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7 Lessons in How (And How Not) to Interview Trans People
We don’t know what Diane Sawyer will discuss with Bruce Jenner, but if it’s about Jenner’s gender identity, she has lots of examples to follow — and avoid.
Thom Senzee
www.advocate.com/politics/media/2015/04/24/7-lessons-how-and-how-not-interview-trans-people
Check out Barefoot Wine's giant sand SOS to 'keep Britain's beaches barefoot-friendly'
150 x 150m sand art in Morecambe Bay took five people ten hours to complete
jamiet
Eric Holder: The Exit interview
Loretta Lynch is finally confirmed by the Senate as Eric Holder’s replacement. The Advocate spoke with the outgoing attorney general on marriage equality, the progressive agenda, and the future of civil rights.
Edward Wyckoff Williams
www.advocate.com/politics/2015/04/24/eric-holder-exit-interview
This Straight Guy Just Asked His Gay BFF To Prom With The Most Adorable Promposal
As a student council member at his high school, Anthony Martinez is often tasked with planning school dances. But the 17-year-old, who is gay, says that he “never [gets] asked.”
Until now, that is.
Martinez, who attends Desert Oasis High School in Las Vegas, Nevada, shared on Twitter this week that he was asked to prom by someone entirely unexpected. It was his best friend, Jacob Lescenski — who is straight.
Guess who just got asked to prom by @JacobLescenskii pic.twitter.com/eDrTRkX7fp
— AnthonyseXC (@anthonyseXC) April 21, 2015
For the promposal, Lescenski (wearing camouflage pants in the photo above) created a banner with the words: “You’re hella gay, I’m hella str8. But you’re like my brother. So be my d8?”
Lescenski told New Now Next that he had decided to surprise Martinez with the promposal after seeing his friend tweet about wanting a date for the event.
“I decided on going to prom alone because my original date idea didn’t work out so well,” he said. “Then one night I saw Anthony, who is my best friend, tweeting about wanting a date. So, I came up with the poster idea, asked my friend Mia to make it and asked him that next day … It was a giant surprise to everyone, especially Anthony!”
A thrilled Martinez expressed his gratitude to his BFF on social media.
“He’s my best friend, and a real man given the fact he has the guts to fulfill my gay student council dream of always helping out planning dances, and never getting asked. I couldn’t ask for a better person in my life,” the teen wrote on Tumblr. “Thank you Jacob, can’t wait for May 2nd!”
Lescenski’s promposal has gone viral this week, and netizens everywhere have praised the teen for his awesome gesture of friendship.
“It’s an adorable story — boy meets boy — with a 2015 twist,” wrote Mic.com of the promposal. “As being an ally becomes more and more a part of the high school experience, it’s inspiring to see a pair of bros taking the hetero-homo friendship to new heights.”
These two are my heroes 😉 @JacobLescenskii your true friend everyone whish to have @anthonyseXC have a great prom!! pic.twitter.com/UHt2GV4tSy
— Aurelija (@JulyGirl3) April 23, 2015
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Activist Remembers Those He Met on 6,000-Mile Walk for Equality (VIDEO)
I’m From Driftwood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit archive for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer stories. New stories are posted on the site every Wednesday.
Alan Bounville walked 6,000 miles for gender-identity and sexual-orientation equality. But what happened early on in his walk, at a small grocery store in a rural town, is what led him to one of his most memorable experiences. Alan recalls how it began:
It was actually the customer who asked first. … [A]s I’m pulling up to the register, he’s like, “‘Full Equality Now’? What’s that mean?”
I said, “I’m walking for gender-identity and gender-expression and sexual-orientation equality.”
One of them said, “Well, you came to the right place.”
The customer was referring to Joey Harris, a young queer teen who had recently died by suicide after being bullied in school and in the community. Alan was told where the father works, and after they met, a special relationship began between Alan and Joey’s family, including a vigil at the teen’s grave:
Right towards the end of the vigil, after I said a few words, all of a sudden this flurry of fireworks goes off, and you just hear, “Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom!” in the background. And we all just kind of looked at each other, and we were all kind of crying a little bit, and Joey’s mom Sabina says something like, “That couldn’t have been more perfect timing, because Fourth of July was Joey’s favorite holiday.”
Joey’s parents ended up giving Alan a necklace that belonged to Joey. After saying goodbye, Alan continued on his walk, set up his tent a few miles down the road, and reflected:
[I]t got really dark. I set up my tent in this big grass patch and just kind of tamped the grass down, put the tent up and then got inside it, put all my stuff inside. But I was so tired, so I just laid among the curves of the grass, and I held onto the necklace and just kind of cried myself to sleep.
WATCH:
Need help? In the U.S., visit The Trevor Project or call them at 1-866-488-7386. You can also call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
For more stories, visit I’m From Driftwood, the LGBTQ Story Archive.
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Gay High-Schooler Gets Date for Prom — With Straight Best Friend
The Internet is blowing up with congratulatory messages from around the world.
