Police in Russia cited the country’s “gay propaganda” law when they shut down a music video shoot with punk band Pussy Riot in Saint Petersburg yesterday.
Pussy Riot said in a statement that police accused them of “extremism” and of “making an illegal video” and had them removed from Lenfilm studio.
The band was shooting a music video for a song called “БЕСИТ / RAGE” with 150 activists who were mostly queer or female when police turned up, Pitchfork reports.
They said that police insisted staff at the studio shut the power off to bring about an end to the shoot.
Pussy Riot said they lost $15,000 after their music video was shut down because of Russia’s ‘gay propaganda’ law.
Bizarrely, Lenfilm claimed that the police seen in recorded footage were actually actors – however, Pussy Riot responded: “Damn it, if the actor played this, he would have been given an Oscar.”
We’ll be thankful if you share this info and/or be kind enough to help us to raise the money to make this video happen anyway.
The band said they lost $15,000 as a result of the video shoot being shut down, and said the incident occurred because of Russia’s “absurd ‘gay propaganda’ law”.
“We’ll be thankful if you share this info and/or be kind enough to help us to raise the money to make this video happen anyway,” Pussy Riot added.
Russia is well-known for having strict anti-LGBT+ laws. The county’s controversial ‘gay propaganda law’ a unanimously approved federal bill, has prohibited even the mention of homosexuality since 2013.
A Russian feminist recently faced charges under the archaic law.
A number of people have faced charges under the law. In December, a Russian feminist was arrested for “gay propaganda” because she shared drawings of vaginas online.
Yulia Tsvetkova was named as a suspect in a case investigating the distribution of “criminal pornography”. She was investigated for running a social media page called Vagina Monologues, which aims to “remove the taboo” around vaginas.
Despite the law, recent research found that school children in Russia are actually highly tolerant of LGBT+ people.
Following anti-government protests attended by thousands over the summer, Russian authorities have been targeting youth with recent initiatives including funding for patriotic education and a ban on minors attending protests.
But the recent study found that 62 percent of Russian youth say they are patriots and while 70 per cent had heard about the recent wave of protests, 75 percent said they wouldn’t protest themselves.
National newspaper The Australianhas sparked fury with an article that draws comparisons between the coronavirus and the “contagion” of transgender people.
The newspaper is well known for its its “appalling” coverage of transgender issues, which includes articles such as “They’re castrating children”, “Transgender project ‘out of balance’” and “Corrupting kids’ thinking”.
The latest article evoked strong comparisons with disease with the headline: “Health chiefs can’t ignore ‘global epidemic’ of transgender teens.”
Published on Monday, it begins: “With the coronavirus dominating the news, Queensland’s health authorities have been urged to confront an under-reported global contagion involving troubled teenage girls declaring they are ‘born in the wrong body.’”
It then quotes University of Queensland law dean Patrick Parkinson, a man who wrote a paper comparing transgender children to teens with eating disorders, causing his employer and colleagues to write an open letterdistancing themselves from him.
“Speaking in a personal capacity,” the paper says, “[Parkinson] conceded authorities would be worried and busy with the coronavirus but said the explosion in transgender teenagers, chiefly girls, was ‘another epidemic’ – one that had ‘so far escaped public attention.’”
The article also suggests that efforts to criminalise the harmful practise of conversion therapy are a “global tactic of trans activists” who are attempting a “deceptive widening” of conversion therapy’s definitions in order to criminalise any attempt to change trans children’s gender identity.
Coronavirus aside, The Australian has a history of anti-trans reporting.
For months, The Australian has been publishing claims of a transgender “social contagion” in a section of its website dedicated entirely to sex and gender.
Critics say the articles “demonise and spread misinformation about trans and gender-variant youth,” promoting fringe anti-trans extremists while campaigning against medical experts.
Last September, the Australian Psychological Society rejected the claims as “alarmist and scientifically incorrect”. Australia’s peak trans healthcare body, AusPATH, has also called out the newspaper’s “biased” reporting.
Swiss voters on Sunday approved a referendum to ban anti-gay discrimination in a landslide, 63 percent to 37 percent, reaffirming an antidiscrimination law approved by the Swiss Federal Assembly in 2018.
