The Supreme Court’s June 26, 2013 ruling that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional was good news for bi-national same-sex married couples. It is now possible for a U.S. citizen to file an immigration visa petition on behalf of a foreign national spouse of the same-sex.
This Black History Month, we are celebrating the luminary contributions of Black and African diaspora authors throughout history, many of whom are LGBTQ+, who have had one or more of their books challenged or banned in classrooms or libraries.
Black literature has long been a target for coordinated campaigns of censorship and repression. Authors and scholars, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, continue to face this targeting today, with an alarming number of challenges to books in libraries and schools.
Last fall, the American Library Association documented an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, and many of the objections are based on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. The censorship of books that focus on the experiences of historically marginalized communities directly violates students’ rights to equality in education.
To compound this targeting of intellectual freedom, several bills have been filed in states across the country that also limit discussion and curricula. These extremely harmful and dangerous laws further deprive students of an education that depicts accurate, complete history and blocks crucial conversations about identity, community, and heritage – a necessity in our continuously expanding society. GLAD continues to fight these school and literary censorship efforts because everyone deserves to see themselves represented in their classrooms and libraries.
Let us celebrate these exceptional voices!
Maya Angelou
(1928-2014)
Poet, dancer, singer, activist, and scholar Maya Angelou was a world-famous author best known for her distinctive autobiographical writing style.
On April 4, 1928, Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Maya’s interest in writing and the English language developed at an early age. Throughout her adolescence, she wrote essays and poetry and kept a journal. In 1959, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, created in 1950 by Black writers in New York City, to nurture and support the publication of Black authors. She also became active in the Civil Rights Movement and served as the northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a prominent Black advocacy organization.
In 1969, Maya published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an autobiography of her early life, and chronicled her experiences of childhood trauma and racism. Although this work resonated with many and was nominated for the National Book Award, schools sought to ban the book for its honest depiction of sexual abuse.
It is credited with helping other abuse survivors tell their stories. James Baldwin said this about the work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”
Jerry Craft
(Born 1963)
Author and illustrator Jerry Craft creates picture books, comics, and graphic novels. Much of his work is partly autobiographical and includes events and people from his own life.
On January 22, 1963, Gerald A. Jerry was born in New York City. Though he was a reluctant reader as a child, he started making comics at a young age. He began his career as a copywriter before becoming a comic book and graphic novel cartoonist. In 2013, Jerry co-founded the Annual Black Comic Book Festival at the Schomburg Center in Manhattan. In the early years of his career, Jerry created and authored the comic strip “Mama’s Boyz,” which featured a Black mother who was widowed and raising two sons.
In 2019, Jerry published his biggest hit, New Kid. New Kid is about a Black child named Jordan Banks who attends a private school where most students are white. The book injects humor into commonplace scenarios as Jordan strives to blend in with his new school friends while identifying with his African American community. New Kid won the Newbery Medal, an award for best American children’s book, making it the first graphic novel to do so.
The book has been challenged in some school districts, including in Texas and Pennsylvania, citing the teaching of critical race theory. A school district near Houston canceled the appearance of Jerry due to the idea of his books telling stories about Black children struggling to fit into unfamiliar settings.
In response to a question about why his books were being “banned,” Jerry recently tweeted, “Apparently, I’m teaching critical race theory.”
Writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, Junauda Petrus was born in Dakota land, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “West Indian-descended and African-sourced,” Junauda centers her work around the idea of “Black wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer, and liberation.” She is the author of The Stars And The Blackness Between Them, the winner of the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award.
The book is about two Black women, one from Minneapolis and one from Trinidad. The girl from Trinidad has a difficult, tense relationship with her mother. After she is caught kissing the pastor’s daughter, her mother sends her to live with her Black American father in Minneapolis. She makes friends and falls in love with a young woman, and what starts as a friendship becomes much more. This book is a love story at heart, but it also takes readers through themes of ancestral connection to the earth, adding an extra layer of beauty to the narrative.