Trudy Ring
www.advocate.com/youth/2015/04/23/gay-high-schooler-gets-date-prom-straight-best-friend
Ted Cruz Introduces Legislation To Stop Marriage Equality
Days before the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on same-sex marriage, Senator Ted Cruz has filed two bills to protect states that bar gay couples from marrying.
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Marriage at the Supreme Court 2.0: Windsor, Perry, and Context — Part I
Kenji Yoshino, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law, has written an outstanding book: Speak Now: The Story of Hollingsworth v. Perry. Perry was not the first marriage equality case. Nor, Professor Yoshino noted recently, did it create the most important legal precedent (that’s Windsor). But Perry accomplished two essential functions, without which we would not be on the precipice of a nationwide marriage equality right: it launched marriage equality into the public conscience and used the unique environment of an adversarial trial to put our opponents’ anti-gay arguments in stark relief. From there, the dominoes fell rapidly in our favor.
Less than one week away from oral argument at the Supreme Court in the most recent (and likely last) round of marriage equality cases, it is fitting to take Professor Yoshino’s invitation to look back and understand the historical context that brought us here. For this retelling (and there are many possible retellings of the history of the marriage equality fight), I will connect the dots between some of the major legal precedents. Professor Yoshino’s text is the seminal work on one of them — Hollingsworth v. Perry. Let’s see the bigger picture.
I will argue that although a multi-pronged strategy of growing public support, legislative action, and on-the-ground activism was important for marriage equality’s success, without legal boldness and a courtroom strategy, much of the political work would not have mattered.
When, in the 1972 one-line order in Baker v. Nelson, the Supreme Court decided that the freedom to marry a person of the same sex did not raise any questions of federal law and, thus, could not be addressed in a federal court, the gay rights movement faced several options: give up on marriage, work state by state to amend marriage laws, or build the legal framework for a future federal fight on marriage equality. A non-monolithic movement, gay rights activists dabbled in each, but the latter was the most important.
CONTINUED, AFTER THE JUMP…
A constitutional right to marry for gay persons made little sense if the Constitution didn’t protect gay persons at all. In fact, the situation in the 1970s and 1980s (even through the 1990s) was much worse: the Constitution saw gay persons as presumptive criminals. Anti-sodomy laws criminalized behavior that was not only common to the gay community, but so primary to our expression of love that the conduct had to be seen as synonymous with our identity. So, if anti-sodomy laws that targeted gays were constitutional, as the Supreme Court said in 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick, then the Constitution was saying that activity so bound up with gay identity could be the basis of criminal sanction. That turned gay persons into presumptive criminals.
It would take until 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, for the Supreme Court to reverse Bowers. But along the way, the movement didn’t stand still. It went state by state, with a political and litigation strategy that not only challenged anti-sodomy laws, but wrapped in other rights and opportunities into a broader fight. It was at this time that advocates started to shift their emphasis from seeking pure “freedom” — including speech and sex — to more aggressively seeking constitutional protections for a discriminated minority.
Colorado offered a perfect test for the Constitutional protection battle. In 1992, 53 percent of Colorado voters voted for (and enacted) Amendment 2 to the state’s constitution, stating that the only way gay persons could win civil rights protections is if the people of Colorado agreed to amend the constitution. That is, no city council, no county board, and not even the state legislature could pass a pro-equality measure that included protections for gay people. A coalition of Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and a local group, prevented implementation and won a 6-3 victory at the Supreme Court, which declared Amendment 2 unconstitutional in the 1996 case of Romer v. Evans.
It was the first positive watershed moment in the marriage equality journey because it was the first time the Supreme Court recognized that gay persons had rights under the Constitution and that mere hatred of — or “animus” toward — gays was not a valid reason to pass a discriminatory law. Romer (plaintiffs at right) was also the first Supreme Court case where the Court waded through the multitude of so-called justifications for anti-gay discrimination: children, morality, history and tradition. Judges that have decided marriage equality cases over the last several years always reached back to Romer to shoot down those lingering pretextual justifications.
From Romer, Bowers immediately seemed like bad law: anti-gay sodomy laws that specifically target activity central to gay identity were passed out of pure animus toward gays. Lawrence found such laws unconstitutional under a somewhat broader conception of a constitutional right to intimate association. But by 2003, it was clear that the Constitution would not abide naked anti-gay discrimination: gay persons had the right to live and love just like heterosexuals. This meant several things. First, the notion that marriage discrimination against gays doesn’t raise a federal constitution issue is dead. If the Constitution protects our right not to be discriminated against, a law that discriminates against us raises constitutional concern. Second, it tees up the marriage strategy.
If we could intimately associate with the person we saw fit regardless of gender or sexual orientation, then the freedom to make that intimate association official — and enjoy the honorific and practical benefits of marriage — seemed evident. Advocates reached back to myriad Supreme Court cases — from Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception) to Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage) — that declared marriage a fundamental right. It made sense: gays were protected under the Constitution such that their rights, like all persons, are guaranteed as against popular discrimination. Marriage should be included among that panoply of rights.
