treatment”.
“This is the second federal court to find that the Trump administration’s attempt to discharge these individuals is unlikely to pass legal muster,” he said in a press release.
“At the root of these discharge decisions and other restrictions on the service of people living with HIV are completely outdated and bigoted ideas about HIV.
“Today’s ruling clears the way for us to definitively prove at trial that a person living with HIV can perform the job of soldier or airman as well and as safely as anyone else.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar is facing scrutiny on the campaign trail for voting to confirm many of President Trump’s judicial nominees — and a closer look at that record reveals she backed one pick who once derided as “social policy” not only LGBTQ rights and abortion, but also school integration.
With weeks remaining before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, Klobuchar’s vote to confirm David Ryan Stras to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals could dissuade supporters of LGBTQ rights and other progressives from supporting her in the Democratic presidential primary.
Although Stras hasn’t been as viciously anti-LGBTQ as some of Trump’s other picks, his past is troubling to LGBTQ advocates. As a law professor, Stras in a 2008 legal essay was condescending toward judges’ “ventures” into LGBTQ rights, abortion and school integration.
“The court’s own ventures into contentious areas of social policy — such as school integration, abortion, and homosexual rights — have raised the stakes of confirmation battles even higher,” Stras wrote.
Additionally, as a Minnesota Supreme Court justice, Stras in 2012 joined an opinion allowing an anti-gay marriage amendment to come intact to the ballot with a title obscuring its purpose and effect. Minnesota voters ended up rejecting the amendment anyway.
Along with Sen. Doug Wilson (Ala.), Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), former Sen. Heidi Heithkamp (N.D.) and former Sen. Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Klobuchar was among seven Democrats who joined Republicans in voting for Stras. The vote in January 2018 was otherwise along party lines, 56-42.
Ironically, Klobuchar voted for Stras even though she wasn’t consulted on the judicial pick, which was a customary part of the confirmation process before the Trump era, and recommended other choices for the judicial seat.
Carlie Waibel, national press secretary for the Klobuchar campaign, put distance between Klobuchar and Stras in response to a Washington Blade inquiry on whether the Democratic hopeful stands by her vote.
“Of course Sen. Klobuchar disagrees with his comments, just as she will not agree with every one of his opinions,” Waibel said. “She has made clear that Judge Stras was not the judge that she would ever recommend to the White House. In fact, she recommended other candidates.”
Waibel also defended the senator’s vote for Stras by saying he was better than other picks Trump might have offered.
“Her vote was based on the reality that given the choices, on balance she thought he was better than the other candidates who would have been nominated from other states,” the spokesperson said. “Judge Stras was recommended by liberal Justice Alan Page, who Sen. Klobuchar has great respect for, and in the vast majority of cases on the Minnesota Supreme Court Judge Stras sided with the majority, which included several Democratic-appointed justices.”
Klobuchar’s vote for Stras was one of many in favor of judicial nominees by Trump, who set records with judicial confirmations in ways that will likely affect the courts for generations to come.
According to an April 2019 article in ThinkProgress, Klobuchar voted for more than 56 percent of his judicial picks two years into his presidency. According to the Klobuchar campaign, the percentage since that time has dropped to just 33 percent.
Meanwhile, other Democratic senators who have run for president this cycle, such as Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, had a knee-jerk opposition to all of them.
Klobuchar cast a vote for Stras even though he was opposed by civil rights and progressive groups, who pointed to his statements and actions as a law professor and Minnesota Supreme Court justice. Among the groups that opposed him were Lambda Legal, People for the American Way and Alliance for Justice.
“His vision of the role of the courts as a nefarious force that seeks to block the will of the majority sends a dangerous message to vulnerable minorities that their constitutional rights are not guaranteed,” McGowan wrote. “Justice Stras’ failure to appreciate the important role that an independent judiciary plays in our constitutional democracy causes communities like ours grave concern.”
In a 2008 essay titled “Understanding the New Politics of Judicial Appointments,” Stras wrote intensified media scrutiny and organized interest groups have politicized the judicial confirmation process, which he said made lawmakers act “with a keen eye toward pleasing constituent groups and maintaining a consistent policy image.”
As an example of attempts at “pleasing constituent groups,” Stras pointed to judicial rulings on LGBTQ rights, abortion and school integration, suggesting either the decisions were best left to the political process or the courts got it wrong.