This book was among 850 others that Texas lawmakers wanted to have banned in schools across the state. Junauda had this to say about the challenge:
“I feel like my book is so love-filled and wants to affirm and make people feel safe and included and like they exist, particularly in times that want to erase and oppress people just for being who they are. So for me, it’s interesting in this moment that people are using gaslighting and confusing language to pinpoint texts that are trying to uplift and empower and love on people who have not felt loved or seen forever as a way to act as though these texts are violent or disruptive or negative. It’s just really fascinating to be alive in these times.”
Junauda lives in Minneapolis with her wife and family.
Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Born on December 6, 1983, Jason Reynolds is an American author of novels and poetry for young adult and middle-grade audiences. Born in Washington, DC, and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland, Janson found inspiration in rap and had an early focus on poetry, publishing several poetry collections before his first novel in 2014, When I Was The Greatest, which won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Ibram X. Kendi, born August 13, 1982, is an American author, professor, antiracist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in America. In July 2020, he assumed the director position of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.
Ibram said that history books in schools today need to offer students a more profound perspective or account of who people were and what they did. This led him to take up this challenge and give young people access to this history by collaborating with a writer who could take these facts and make them accessible to a younger audience.
Ibram and Janson got together to make their new book called Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, and right from its first few pages, the authors promise that “this is not a history book.” Instead, they say, it’s a book that mixes the past with the present in a way that young adults can relate to.
“History books are written with the idea of a student in mind, but not the idea of an actual young person themselves,” says Jason. So this book sets out to do just that, and Jason says it’s filled with “the things that I needed someone to say to me when I was 15 years old.”
“Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” found its way onto the American Library Association’s top 10 most challenged book list in 2020.
Mikki Kendall
(Born 1976)
A writer, diversity consultant, and feminist, Mikki Kendall speaks at organizations and universities across the nation about pop culture, feminism, race, and police violence. Her writing frequently discusses current affairs, media portrayal, the politics of food, and the evolution of the feminist movement. She has appeared on the BBC, NPR, The Daily Show, PBS, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, WBEZ, and Showtime.
In 2017, she was awarded Best Food Essay by the Association of Food Journalists for her essay Hot Sauce in Her Bag: Southern Black identity, Beyoncé, Jim Crow, and the pleasure of well-seasoned food. She co-edited the Locus-nominated anthology Hidden Youth and is part of the Hugo-nominated team of editors at Fireside Magazine.
Hood Feminism is a blistering compilation of writings that delivers a forceful and incendiary indictment of the contemporary feminist movement. She challenges the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, claiming that, with the exception of a few women, it has consistently failed to meet the needs of people of color. Hood Feminism presents an unflinching assessment of a movement in flux by drawing on the author’s personal experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, as well as sharp comments on reproductive rights, politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more.
In her memorable debut, Mikki issues a fierce call to all aspiring feminists to embody the true spirit of the movement in both words and deeds.
Republican Texas state Representative Matt Krause listed the book as being prohibited in 2021, claiming that the volume’s extensive discussion of race may embarrass certain (i.e., white) kids.
George M. Johnson
(Born 1985)
George M. Johnson is a Los Angeles-based, award-winning Black non-binary writer, author, and executive producer. They are the author of the young adult memoir and New York Times bestseller All Boys Aren’t Blue. In a series of stirring essays, they recount their upbringing as a young Black queer boy growing up in New Jersey. Gabrielle Union has optioned the book for television.
George used to work as a journalist, contributing to a number of prestigious publications, including Teen Vogue, Entertainment Tonight, NBC, and Buzzfeed. For their piece “When Racism Anchors your Health” in Vice Magazine, which appeared in 2019, the National Association of Black Journalists gave them the Salute to Excellence Award in 2019.
George was included in The Root’s 2020 list of the 100 Most Influential African Americans and Out Magazine’s 2021 Out 100 list of the year’s most impactful and influential LGBTQ+ people. Additionally, in 2022, they were recognized on TIME100 Next list of rising stars from across industries and around the world.