The reaffirmed law makes it illegal to publicly denigrate, discriminate or stir up hatred based on a person’s sexual orientation. The 2018 bill was an expansion of a law passed in 1995 that banned denigration, discrimination and hate speech on the basis of race and religion with potential fines and prison sentences for violations. The new law does not ban gender identity discrimination.
Only three of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, or states, had majorities vote against the public referendum on Sunday, which was forced after opponents of the 2018 antidiscrimination law gathered enough signatures to force a public vote on the issue.
“After the clear ‘Yes,’ the LGBTI community will use this momentum to push for the equal application of the law and enforce marriage equality for everyone,” Pink Cross, a Swiss advocacy group said in a statement posted in German. Same-sex civil unions have been legal in Switzerland since 2007, and a bill to legalize same-sex marriage for all is pending in the Swiss Pariament and could see passage this year.
Pink Cross also called for better recording of hate crime statistics, and for an overhaul of what it called the “bureaucratic effort” required to change gender on official documents for transgender and intersex Swiss people — “the part of the LGBTI community that cannot benefit from today’s yes,” the group wrote.
The BBC reported that some of the country’s right-wing political parties and evangelical Christian groups opposed the measure. The country’s largest parliamentary party, the far-right Swiss People’s Party, opposed the antidiscrimination law, saying it would silence “unwelcome opinions and voices.”
Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter, a member of the seven-person Federal Council that serves as Switzerland’s executive branch, said voters “are saying unmistakably that hatred and discrimination have no place in our free Switzerland.”
“Freedom of expression remains guaranteed,” she said, noting that courts have been “restrained” in their application of the existing law and “anyone who remains respectful need have no fear of being convicted.”
The body of a 56-year-old Australian man was found hours after he allegedly left home for a Grindr hook-up.
The unidentified Canberra man was discovered dead on February 2 by a man walking his dog in Boulee, New South Wales.
His body had been dumped in bushland a few metres away from the purple Honda Jazz he had been driving.
He had no visible injuries, and police are waiting for autopsy results to determine his cause of death.
Officers believe the man had been on his way to a Grindr hook-up, as he was known to use the app and others like it.
They will be using these apps to determine who the man was speaking with in the hours before his death.
Police urge locals and Grindr users to come forward with information.
Homicide squad commander detective superintendent Danny Doherty urged locals with any information to come forward.
“This is a small community and we hope that someone may be able to assist our investigators — either through sightings of the car, or who also may have been using dating applications to meet people in the area,” he said, according to Star Observer.
“Someone may come forward who may have knowledge of this person, this area might be an area where people have met before, they may have knowledge of this man in the car that’s important.”
The deceased was found wearing blue jeans, a sleeveless dark blue fitted t-shirt and white sneakers, and was driving a car with ACT number plates YFD 00H.
If you have any information which could assist police, contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
While Grindr and apps like it are used safely by millions of queer people ever day, there are rare occasions where hook-ups end in tragedy.
PinkNews ran through some simple tips that users can take in order to keep themselves safe, including meeting in public and sharing your location with an app such as Find My Friends.
When Reggie Bledsoe was a student in the public schools of Newark, New Jersey, he didn’t feel represented by the people he learned about in the classroom. As a black man, he could look to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. But as a gay man, he knew he didn’t fit the traditional mold of a black historical figure. He said he wishes he had learned about even one black LGBTQ figure, like Bayard Rustin, King’s longtime adviser and fellow civil rights pioneer, when he was young and in need of inspiration.
“Personally and academically, it would have been so helpful seeing myself in what I was learning,” Bledsoe, who now sits on the Newark Board of Education, told NBC News. “Had I known about Bayard Rustin or [writer and activist] James Baldwin, I could only imagine where I would be and what I would do.”
Future generations of Newark students will get the chance to learn about LGBTQ historical figures — including Baldwin and Rustin (who was posthumously pardoned by California’s governor last week, 67 years after he was arrested on anti-gay charges) — alongside their heterosexual contemporaries.
A year ago, New Jersey became the second state, following California, to pass a law requiring public schools to incorporate an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum into their classrooms; Colorado and Illinois soon followed suit. And ahead of the statewide law, which goes into effect in September, the nonprofit groups Garden State Equality and Make It Better for Youth rolled out a pilot program last month in 12 public schools across the state, including Newark Arts High School, that will run until the end of the school year in June.