Although the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is the case most cited in the article, Stras also draws on the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, noting with a tinge of skepticism the court “struck down a Texas ban on homosexual sodomy because, according to the court, the state law violated privacy rights.”
Anthony Kreis, visiting assistant professor of law for the Chicago-Kent College of Law, told the Blade comments deriding LGBTQ rights as “social policy” are off-base.
“The problem with the notion of LGBTQ rights as being ‘social policy,’ is that viewpoint indicates that the Constitution’s protections do not sweep broadly enough to protect sexual minorities,” Kreis said. “In other words, LGBTQ people are at the mercy of legislatures to do right by them — and so then courts aren’t reliable actors to combat homophobia and transphobia.”
In written responses to questions from the Senate on his 2008 writing, Stras when asked about school integration acknowledged the Supreme Court applied the Fourteenth Amendment to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education, which he said “overruled the Supreme Court’s detestable decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.”
“When I wrote the referenced book review essay, I did so as a law professor, not as a judge,” Stras added. “I was describing the factors that have increased political polarization surrounding the judicial nomination process over the past several decades.”
Asked whether the U.S. Constitution provides a textual basis for rights to contraception, women’s access to abortion and same-sex marriage, Stras acknowledged the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of abortion rights and marriage equality, saying he’d “follow all binding precedent, including each of these precedents” on the Eighth Circuit.
Four years later, when Stras was a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court, he joined an opinion that prevented the Minnesota secretary of state from changing the ballot title on a proposed anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment from “Recognition of Marriage Solely Between One Man and One Woman” to “Limited the Status of Marriage to Opposite Sex Couples.”
Although Minnesota law dictates the secretary of state must “provide an appropriate title” for proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot, the court in the case of Limmer v. Ritchie concluded that language doesn’t enable the official to change a ballot title designated by the state legislature.
“Allowing the secretary of state, an executive branch officer with no constitutional authority over the form and manner of proposed constitutional amendments, to simply ignore the legislature’s action in proposing and passing a title to accompany a ballot question on a constitutional amendment potentially risks interfering with the legislature’s constitutional authority,” the decision says.
The decision, however, wasn’t unanimous. Minnesota Supreme Court Judge Minnesota Alan Page criticized the majority in his dissent by saying the ruling “announces a fundamentally flawed interpretation” of state law.
“Under the court’s view, a majority of the legislature could propose a constitutional amendment to, say, reinstate prohibition, propose the ballot title ‘Eliminating the Personal Income Tax,’ the secretary of state would be obligated to put the legislature’s title on the ballot, and under the standard the court announces today, this court could do nothing to prevent it,” Page wrote. “That is a result I cannot countenance.”
It should be noted that although the Klobuchar campaign defended the Minnesota Democrat’s vote for Stras by saying he was recommended by Page, the two weren’t in agreement in this instance.
Stras’s LGBTQ record was just part of the reason civil rights and progressives opposed his confirmation. A member of the Federalist Society, Stras clerked for conservative U.S. Associate Justice Clarence Justice, whom he called a “mentor” upon being sworn in to the Minnesota Supreme Court.
In Peterson v. Minnesota, which involves a police officer suing the City of Minneapolis for age discrimination, the Minnesota Supreme Court determined the 14 months the city took to investigate the case need not be applied to the statute of limitations under the law. Stras, however, joined a dissent that would have prevented the officer from bringing his case to the jury.
When the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a rape case trial judges can allow expert testimony to explain why a victim would delay in reporting the incident, Stras strikingly dissented on procedural grounds. The testimony was deemed warranted in the case because the victim had waited several hours before reporting the incident.
Stras has cultivated this record even though his own family experienced persecution as a member of a minority community. Stras, who’s believed to be the first Jewish person to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court, is the descendant of Holocaust survivors.
To be sure, Klobuchar has built a solid record in support of LGBTQ rights as a member of the U.S. Senate. She was a co-sponsor of the Respect for Marriage Act, which sought to repeal the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act before it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, voted in favor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and now co-sponsors the Equality Act. The Minnesota Democrat received a perfect score of “100” in the latest Human Rights Campaign congressional scorecard.