They developed and oversaw the production of the dramatic reading of All Boys Aren’t Blue in 2021, which starred Jenifer Lewis and Dyllon Burnside and won a GLAAD Special Recognition Award in 2022.
In this collection of writings, George describes what it was like to grow up as a queer Black person in America. The essays speak to what queer boys and allies can learn about institutional brutality and the heteronormativity that is required of Black men. The writings also show the joys of being Black thanks to George’s personal and open voice. Through this piece, non-Black and non-queer readers can find compassion and a level of understanding through a story of groups they are not a part of by understanding the language and history.
As of last November, this “memoir manifesto” has been prohibited from school libraries in eight states due to its references to consensual sex and sexual abuse.
Richard Wright
(1908-1960)
Born on September 4, 1908, close to Natchez, Mississippi, Richard Wright was a novelist and short story writer, most notable of which were Native Son from 1940 and Black Boy from 1945. He worked at a number of jobs before joining the northward migration, first to Memphis, Tennessee, and then to Chicago. There, he got an opportunity to write through the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1932 he became a member of the Communist Party, and in 1937 he went to New York City, where he became Harlem editor of the Communist Daily Worker.
Black Boy is a deftly written account of what it means to be a Black and Southern man in America. This touching depiction of Richard’s youth in the South was contentious. The book details his upbringing in abject poverty, his encounters with white hostility toward Black people, and the development of his interest in literature. This book has been prohibited on the claims that it “promotes immorality, uses sexual undertones to discuss domestic violence, and incites racial animosity.”
Toni Morrison
(1931-2019)
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The central theme of Toni’s novels is the Black American experience in an unjust society, particularly the experience of the Black woman. Her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture.
The Bluest Eye, Toni’s debut book, was published in 1970. The story of a little Black girl named Pecola, who grew up after the Great Depression, is set in Lorain, Ohio. The 1941-set novel centers on a Black adolescent who is infatuated with white beauty ideals and yearns for blue eyes.
Toni was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1987 for the well-acclaimed novel Beloved, the narrative of an escaped slave who kills her young daughter to save her from being recaptured and living a life of slavery.
Toni’s works are a regular fixture on the American Library Association’s annual list of the top 10 most challenged books. The Bluest Eye has appeared several times, in 2006, 2013, 2014, and 2020. Beloved, Toni’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel, is also on the 2006 and 2012 lists.
According to academics, one of the reasons Toni’s books, in particular, are controversial is because they discuss hard topics like turbulent periods in American history. “What she tried to do is convey the trauma of the legacy of slavery to her readers. That is a violent legacy,” says Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, of Toni’s body of work. “Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.”
These authors have shared their lives and perspectives in the works above, including what it means to live in a society that has historically erased Black and queer stories. At a time when the history and experiences of people of color and LGBTQ+ people are facing another wave of erasure, lifting up these works is crucial.
We are heartbroken by the violence that took place in Monterey Park, California over the weekend of the Lunar New Year. What was meant to be a celebratory occasion for the Asian American community at a popular gathering center ended in the murder of ten people and injury of ten more.
Our hearts are with the loved ones of those killed or harmed in this devastating event, and the Asian-majority community of Monterey Park. This Lunar New Year marks a time of peace and hope, now marred by this horrific act.
While each act of violence stands alone, the LGBTQ+ community understands too well what it means to recover from the tragedy of mass shooting. While our communities intersect, we honor differences in experience and resolve to support all people of the Asian diaspora in the work to end violence.
We once again call on lawmakers to act for the safety of all and take measures to end mass shootings and gun violence in all its forms. We must be able to gather and take joy in our communities without the threat of senseless violence, and GLAD will continue to build toward that reality.
Thanks to our community’s incredible support, GLAD secured some critical wins last year, and our work continues in 2023.
Your generosity has enabled us to:
Fight book bans and school censorship laws that seek to erase history and limit what students can learn and teachers can teach about LGBTQ+ people and more
Stop anti-LGBTQ+ legislation already being filed this session, like an extreme New Hampshire bill (HB 619) which would eviscerate protections against conversion therapy, ban gender-affirming care for minors and force public schools to misgender transgender students in all respects from names to bathrooms to sports.