Implementation
Implementation of California’s 2011 LGBTQ curriculum law was slow — so much so that the state didn’t approve LGBTQ-inclusive textbooks until 2017. Wanting to learn from California’s missteps and get ahead of the conservative politicians and anti-LGBTQ groups who vocally opposed the new law, proponents of New Jersey’s LGBTQ curriculum were proactive.
“Developing curriculum for any topic is incredibly resource intensive, so we have designed a full curriculum that we’re going to continue to expand, and we’re going to get it to every public school in New Jersey that wants it completely free,” said Jon Oliveira, director of communications at Garden State Equality, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group.
He said his organization’s goal is to ensure that an “LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum has wide adoption across the state.” Unlike California’s law, New Jersey’s mandate leaves the specific curriculum materials and lesson plans up to individual school districts, not the state.
The interdisciplinary pilot curriculum, which was written by New Jersey educators, goes beyond lessons about LGBTQ historical figures and their contributions, according to Oliveira. The program also includes a creative writing lesson for how to treat LGBTQ characters, a world languages lesson on gender-neutral pronouns and biology lessons on sex and gender diversity.
Kate Okesen, the founder of Make It Better for Youth, led the writing team for the pilot program. In March 2018, when the curriculum bill was still in committee in the Legislature, she met with a group of enthusiastic volunteer educators, many of whom are LGBTQ themselves. They gathered in the library of Red Bank Regional High School in Little Silver to discuss what obstacles schools might face if the law were passed and what they could do to help ease the transition for teachers. In those conversations, the seed of the pilot program was sown.
“That input helped me recognize … if this is not grounded in the realistic practice of a classroom teacher, we’re not going to make the progress that we want to make with the spirit of the law,” said Okesen, who has been a teacher for 22 years.
Last March, Okesen and two dozen other educators gathered again for a three-day retreat at a Unitarian Universalist retreat center right by the beach town of Barnegat, where later in the year Alfonso Cirulli, the town’s conservative Christian mayor, would call the LGBTQ curriculum law “an affront to almighty God.” This time, with the law firmly on the books, the volunteers had a more concrete goal: to outline a plan to help teachers adapt to the curriculum mandate and brainstorm a collection of lesson plans and guidelines that would become the pilot program.
The 12 elementary, middle and high schools from across the state were chosen based on a survey of interested schools, which gathered information on factors like administrative readiness and cultural competency training. The schools, which started incorporating lesson plans from the program last month, each have an assigned instructional coach — or “teacher leader” — who meets with teachers in the building to answer questions about implementation and to gather feedback on the lessons.
Another cohort of a couple of dozen schools, Okesen said, is also participating but without any instructional guidance or oversight.
John Bormann, superintendent of the Rumson School District, where the Forrestdale School is one of the pilot program’s 12 participating institutions, said his district is participating to better understand the requirements of the new law and what it must do to comply ahead of September, when the mandate goes into effect. However, he added, the district has not yet decided to adopt the curriculum.
“A lot of thoughtful decision-making and exploration needs to occur with our faculty and administration before lessons are rolled out to students,” he said.
Representation
At meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance club at Haddon Heights High School in Haddon Heights, students will sometimes discuss LGBTQ history, like the 1969 Stonewall uprising, according to GSA member Lola Rossi. But Lola, a 10th grader, said this has been the only place in school where she and her peers have been exposed to this history.
“Our history, how we got to where we are, fighting for our rights,” she said, “a lot of LGBT members don’t even know about stuff like that or even current stuff that’s happening within the community.”
Haddon Heights is one of the 12 schools participating in the pilot program this term, and Lola said she’s excited that LGBTQ history is getting more attention in the classroom — for herself, her LGBTQ peers and their straight counterparts.
“What I look forward to the most is kids seeing that we’ve always been here and we’ve always been making an impact,” she said.
Nearly 65 percent of students in the U.S. reported receiving no classroom instruction about LGBTQ people, history or events, and 15 percent reported receiving only negative information about LGBTQ people in the classroom, according to a 2017 report by the LGBTQ education advocacy group GLSEN. While less than 20 percent of students reported seeing positive LGBTQ representations in the classroom, the survey found that a more inclusive curriculum could have a positive effect on LGBTQ students’ experience in school and their educational engagement overall.