However, Klobuchar’s vote to confirm Stras to the Eighth Circuit despite his record on LGBTQ rights stands out.
Kreis acknowledged “there are often many reasons why senators could vote for nominees they don’t favor,” but didn’t see that at play with Klobuchar’s vote for Stras.
“It is hard to discern what reason she might have,” Kreis said. “Whatever the reason might be for the favorable vote, it was not a vote cast to help the advancement of LGBTQ rights.”
A well-known LGBTQ activist in Nicaragua who was arrested last September says he was tortured while in custody.
Ulises Rivas on Monday said members of Nicaragua’s National Police on Sept. 1, 2019, arrived at his niece’s volleyball game in Comalapa, a town in the country’s Chontales department that is roughly 75 miles east of the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, and arrested him because “they had an arrest warrant.”
A source with whom the Washington Blade spoke after Rivas’ arrest said he had been accused of robbing a woman. Rivas sent the Blade a screenshot of a message posted to a pro-government Facebook group that said he has also been accused of “inciting violence, destabilizing the peace” of his neighborhood and “hiding under the false flag of protectors of the environment.”
Rivas told the Blade during an emotional WhatsApp interview from his home in Santo Domingo, a town in Chontales department, the police brought him to the departmental capital of Juigalpa and placed him into a cell.
“I was not able to receive anything from my family, nor a visit or food,” said Rivas. “I was hungry all night.”
Rivas said officers the next morning took him to a local jail, and put him into what he described as a “punishment cell.” Rivas told the Blade he was forced to stand inside a cell for four hours with his hands in the air. He also said he suffered physical, “cultural and psychological torture.”
“I was bleeding and my entire body had been beaten and tortured,” said Rivas.
“I didn’t think that I would return to see my family,” he added. “I have tears in my eyes from everything they did to me.”
Rivas told the Blade he was forced to strip naked when his family arrived at the jail to visit him. Rivas also said authorities forced him to show his buttocks and made him do 10 squats.
Rivas said he spent 25 days in the cell before authorities transferred him to a prison within a larger penitentiary complex and placed him into another “punishment cell.”
“There was no bed, there were no mattresses, there were no hammocks,” said Rivas. “There was nothing on the floor.”
Rivas told the Blade there was a hole in the floor into which he and his other cellmate could defecate. Rivas also said they had access to water for only 20 minutes a day.
“You could hear cries, the cries of common prisoners when they were beaten,” said Rivas.
Rivas told the Blade there was also no access to medical care. He said the psychologists who worked at the prison were “from the government.”
“The first thing that they ask you is whether you want to kill yourself,” he said.
Rivas helped LGBTQ Nicaraguans in exile
Hundreds of people have been killed in Nicaragua since protests against the government of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, began in April 2018 in response to proposed cuts to the country’s social security benefits and the response to a wildfire at the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.
Rivas before he fled to Costa Rica protested against a gold mine in his hometown that B2Gold, a Canadian company, owns.
He helped create Asociación Hijos del Arco Iris LGBTI, a group in the Costa Rica that helps other LGBTQ Nicaraguans in exile. Rivas returned to Nicaragua in June 2019 in order to take care of his father who later died of cancer.
“I saw him die in the hospital,” Rivas told the Blade. “I was caring for him.”
Rivas said he then returned to his hometown for his father’s funeral.
“Afterwards they saw me and captured me because they had already seen that I was in Nicaragua,” he said.
Rivas spoke with the Blade less than two weeks after the Nicaraguan government released him and 90 other political prisoners from prison.
Rivas noted Waldemar Sommertag, the papal nuncio in Nicaragua, and the International Committee of the Red Cross played a role in the prisoners’ release, along with pressure from the international community. Rivas said his neighbors continue to protect him, even though he remains under house arrest and government surveillance.
“My neighborhood loves me,” he told the Blade.
Rivas said he does not know what to expect during his next court appearance that is scheduled to take place on Jan. 15.
The screenshot of the Facebook page that Rivas sent to the Blade says he could be sent to El Chipote, a notorious Managua prison in which Ortega himself was once a prisoner, “for about 10 or 20 years without the right to freedom, under the accusation of terrorism and threats to people.” Rivas nevertheless remains defiant.
“Nicaragua is made of vigor and glory,” he said. “Nicaragua is made for freedom.”