Ensure that people’s bodily autonomy is respected – whether that’s access to abortion, other reproductive healthcare, or transition-related care – and those who provide them with that care are safe from targeting or criminalization
Increase access to HIV PrEP by allowing people to obtain it for a limited supply at a pharmacy without a prescription, and ensuring that cost is never a barrier to HIV prevention medication
and so much more
We are so grateful for our community, whose support and collaboration enable us to keep moving forward against the continued onslaught against LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms. To ensure we can rise to every challenge ahead, make a gift today!
State of Tennessee Officials Agree That a Sign Mandate Targeting LGBTQ+ People Is Unconstitutional and Cannot Be Enforced
Final District Court Order in Curb Records and Mike Curb Foundation’s challenge to HB 1182 ensures the anti-business “Not Welcome” sign law will never take effect
A U.S. District Court has entered a final order prohibiting enforcement of Tennessee HB 1182, a law passed in 2021 requiring businesses to post a demeaning notice if they permit LGBTQ+ patrons to use the same restrooms as other patrons. The order states that the law “is unconstitutional and may not be enforced.” HB 1182 designated precise dimensions, red and yellow coloring, and specific mandated language amounting to a “not welcome” sign to patrons.
The order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Tennessee, Nashville Division, is the result of an agreement with the Defendants, including the Tennessee Governor and other state and Nashville officials, to resolve the federal challenge to HB 1182 brought by independent record label Curb Records and the Mike Curb Foundation. The challenge asserted that HB 1182 promoted a hostile climate for LGBTQ+ people in the state and denied them equal access to businesses open to the public and to employment and educational opportunities.
Mike Curb, founder and Chairman of Curb Records and President of the Mike Curb Foundation, who argued that the law would compel his and other Tennessee businesses to endorse a climate of fear and nonacceptance of LGBTQ+ people, expressed relief that this final order resolves the case and banishes HB 1182 for good.
“Our foundation has been dedicated to inclusion and nondiscrimination, including for LGBT people, from day one,” said Curb. “HB 1182 was an attempt by the government to force me and other businesses in the state to abandon our values and put up a ‘not welcome’ sign to employees and customers. I’m relieved to know that state officials have agreed that the constitution does not permit such a mandate and that this final order means HB 1182 cannot be enforced. The people of Tennessee do not want such harmful anti-LGBT and anti-business legislation and such a law should never have been passed and signed into law.”
Grammy award-winning record producer Mike Curb started his career almost six decades ago in California and Curb Records has operated for the last three decades in Nashville, Tennessee. Curb has worked on LGBTQ+ issues his entire career. In 1978 Curb worked with Harvey Milk on the campaign against the Briggs Initiative and persuaded Ronald Reagan to oppose it, leading to its defeat. The Briggs Initiative would have banned gay schoolteachers in California and was the subject of Harvey Milk’s Academy Award-winning performance in the motion picture Milk, which included footage of Curb and Reagan as leaders who helped defeat the Briggs Initiative. Curb also played a leadership role as a Board member of Belmont University to change the University’s position regarding the LGBTQ+ community. Curb Records and the Mike Curb Foundation have provided grants and gifts totaling more than $100 million in Tennessee in support of education, historic preservation, people facing homelessness, and a wide range of civic and charitable endeavors in local Tennessee communities.
Curb Records and the Mike Curb Foundation were represented in their suit by Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison, attorney Abby Rubenfeld, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD).
Today President Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act. At a signing ceremony outside the White House, President Biden was joined by Gina and Heidi Nortonsmith of Massachusetts, one of the seven plaintiff couples that successfully won the freedom to marry in the landmark Goodridge c. Département de la santé publique du Massachusetts ruling in 2003.