Shannon Cuttle, first vice president of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, who is the first elected official in the state to openly identify as nonbinary, said their experience in New Jersey public schools would have been greatly improved if they had seen LGBTQ representation in the classroom.
“Our curriculum and our classrooms should be mirrors and windows for our diverse community,” Cuttle said. “I didn’t have representation when I was in school. Curriculum like this would have been life-changing for me.”
For Cuttle, whose school district is not participating in the pilot program, making curriculum more inclusive is often just a matter of including LGBTQ representation in lessons that are already being taught.
“We’re already talking about LGBT figures in history,” Cuttle said. “Some just may not know that they are.”
That is how the pilot program approaches lessons, according to Oliveira. When learning about the civil rights movement, for instance, students will learn about Rustin, and in lesson plans about World War II, students will be taught about Alan Turing, the “father of computer science,” who helped defeat Nazi Germany by deciphering its coded messages. What’s often left out of the history books is that Turing, despite having been a war hero, was chemically castrated by the British government for being gay, and he later died by suicide.
Bledsoe, the Newark school board member, said he appreciates the pilot program’s inclusion of local LGBTQ history, as well. One of its lesson plans focuses on Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old black lesbian from Newark whose murder in a 2003 hate crime sparked protests and prompted a statewide conversation about protecting LGBTQ people from violence.
The curriculum also includes lesson plans on Barbra Siperstein, a lifelong transgender rights activist who was the first transgender member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee, who died last year, and Marsha P. Johnson, an LGBTQ icon who was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“A criticism I often hear is ‘What does being LGBTQ have to do with that person’s contributions to society?'” Oliveira said. “It’s impossible for me, in my mind, to separate [Rustin’s and Turing’s] accomplishments from their identities in the lives that they lived.”
The response to the pilot program in the 12 participating districts has been a mix of enthusiastic support and vocal opposition, according to Oliveira. However, he said he’s confident that the program will be a success, and he added that opponents’ primary argument — that any mention of LGBTQ identity is inappropriate for the classroom — is increasingly falling on deaf ears.
“There are naysayers out there who have an agenda against our community, who say that stuff belongs at home, it’s a private conversation,” he said. “LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum is not talking about people’s private lives. It’s talking about people’s public lives.”
Data component
Along with helping public school teachers adapt their lessons to comply with the new law, the pilot program will also be a source of data for a research study that Oliveira and Okesen hope will make a supportive case for an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum.
Garden State Equality and Make It Better for Youth are working with a team of researchers from Stockton University in southern New Jersey to measure the effect of the curriculum on individual student outcomes and on the cultural climate around LGBTQ identity in state public schools. Okesen said the research aspect of the pilot program is just as important as the lesson plans.
“I’m hoping that the data we collect demonstrates concretely for schools in New Jersey that the kind of visibility that’s offered by this curriculum creates positive outcomes for kids and that we see a shift in … students saying that they feel accepted and affirmed,” she said.
A best-case scenario, she said, would be for the study to make the case for an inclusive curriculum beyond New Jersey, as well.
A national model?
New Jersey is now one of four states to require LGBTQ-inclusive curriculums in public schools, up from just one before 2019. Oliveira said he thinks the sudden push for more inclusive public education is motivated in part by a resurgence of anti-LGBTQeducationpolicies at the federal level.
“The Trump administration is proof that, at any given moment, these rights can be taken away,” he said. “We have to constantly remain vigilant about moving forward, making sure these stories are told, making sure that our stories are raised and that LGBTQ youth see themselves represented in the classroom.”
Six states still have laws that restrict the mention or promotion of LGBTQ history and people in public schools, according to GLSEN: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. The laws, sometimes called “No Promo Homo” laws, forbid teachers from discussing LGBTQ identities in a “positive light” — and often effectively mean they can’t discuss LGBTQ issues at all.
But there is also a growing consensus that curriculums should be more LGBTQ inclusive, as more states, including traditionally conservative ones like Missouri, are considering laws that mirror New Jersey’s.