A coalition of centre-left parties in Poland has responded to the growing LGBT+ backlash in the country by appointing an openly gay candidate to stand in the next presidential election.
The strongly conservative Catholic country has seen a huge surge in homophobia after the ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) based its winning 2019 parliamentary election campaign on a platform of LGBT+ abuse.
The problem has grown so severe that more than 80 Polish municipal or local governments have now proclaimed themselves to be ‘LGBT-free zones’, a move strongly condemned by the European Parliament.
An alliance formed of three left-wing parties is now aiming to combat the increasing anti-gay rhetoric by backing Robert Biedroń, an openly gay politician and LGBT+ activist, as their joint candidate in the May presidential election.
Biedroń, 44, is a former MEP and current leader of the social liberal and pro-European party, Spring. Leaders of the left-wing alliance said they chose him for his support for women’s rights, the rule of law and the separation of church and state – all of which have been undermined by PiS since it took office in 2015.
Wlodzimierz Czarzasty, leader of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) noted that Biedroń “has clear views on the secular state, on social affairs, on the EU, on matters of freedom, including women’s issues”.
During his political career he has pushed for the removal of catechism classes from public schools, free access to contraception and sexual education and the right to abortion for all women.
He has long campaigned for LGBT+ rights, including the formal recognition of same-sex partnerships, which are not yet legal in Poland. His commitment to the LGBT+ community was recognised when he was awarded Poland’s ‘Rainbow Laurels’ in 2003 and named ‘Rainbow Man’ in 2004.
In May Biedroń will face incumbent right-wing president Andrzej Duda and liberal candidate Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska, who is viewed as Duda’s main rival.
If he wins the office of president, Biedroń will be “a guarantor of modern and diverse Poland, a good partner for the future leftist government”, said liberal politician Adrian Zandberg.
Three key pieces of California legislation that were tabled last year for various reasons will see the floor in 2020.
These bills – SB 132, SB 145 and SB 201 were all introduced by openly gay Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and were co-sponsored by Equality California.
SB 132, the Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act, aims to improve the living conditions for incarcerated transgender person. SB 132 will require that incarcerated transgender people in the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) be classified and housed based on their sense of health, safety and gender identity — rather than the sex they were assigned at birth. The bill will also require all staff and contractors of CDCR to consistently use the gender pronoun, honorific, and name the person has specified in all verbal and written communications with and regarding that person.
SB 145 is the LGBTQ Young People Nondiscrimination in the Sex Offender Registry Act. It would allow judges to decide whether a person should have to register as a sex offender if the person is within 10 years of age as the consensual sexual partner between ages 14-17. Current law mandates that such adult would automatically be added to the state’s sex offender registry. The bill aims to prevent LGBTQ+ adolescents from having to be listed on the state’s registry for sleeping with a boyfriend or girlfriend under the age of 18.
SB 201 would ban medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex infants. This would allow the individual to make the decision for themselves when hey are older. Currently, intersex infants often undergo cosmetic surgeries to help assign a gender. Weiner Tod the B.A.R. that the bill will be amended so that the age of informed consent is set at age 6.
“By that age kids can express, you know, what they want,” Weiner said. “They know what they want to look like and they can express their gender.”
The Senate committees has until January 24 to send it to the full Senate for a floor vote. That Chamber must pass it by January 31, sending it to the Assembly for approval.
The Council of the District of Columbia on Tuesday introduced legislation that would strip gendered and “patriarchal” terms from the D.C. code and replace them with gender-neutral language.
The Gendered Terms Modernization Amendment Act of 2020 would change instances of “he” or “she” in the law books to “the individual” or “they.” The bill was introduced by David Grosso, an at-large independent member of the council who has been a leader on LGBTQ legislation during his council tenure.
“We believe very strongly that language matters, that it actually holds power, and that the language of our laws matters,” Grosso told NBC News. “And it’s incredibly important that people feel included in the District of Columbia code to the fullest extent.”
The 43-page bill contains a list of “suggested” terms, Grosso said, “because for me it’s important that we have a hearing and listen to the public fully on what they think we should change it to as well.”
“His” would become “the individual’s,” “men” would become “individuals” or “humans,” “brother” and “sister” would become “sibling” and so on.