Several couples in Hawaii went first, despite some remaining ambivalence in the community among seeking marriage rights outright. When a court said that preventing gays from marrying required the state to meet a heavy constitutional burden, a conservative Congress reacted swiftly, passing the inaptly named Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA enshrined opposite-sex marriage into federal law. It said that whatever one state did about same-sex marriage, gays would never really be married in the eyes of the federal government. Nor did any other state have to follow a pro-equality state. The law pre-emptively cut off the flow of thousands of rights to future gay couples and relegated gays once again to second-class citizenship.
The multi-pronged strategy to win marriage equality nation wide now kicked into high gear. Stay tuned for Part II.
***
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Ari Ezra Waldman is a professor of law and the Director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a B.A. from Harvard College. Ari writes regular posts on law and various LGBT issues.
Ari Ezra Waldman
www.towleroad.com/2015/04/marriage-at-the-supreme-court-20-windsor-perry-and-context.html
Why the American Family Needs Same-Sex Parents
On April 28th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an omnibus case about whether same-sex couples are allowed to marry in all 50 states in this country. The probability of the court ruling in favor of legalization likely played a role in the Indiana and Arkansas controversies over the passage of their Religious Freedom Restoration Acts at the beginning of April.
Proponents and opponents of marriage for same-sex couples agree that heated debates about religious liberty are one effect of the marriage debate. But they strongly disagree about what America and its families will look like if same-sex couples can marry throughout the nation. Opponents have made dire predictions of marital instability, falling birth rates, and increases in children being born outside of marriage — in short, the destruction of American families.
But an examination of the data — particularly as it relates to the children in this country most in need of loving and stable families — does not support those predictions.
In a recent friend-of-the-court brief that I submitted to the Supreme Court, I explore what demographic and social science research tells us about the impact of the upcoming ruling. Today, nearly 1.4 million men and women are part of the estimated 700,000 same-sex couples living in this country. About 350,000 of them are married couples and 122,000 are raising more than 200,000 children under the age of 18.
Michigan couple April DeBoer and Jayne Rouse, plaintiffs in one of the cases currently before the Supreme Court, offer an example of how same-sex couples already play an outsized role in caring for some of the nation’s most vulnerable kids. They have adopted four children, two with developmental disabilities who require special care. U.S. Census Bureau data show that April and Jayne are not alone.
Same-sex couples are three times more likely than their different-sex counterparts to be raising adopted or foster children. Among married couples, same-sex couples are five times more likely. In states where same-sex couples can legally marry, more than three percent of adopted or foster children have same-sex parents. Since only about 0.3 percent of all children in those states have same-sex parents, it means that adopted and foster children there are nearly 10 times more likely than children in general to have same-sex parents.
As marriage becomes more widely available for same-sex couples, they will likely expand their already disproportionate role as parents to some of the nation’s neediest children. In 2013, 19 percent of same-sex couples without children were married compared to 33 percent of those with children. If they had adopted or foster children, the figure was 41 percent. In states where same-sex couples can marry, 60 percent of those with adopted or foster children are married. Clearly same-sex couples raising kids, especially adopted and foster kids, have a strong preference for marriage.
Opponents of marriage for same-sex couples argue that children do best when they are raised by their married biological parents. They reason that reserving marriage only for different-sex couples promotes that ideal. Assuming that kids do best with married moms and dads is a false read of social science research. A more careful review of the literature shows that children tend to do better when they are raised by two parents who are in a stable and committed relationship. Marriage offers a way for many couples to strengthen and support their desire for stability, love and commitment. Kids with married parents, regardless of the sexual orientation or gender of those parents, benefit from the security that marriage offers to many couples.
What about the argument that reserving marriage for different-sex couples encourages them to raise children within marriage? This argument implies that allowing same-sex couples to marry might decrease the likelihood that different-sex couples decide to marry and have kids. Even if every same-sex couple in the country got married tomorrow, they’d only represent about one percent of all married couples. The notion that their marriages could alter the behavior of the other 99 percent of married couples (and unmarried heterosexuals for that matter), especially regarding such important and personal decisions like whether or not to marry or have children, seems ludicrous on the face of it. It turns out that the research agrees.
Two studies published last year in Demography, the premier academic journal in the field, find no evidence that allowing same-sex couples to marry has altered the marriage rates of different-sex couples in the U.S. or in the Netherlands, the country that has allowed same-sex couples to marry longer than any other in the world. In 2013, the portion of children being raised by married different-sex parents in the U.S. was actually a little bit higher in states where same-sex couples could legally marry (65 percent) compared to states where marriage was restricted to different-sex couples (64 percent).
The recent events in Indiana and Arkansas prove that a Supreme Court decision bringing marriage for same-sex couples to all parts of the nation won’t end political conflict associated with LGBT rights. But it will improve America’s families. The nation will have more married couples, more kids with married parents, and more stable homes and families for the country’s most vulnerable children. It’s hard to understand how that could ever be a bad thing.
This article was written for Thinking L.A., a partnership of UCLA and Zócalo Public Square.
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