Oliveira hopes the ready-made curriculum his organization has helped craft will make complying with the new mandate easier for districts across the state. He said that as the push to make curriculums more LGBTQ inclusive catches on across the country, as he hopes it will, other states could benefit from the model, as well.
“We really see the work that we’re doing here as a model that we can bring to every other state in the nation that wants to do it,” he said.
Youth suicide rates are dropping in the U.S., but the proportion of teens who have suicidal thoughts or make an attempt remains consistently higher among sexual minorities than among heterosexual young people, two new studies in Pediatrics suggest.
One study looked at suicide rates among teens between 2009 and 2017 and found young people who didn’t identify as heterosexual were more than three times as likely as those who did to attempt suicide. A second study looked at this same connection from 1995 to 2017 and found suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts were all more common among sexual-minority youth.
“Numerous studies going back to the late 1990s have consistently shown that sexual minority youth are about three times more likely to report making a suicide attempt,” said Brian Mustanski, co-author of an editorial accompanying both studies, and director of the Northwestern Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing in Chicago.
“The fact that societal acceptance for the LGBTQ community has improved significantly in the past decades raises the important question of (whether) these disparities in suicide attempt have shrunk over time,” Mustanski said by email. “The two studies . . . are some of the first to show that sexual orientation disparities in suicide attempts have not been shrinking over time.”
Adolescence is a time of sexual and social development when many young people may begin to recognize or express attraction to people of the same sex or identify with a gender other than their sex assigned at birth. While the risk of mental health disorders, suicide, substance misuse and other health problems spikes during adolescence, the risk can be even more pronounced for sexual minority youth, both teams of researchers note in their reports.
One of the studies, led by Julia Raifman of Boston University School of Public Health, examined almost a decade of data from youth in 10 states in the Northeast and Midwest.
During this time, the proportion of youth identifying as sexual minorities nearly doubled, from 7.3% in 2009 to 14.3% in 2017. Over the same period, the proportion of youth who reported any same-sex sexual contact climbed by 70%, from 7.7% to 13.1%, the study also found.
However, the proportion of teens who attempted suicide and also identified as sexual minorities also rose over time, from 24.6% in 2009 to 35.6% in 2017.
“There is a great deal of evidence linking stigma against sexual minority youth to suicide attempts,” Raifman said in an email. “Stigma in the form of family rejection, peer bullying, and higher-level state policies are all linked to increased suicide among sexual minority youth.”
The second study looked at more than two decades of data from youth in Massachusetts.
Lead author Richard Liu, a researcher at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues found that suicidal plans and attempts declined across the board, but much more steeply among heterosexual youth than sexual minority teens.
One limitation of both studies is that the results may not represent what’s happening among youth nationwide, the researchers note.
Even so, the findings suggest that at least some sexual minority youth may not be receiving the support they need, Liu said.
“I think the results of our study really highlight that we have a long way to go to reduce suicide risk in sexual minority youth,” he told Reuters Health by email.
“Interpersonal conflicts are often a trigger for suicide risk, and having supportive and accepting people in their lives is important for sexual minority youth,” Liu added. “Additionally, having family and friends to turn to when dealing with conflicts with others cab help minimize risk for mental health concerns and suicide.”
With a declared goal of beating HIV/AIDS in the United States by 2030, President Trump this week in his $4.8 trillion budget request for fiscal year 2021 proposed major increases in HIV/AIDS funds, but global programs and social services used by low-income people with the disease face steep cuts.
At first glance, the proposed request Trump unveiled Monday is a major victory for advocates hoping he’d make good on his stated vision to beat HIV/AIDS by 2030, which herenewed in his State of the Union address last week.
But despite $716 million proposed to beat HIV in a PrEP-centric “Ending the HIV Epidemic” initiative, the budget seeks to cut Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS, or HOPWA, by $80 million, halve funding for PEPFAR and reduce the U.S. commitment to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculous & Malaria.
