Official News Outlet for the Rainbow Round Table of the American Library Association
By Thomas Maxheimer TechCrunch, The Washington Post, and The Advocate, among other news outlets, report that moments after being inaugurated, the LGBT, climate change, and other sections of the Whitehouse.gov website disappeared. Many felt this could be a sign of hostility toward the LGBT community, especially given the history of gay opposition of VP Mike […]
By Jeremy Selvidge On Friday, Donald Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States. As a candidate, Trump pledged to sign the “First Amendment Freedom Act,” a bill originally introduced in 2015 that would allow discrimination based on the “moral conviction that marriage is… the union of one man and one […]
By John Mack Freeman The United States Justice Department issued a letter to the state of North Carolina this week informing them that the state’s anti-GLBT law commonly known as HB-2 was a violation of the Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination on the basis of sex. The letter gave the state until Monday, May […]
By John Mack Freeman Two so-called “bathroom bills” have stalled and died in the Kansas legislature meaning that there is no chance that they will pass this year. Senate Bill 513 and House Bill 2737 would have (via Advocate.com): […] barred trans students in public K-12 schools, as well as state colleges and universities, from […]
By A. Faulkner North Carolina’s HB2 has been all over the news the past few weeks. Even with my less-than-stellar news habits, I couldn’t help but pick up strings of conversation. I was confused though. It all seemed to be boiling down to a debate about whether letting people self-select the silhouette with the skirt […]
By John Mack Freeman The United States Department of Education has released a searchable database of schools that have sought exemption from anti-discrimination rules based on their religious character. This has come about because several senators had requested more transparency in the process of requesting waivers. The list can be searched by school name, state, […]
By John Mack Freeman This week, anti-GLBT legislation in both South Carolina and Missouri died in those states’ respective legislatures. In South Carolina, South Carolina Senate Bill 1203, which would have prevented cities and schools from establishing protections that would allow transgender individuals from using sex-designated bathrooms, missed the so-called “crossover” deadline. The crossover deadline is the date […]
By John Mack Freeman The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has found in a 2-1 decision that the US Department of Education’s interpretation that current civil rights laws protect transgender people is valid. The court upheld the interpretation as part of the 1972 Title IX Education Amendments. Via Buzzfeed: The Gloucester County School Board, however, […]
By John Mack Freeman Governor Tom Wolf (D) signed two executive orders that ban anti-GLBT discrimination in the state of Pennsylvania. Via The Washington Blade: The first order prohibits discrimination against state employees based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, HIV status and other factors. The second mandate bans state contractors from discriminating against their LGBT […]
