Lots of news this week, some of which I covered in a roundup of parenting-related posts on Wednesday. Here’s more:
- The AFL-CIO and other unions are coming out in support of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which the U.S. House of Representatives should vote on within a week. Openly gay Representative Barney Frank predicts it will pass there, but face a tougher battle in the Senate.
- The House federal workforce subcommittee split along party lines over proposed legislation to ban discrimination against federal employees and job applicants based on sexual orientation
- The Washington, DC mayor and a majority of the City Council have pledged to support legislation legalizing same-sex marriage in the District, saying it could pass easily. The Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance, however, says D.C. should not move ahead with the bill now because Congress would likely overturn it.
- In an emotional speech, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders reversed his position and signed a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California’s same-sex marriage ban. He said that part of the reason for his change was that his daughter is a lesbian. Well worth watching the whole speech; it’s a rare example of a politician leading with his heart, not his strategists.
- Meanwhile, supporters of marriage equality rallied around California in an effort to convince Governor Arnold Scwarzenegger not to veto the bill on his desk, as he has said he will do.
- In an item I missed last week, the California state Assembly approved a bill to protect all young people, including those who identify as LGBT, from abuse and discrimination in the state’s justice system. The bill will return to the Senate “for a routine concurrence vote” before going to the governor.
- Mark Ferrandino, appointed to replace an outgoing Colorado state representative, will become the first openly gay man to serve in that state’s legislature. Last week, Governor Bill Ritter appointed the state’s first openly-gay district court judge.
- LGBT students Hononegah High School in Illinois won the vote of the Board of Education to form a Gay-Straight Alliance on campus despite opposition.
- Many in the LGBT community are rallying to the cause of the Jena 6, six black students in Louisiana who are facing what some see as unnecessarily harsh charges for their actions in response to racist actions by other students and inaction by the school. Not an LGBT issue per se, but one of diversity and civil rights. Others say the LGBT community (HRC in particular) has jumped on the bandwagon of a popular case that isn’t so clear cut.
- The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage did not violate the state constitution, saying the state “has not acted wholly unreasonably in granting recognition to the only relationship capable of bearing children traditionally within the marital unit.”
- The New Jersey State Environmental Commissioner withdrew a state-funded tax break for the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist group that refuses to allow same-sex couples to celebrate civil unions at a beachfront pavilion in Ocean Grove. One of the plaintiff couples suing the group had their civil union ceremony Saturday on a fishing pier near the pavilion.
- Some members of New Jersey’s LGBT community are calling on Newark leaders to investigate the recent murder of three young people in Newark as a hate crime, claiming the victims were targeted because they were gay.
- A Utah court ruled that Utah’s Transit Authority did nothing wrong when it fired Krystal Etsitty, a transgender worker, because of “the possibility of liability for UTA arising from Etsitty’s restroom usage.” Why we need ENDA, reason #782.
Around the world:
- An Australian transgender woman has been told that in order to change her gender on her birth certificate, she must divorce her wife, because marriage of same-sex partners is illegal.
- An Australian lesbian couple that is suing their obstetrician for implanting two embryos, instead of one, leading to the birth of twins, insists “This has never been a case about whether our children are loved. They are cherished.” Some are using the case as a reason to ban lesbian couples from access to in vitro fertilization. (Thanks, PageOneQ.)
- After a complaint by a married lesbian couple that the province of Nova Scotia, Canada did not recognize them both as parents without needing an adoption, the provincial government changed the birth-registration process, effective immediately, to allow the same-sex partner or spouse of the birth mother to be named as the other parent on the birth registration.
- Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly’s Childhood and Adolescence Commission unanimously passed a bill to prohibit adoptions by same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples in which one or both partners is bisexual. The bill will now go to the Assembly’s main floor for debate.
- The Singapore Parliament is considering legislation to repeal laws banning sodomy, but only for heterosexuals.
- The three main political parties in the U.K. have “welcomed” the publication by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) of new guidance for teachers on homophobic bullying in schools.
- A British lesbian who had a civil partnership with another soldier while they were both enlisted in the Royal Army is suing the military for bias, claiming she was forced out after months of harassment by fellow soldiers.