“Twenty-six years ago, Heidi was pregnant with our first child,” said Gina Nortonsmith. “We were overjoyed and terrified. Although we had been a committed couple for six years, the state wouldn’t let us marry…We realized to access the protections our family needed, we had to sue the state. We became one of the seven plaintiff couples in Goodridge vs. MA Department of Public Health, the case that led to marriage equality in Massachusetts and ultimately, the United States.”
“It takes the efforts of many to bend the arc of history toward justice,” said Heidi Nortonsmith. “Even now there are so many places where people in our community are under attack. The work will continue, but look how far we’ve come. The law that President Biden signs today will make people safer, more secure and less alone. From our family to all of you, thank you for fighting for our equal humanity and dignity. For our right to love and be loved. And for our marriage.”
Statement from Janson Wu, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders
This is a joyful day. Millions of couples and their children across the country now have the assurance that their families will continue to be respected by our state and federal governments because President Biden has signed the Loi sur le respect du mariage into law. The effort to pass the Respect for Marriage Act spanned decades and involved the work of so many. It’s passage this year demonstrates the strong and growing support for equality among Americans of all political parties and from all walks of life.
Nearly 20 years ago, Gina and Heidi Nortonsmith, together with other courageous couples, first won the freedom to marry in GLAD’s Massachusetts Goodridge cas.
It was thrilling to see them at the White House today as Congress and the President affirmed our nation’s commitment to the freedom to marry the person you love and have your family respected and protected, regardless of race or sex. Today is truly a celebration of love, equality, and dignity for families like Heidi and Gina’s, and for all our families.
We are grateful to President Biden and Vice President Harris, to the Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle who came together to pass this law, and to the millions of people across the country who have fought for decades to get us here. We will take the joy and energy from this celebration to continue the work for full freedom, safety, and justice for all people.
Because of your support, incredible wins like this are possible. Give to GLAD today.
Today the U.S. House of Representatives passed a final version of the Respect for Marriage Act, with a bipartisan vote of 258-169. The U.S. Senate passed the bill on November 29 with a bipartisan vote of 61-36. The bill now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law.
GLAD Executive Director Janson Wu issued the following statement:
“Today’s vote is a win for equality and for the overwhelming majority of Americans across political parties and from all walks of life who support the freedom to marry and want to ensure the dignity, stability and ongoing protection that marriage provides to families and children. The Respect for Marriage Act solidifies that people’s marriages will continue to be respected by our state and federal governments regardless of race or sex.
Loving c. Virginie et Obergefell c. Hodges affirmed that our constitution guarantees the freedom to marry the person you love and have that marriage respected. That is the law of the land and we will defend against any challenge to it that may arise in the future. Yet at a time of escalating attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and unprecedented efforts to unravel protections for fundamental rights, this bipartisan action by Congress provides a critical backstop.
The Respect for Marriage Act provides assurance to millions of LGBTQ+ and interracial couples that no matter what, their marriages will continue to be recognized and respected by federal and state actors and government agencies wherever they live, travel, or relocate. While work remains to ensure full equality under the law in all areas of our lives, this is an important step on the road to ensuring all people are fully protected from discrimination and are free to live, work and support their families and communities. The Congress did something very important with this law and we look forward to continued work with the Congress as well as in our state and local communities to ensure the people’s concerns, our concerns are heard.
We are grateful to the House and Senate leadership and to the Respect for Marriage Act sponsors and look forward to seeing President Biden quickly sign the Respect for Marriage Act into law.”
About the Respect for Marriage Act:
The Respect for Marriage Act would repeal the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act—which has already been invalidated by the Supreme Court—and get the anti-LGBTQ+ federal law off the books. It will also ensure that all state and federal governments recognize and respect a couple’s marriage, regardless of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of the couple.
The Respect for Marriage Act is narrow but mighty. It builds on Congress’s power to define federal benefits and its constitutionally express power to state “the effects” of acts, records and judicial proceedings under the Full Faith and Credit Clause. In line with Obergefell et Windsor, it requires states and state actors, and the federal government and federal actors, to respect existing marriages of same-sex couples.