That $716 million request breaks down into smaller requests for various U.S. agencies working to fight HIV/AIDS:
$371 million for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention for transition activities from planning to implementation, scaling up jurisdictional programs to provide additional testing, linkage to treatment and prevention services, including PrEP; and augmentation of public health staff in local jurisdictions;
For the Health Resources & Services Administration, $137 million for Community Health Centers for increased access to HIV prevention services, including PrEP, and $165 million for Ryan White HIV/AIDS program to treat HIV rapidly after diagnosis;
$27 million for Indian Health Services to enhance support for prevention, diagnosis and links to treatment (Congress last year declined to fund this money despite Trump’s request, but gave an additional $25 to the National Institute for Health to support HIV research);
$16 million for NIH Centers for AIDS Research to evaluate prevention and treatment methods.
Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health & Human Services Rear Adm. Brett Giroir presented the numbers at a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS on Monday, saying they demonstrate Trump’s commitment to ending HIV/AIDS.
“I don’t run the budget, but you’re going to see cuts in many many many programs proposed by OMB,” Giroir said. “$716 million in new money is a serious investment in this program.”
Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV & Hepatitis Policy and co-chair of PACHA, told the Washington Blade prior to the meeting on Monday the proposed increases were “really, really good.”
In a joint statement, the Partnership to End HIV, STD & Hepatitis — which comprises the AIDS United, the National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Directors, the National Coalition of STD Directors, the National Minority AIDS Coalition and the AIDS Institute — hailed the request for $716 million as “an important scale up of current funding.”
“Coupled with continued HIV funding across HRSA and CDC, these dollars will support the communities that remain vulnerable and disproportionately impacted by this epidemic,” the statement says.
But praise from the partnership comes with a major caveat: Criticism for not increasing funds to fight sexually transmitted diseases generally or hepatitis.
“With STD rates at an all-time high and new cases of viral hepatitis on the rise, it is paramount that we respond to this crisis with the funding necessary to mount a public health response,” the statement says.
But these gains are offset by general reductions in social services programs across the board, including many programs used by people with HIV/AIDS, such as Medicare and Medicaid. The budget would cut $451 billion from Medicare and $900 billion from Medicaid over the course of 10 years.
Additionally, the budget calls for Medicaid to become a block grant program, which would give states greater leeway, but make federal resources for the program finite.
An estimated 40 percent of people with HIV/AIDS are on Medicaid, and 25 percent are on Medicare, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) laid into Trump in a joint news conference for the proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, which total $1.6 trillion.
“Two-thirds of long-term care is payed for by Medicaid,” Pelosi said. “This is a middle class benefit. Those cuts endanger the health of seniors in long-term care needs for them and their families. And these Medicaid cuts also hurt rural hospitals, people seeking opioid addiction treatment, veterans and their families, more than one million veterans are on Medicaid.”
Defending the proposed cuts was Acting Office of Management & Budget Director Russ Vought, who at a White House briefing on Monday insisted Medicare would grow by 6 percent and Medicaid would grow by 3 percent under Trump’s proposal.
“The budget does propose good government reforms to lower drug prices, to root out improper payments, and to address wasteful and inefficient spending,” Vought said. “For instance, this budget proposes to remove from Medicare certain programs, such as uncompensated care in graduate medical education that are draining the Medicare trust fund and benefit more than just seniors. These costs would still be funded outside of Medicare, but with reforms to moderate their growth.”
Moreover, while the funds for HIV/AIDS programs under the Department of Health & Human Services get a boost, a look at another HIV/AIDS-related item in the budget under the Department of Housing & Urban Development, HOPWA, faces a steep cut.
Lauren Banks Killelea, director of policy and advocacy for the National AIDS Housing Coalition, lambasted the proposed cuts to HOPWA in a statement, estimating the proposed reduction would result in nearly 9,000 families potentially losing their homes.
“Taking away healthcare options and housing options from low-income Americans will only exacerbate the HIV epidemic,” Killelea said. “The proposed increases to the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiatives pales in comparison to the drastic cuts proposed elsewhere.”
Schmid, announcing he had just learned about the proposed HOPWA cut at the AIDS council meeting, said that part of the budget was an “important unfortunate thing” compared to the increases elsewhere and said he’d work with Congress to restore that money.
The Partnership to End, HIV, STD & Hepatitis criticized the Trump budget for its proposed cuts to health programs and HOPWA.
The increased funds Trump seeks to fight HIV/AIDS on the domestic front stands in contrast to the hacksaw the request takes to global programs.