“Although we have done a lot of research and a lot of work on this, it is not something we should put out there and say: ‘We’ve got all the answers,’” Grosso said.
Among dozens of other proposed changes, the bill supports modifying the D.C. Charter and Home Rule Act so, for example, “chairman” of the District of Columbia Council would become “chairperson.” Modifications to the Charter and Home Rule Act would need to be approved by Congress.
The bill is co-sponsored by 10 of the 13 council members, and was introduced on a tense day during which member Jack Evans offered his resignation instead of facing a disciplinary hearing over an alleged ethics violation.
D.C. is not the first city to undergo a “linguistic cleansing,” according to Fern Johnson, a Clark University English professor. In a recent interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the efforts of Berkeley, California, to make its city code more gender inclusive, she said “Albuquerque, Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis, New York and Seattle have all made language less gender-specific, but these changes are usually incremental and happen without much fanfare.”
The broadening use of gender-neutral language in everyday vernacular and official documentation is accelerating. In 2017, the Associated Press Stylebook endorsed the use of the singular pronoun “they,” and this year, “they” was Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year” because of high public interest in the word’s definition and use as a singular pronoun.
Authorities are searching for a suspect after a transgender activist was found shot and killed in McAlester, Oklahoma, while on his way to pickup a taxi fare.
Dustin James Parker, 25, was found dead Wednesday with the windows of his car shot out after a 911 caller told police they heard gunshots in the early morning, according to NBC affiliate KJRH.McAlester Mayor John Browne assured the community that law enforcement was doing all it could to locate a suspect in Parker’s death.
“McAlester lost a supremely nice person who had such a positive outlook in his life,” Browne said in a statement. “He loved his job especially that it allowed him to help people. His passing is a loss for our community.”
Rover Taxi owner Brian West, 42, told NBC News Saturday that Parker was the first employee hired for the company, which launched in September. Parker, married with four children, had struggled previously juggling multiple jobs.
“I called him and said I have this idea I want you to help me build this and he did,” West said.
The two friends knew each other for about a year and worked together to launch a McAlester chapter of Oklahomans for Equality in May. Despite their short time together, West said that Parker felt like family.
“You couldn’t ask for a better friend, you couldn’t ask for a better husband, you couldn’t ask for a better employee,” West said. “He was an all around awesome person.”
Human Rights Campaign said in statement that it suspects Parker may be the first violent death of a transgender or gender non-conforming person in the new year. HRC has tracked violent deaths of at least 25 transgender or gender non-conforming people in 2019.
The organization has documented more than 150 killings of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals since the beginning of its “Violence Against the Transgender Community” project
“We say ‘at least’ because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported,” HRC said Thursday. “These victims are not just numbers or headlines. They were real people worthy of dignity and respect, of life and love.”
The government is giving trans people a special health card that will give them access to an existing government health insurance scheme, which was introduced in 2015 to provide health cards for those earning less than $2 a day, although trans people will not face that financial test.
Prime minister Imran Khan said that his government was “taking responsibility” for trans people, who say they are routinely denied treatment and can face harassment or ridicule from hospital staff and patients.
“It is part of a grand programme to provide health insurance not just to the poor but the vulnerable sections of society, including … transgender (people),” said Mirza.
“Any person who identifies as transgender is eligible for this health insurance programme,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Trans people have historically faced severe discrimination in healthcare settings, with doctors denying trans people treatment when they could not decide whether to treat them in a male or female ward.
The health ID cards giving access to the free healthcare scheme will be immediately available, but only to trans people who have registered as trans on their other identity documents.
Pakistan officially recognised transgender people in 2012, adding a third gender option to forms and official documents.
The 2017 national census counted Pakistan’s trans population for the first time, recording 10,418 trans people in a population of about 207 million, though charities estimate there are at least 500,000 trans people.
“The scheme is good but healthcare providers need to be sensitised,” said Zehrish Khan, project manager for trans rights group Gender Interactive Alliance. “Many of us resort to drugs and alcohol because we need psychiatric help and empathy to overcome the continuous harassment we face.”
Aisha Mughal, a trans rights expert, said about 2,500 trans people were currently registered under the government’s third gender option, which means that the new free healthcare is not readily accessible.
“Only a few transgender people know about this and the first step is to spread the word,” Mughal said. “It is just the beginning.”