The Respect for Marriage Act preempts states from using “sex, race, national origin or ethnicity” of the married pair as a basis for denying rights, protections or duties that pertain to or arise from a marriage. (sec. 4).
Almost by definition, the Congress’s concretizing this in federal law is a mighty recognition that the nation demands that marriages of same sex and interracial couples be accorded dignity and respect. It also creates a private right of action – both for the U.S. Attorney General and for private citizens to file federal court claims and enforce the law.
GLAD Attorney Chris Erchull, Morgan Nighan (Nixon Peabody), Gilles Bissonnette (ACLU New Hampshire), and plaintiffs challenging New Hampshire’s School Censorship Law, Andres Mejia and Tina Kim Philibotte Photo credit: New Hampshire Bulletin
Our public schools have a responsibility to provide a safe school environment where all students can engage with learning and fully benefit from their educational opportunities. But increasingly across the country, schools are being pressured to violate that most basic trust – and students themselves are becoming political targets.
In the past year, we’ve seen escalating efforts to censor teaching about American history and race, to silence discussions of LGBTQ+ people and families in classrooms, and to ban books – many by LGBTQ+ authors and with LGBTQ+ themes – from school and public libraries. Equally concerning, as LGBTQ+ issues are weaponized for political gain, school districts are being pressured to dilute or abandon policies that have improved access to education for LGBTQ+ students.
We also continue to see dangerous bills introduced in states across the country. These bills would force schools to out LGBTQ+ students before they are ready, deny transgender students access to restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender, and ban transgender girls from playing school sports with their friends. GLAD has been fighting these kinds of efforts in New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island. The next session is likely to be even worse in states in New England and across the country.
Our 2022 Spirit of Justice Honoree, Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith, has led the fight against perhaps the most notorious law targeting schools and students, the so-called “Don’t Say LGBTQ+” law in Florida.
The law went into effect this school year, and unsurprisingly, we are already experiencing the harmful impacts. Complaints in the two legal challenges to the law, brought by Equality Florida, NCLR, and Lambda Legal, provide many chilling examples: At least one teacher was already fired after her students drew Pride flags. LGBTQ+ books have been taken out of some school libraries. Teachers have removed stickers, flags, and other signs of support from their classrooms. Students are afraid that faculty will shut down their LGBTQ+ school groups, and teachers and staff won’t be able to do anything about bullying and harassment.
Challenging New Hampshire’s School Censorship Law
Florida isn’t the only state where such legislation has gone into effect. GLAD is challenging a law passed in New Hampshire last year that explicitly discourages teachers from discussing race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity in the classroom. Our partners are the ACLU-NH, Disability Rights Center – NH, and the National Educators Association – NH chapter.
We represent the NEA-NH and two school administrators, Andres Mejia, Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice for the Exeter Region Cooperative School District, and Christina Kim Philibotte, Chief Equity Officer for the Manchester School District. Our suit argues that the law is deliberately vague and has created a chilling effect on what teachers can say and teach in schools.
“We have dedicated our careers to creating an educational community where every student—including Black and Brown students, students of color, students from the LGBTQAI+ community, students with disabilities, and students from other historically marginalized identities—feel like they belong,” Mejia and Philibotte said when filing the lawsuit. “This law chills the very type of diversity, equity, and inclusion work that is absolutely necessary to ensure that each student is seen, heard, and connected, especially as New Hampshire becomes more diverse.”
Teachers, who have to guess at what crosses the line, face severe consequences if they violate the statute, including the possibility of individual lawsuits brought against them and the loss of their teaching license. GLAD Attorney Chris Erchull says it’s not surprising that educators are confused by the law and choose to steer clear of the topics it mentions, to the detriment of students.
“I’ve heard from teachers who have, for example, taken down LGBTQ+ welcoming signs from their classrooms because of the law,” says Erchull. “The result is teachers are afraid, students feel less supported, and everyone is missing out on learning about vital issues in the world they live in and will contribute to as adults.”
The case is proceeding in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire. We expect a ruling from the court soon on the State’s motion to dismiss our case, which was argued in September.