For the Bush-era President’s Emergency Plan AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which provides HIV treatment drugs to developing countries, primarily in Africa, Trump seeks $3.2 billion, which is $1.17 billion less than the money Congress appropriated for fiscal year 2020 funding levels. The proposed reduction is even steeper than the cut proposed by Trump in the previous budget request by $200 million.
For the Global Fund, Trump proposed to contribute $1 for every $3 donated to the partnership, which is a reduction from an earlier U.S. commitment to donate $1 for every $2.
Emily Sanderson, national organizer for the New York-based Health GAP and the Student Global AIDS Campaign, tore into Trump in a statement on the proposed cuts and called on Congress to increase funds for global programs.
“Today’s budget request is a chilling reminder that, if he had it his way, President Trump would take a hacksaw to the HIV treatment and healthcare programs that save the lives of millions of people around the world,” Sanderson said. “The president has threatened people living with HIV enough these last three years. It’s time for Congress to roundly reject Trump’s deadly vision for gutting the HIV response and instead rapidly scale up funding and provide an additional $500 million for PEPFAR this year.”
In previous years, Trump has proposed similarly draconian cuts to global programs, but Congress rejected them and reinstated the funds for both PEPFAR and the Global Fund. It’s likely Congress will take the same approach in response to Trump’s proposed cuts in the FY-21 budget.
The Obama administration had also sought a reduction in PEPFAR funds on the basis that it was doing more with less money because of generic drugs, although the proposed cuts were less severe.
Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said the increase in domestic funds and the decrease for global initiatives means the Trump budget is “a mixed bag” on HIV/AIDS.
“On the one hand, it proposes a significant increase to the domestic ‘Ending the HIV Epidemic’ initiative – an increase of $450 million over FY 2020 funding levels,” Kates said. “On the other, it seeks to cut PEPFAR’s budget by more than $1.5 billion, a cut that would translate into fewer people on HIV treatment and more new HIV infections, globally.”
Neither the White House nor the Office of Management & Budget responded to multiple requests from the Blade to comment on the cuts to HOPWA or to the global programs.
A new bill in the Ohio House would ban conversion therapy — programs intended to end same-sex attraction and make a gay person straight. The conversion therapy bill is sponsored by Rep. Mary Lightbody, a Columbus-area Democrat.
“Human beings are complex, and each individual is unique,” Lightbody said in a statement. “As children grow, we all learn about the world and develop an identity that expresses who we are at heart.”
Nineteen states and Washington, D.C. ban conversion therapy. North Carolina and Puerto Rico have partial bans. In Ohio, seven cities — Athens, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Kent, Lakewood and Toledo have banned conversion therapy.
Republicans far outnumber Democrats in both of Ohio’s legislative chambers.
A gay Missouri police officer who won a “historic” $20 million judgment in a sexual orientation discrimination lawsuit alleging he was told to “tone down your gayness” by a police commission board member has reached a settlement with St. Louis County for half the amount a jury awarded him.
The settlement in the discrimination case filed by Lt. Keith Wildhaber was announced just hours after St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said he will retire.
“I think it’s really important for those of us in St. Louis County to recognize this is a tough time for the county, but we have to recognize that discrimination isn’t right. By settling this lawsuit, the county recognizes that what Lt. Wildhaber went though was not right,” St. Louis County Executive Sam Page said at a news conference.
The constitutionality of South Florida bans on juvenile gay conversion therapy is hanging in the balance in the 11th Circuit, where attorneys jousted Tuesday over whether the bans violate therapists’ free speech rights.
At issue is a lawsuit filed by two therapists challenging local laws that prohibit them and other licensed counselors from performing gay conversion therapy on minors. The local ordinances were passed by the city of Boca Raton and surrounding Palm Beach County.
On appeal Tuesday in a special Miami hearing of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, the therapists’ attorney Mathew Staver urged the three-judge panel to overturn the lower court’s decision. The debate was focused on whether the gay conversion bans represent a regulation of professional medical treatment versus a curtailing of speech.
Read the full article for arguments by the good guys. Two of the three appeals court judges hearing the case were appointed by Trump. If Staver wins at this level, the issue will surely again wind up before the Supreme Court, which has twice before rejected appeals of state-level bans. Since then, however, there are two Trump-appointed justices.