Protecting LGBTQ+ Supportive School Policies
As an energized far-right stirs up fears about how public schools teach our children, lawsuits challenging LGBTQ+ supportive school policies – policies that years of research show create better outcomes for all students – are also rising.
In October, GLAD a déposé une amicus brief on behalf of the Massachusetts Superintendents Association and GLAD in support of a Ludlow public school. The case involves actions taken by teachers and staff to support the well-being of two students, including using the students’ requested names and pronouns and waiting to discuss their gender expression at school with parents until the students themselves were ready to do so. By affirming and supporting students this way, the school was meeting its obligation to provide a safe and equal educational environment for all students. The school district’s motion to dismiss the parents’ case was argued before the U.S. District Court in Springfield on October 17.
Our laws and schools protect children’s safety and support equal educational opportunity so students can learn and grow in ways that lead to healthy participation in our communities as adults. GLAD will continue to challenge these attacks on LGBTQ+ students in the courts and in statehouses. And we will continue to advocate for positive, inclusive school policies that allow all students the opportunity to thrive and the freedom to learn.
Check out the community conversation with GLAD, Equality Florida, and others about anti-LGBTQ+ school legislation and policies and how advocates, parents, and students are challenging them.
The U.S. Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act with a bipartisan vote of 61-36. The House passed an earlier version of the Respect for Marriage Act with a strong bipartisan majority this summer. The amended Senate bill will now move back to the House for a final vote before heading to President Biden’s desk.
Mary Bonauto, GLBTQ LEGAL ADVOCATES & DEFENDERS (GLAD) Senior Director of Civil Rights and Legal Strategies, who argued the landmark Obergefell marriage equality case before the Supreme Court, issued the following statement:
“Today Senators on both sides of the aisle came together to ensure that married couples and their families will remain protected under law. In a time of escalating attacks on our LGBTQ+ communities, it is also important to see our country come together to protect fundamental rights. This bill solidifies what Loving c. Virginie et Obergefell c. Hodges affirmed, that people’s marriages are to be respected regardless of race or sex. As the votes in Congress attest, LGBTQ+ people belong and are part of our families, our communities, and our country. This is a critical victory on the road to the day when all people are fully protected from discrimination and have the freedom to make decisions about their lives and families.
The Respect for Marriage Act provides assurance to millions of LGBTQ+ and interracial couples that their marriages will continue to be recognized and respected by state actors and government agencies wherever they live, travel, or relocate. It removes from the law the stain on LGBTQ people from the discriminatory “Defense of Marriage Act” and codifies what the Courts have ruled – that states and the federal government must respect validly celebrated marriages without regard to the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of the couple. It has broad bipartisan support because Americans from all walks of life seek to support rather than disrupt family relationships for themselves and their loved ones.
We applaud the sponsors, including Senator Baldwin and Senator Collins, for working with people concerned both about marriage and family relationships as well as religious concerns to find a way forward. The bill is a critical backstop for marriage and families should there be changes to the law of the land, which is something we will fight. The bill’s protections and religious amendments are carefully stated to ensure that the Respect for Marriage Act supports the status quo of official governmental respect for marriages rather than being used to strengthen or diminish legal claims or defenses when there are conflicts involving religious beliefs and marriage. It also ensures that religious houses of worship, educational institutions, and religious nonprofits need not host a wedding on their premises, or provide goods or services, as is the case already with some state marriage enactments.
We are grateful for the leadership of Senator Baldwin and Senator Collins, who spearheaded this effort in the Senate, and for the commitment of Leader Schumer and the many Senators on both sides of the aisle who voted to support this important bill. We look forward to final passage in the House and to seeing President Biden sign the Respect for Marriage Act into law.”
Les récentes décisions de la Cour suprême soulèvent des questions urgentes pour les personnes LGBTQ+ et les personnes vivant avec le VIH. Notre ligne d'information juridique, GLAD Law Answers, peut vous aider. Contactez-nous aujourd'hui.
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