A nefarious congress
Nobody elected this anti-LGBTQ group.
Netroots is winding down Saturday, but not before several of the Democratic presidential candidates speak! The conference also held a march Friday to protest white supremacy, particularly the treatment of immigrants. Check out my thread of photos if you’re interested.
Most weeks, you can also hear me talking politics and various news stories on the David Feldman show. Here’s this week’s episode. Now onto the round-up!
I didn’t vote for this anti-LGBTQ “congress”
If you’ve never heard of the “World Congress of Families,” that’s by design. (You may recognize its current head, Brian Brown, from his failure as head of the National Organization for Marriage.) But this organization is one of the primary ways that U.S. evangelicals export their anti-LGBTQ ideas to other countries, in particular Russia.
Over at ThinkProgress, my colleague Casey Michel highlights an interesting story about how WCF may have been involved in Russia’s attempts to secretly fund right-wing extremism across Europe. It’s an illuminating look into forces that sound both foreign and familiar to how such extremism has surged here in the U.S.
Discriminators gonna discriminate
Back in January, the Trump administration granted Miracle Hill Ministry a special license to discriminate based on its evangelical Christian religious beliefs. The South Carolina foster care agency had previously refused to place children with Jewish families and same-sex couples.
Following the exemption, a Catholic mom who had been denied placement because of her religious beliefs sued, challenging the special discriminatory privileges. Now, the agency has announced it’s opening employment and services to some non-evangelical Christians like Catholics, but will continue to refuse to serve progressive Christians, all non-Christians faiths, and the LGBTQ community.
It’s just enough of a change to get out of fighting that lawsuit. How convenient!
Hope for a vaccine
Johnson & Johnson has announced that it’s going to begin human trials on an HIV vaccine. We won’t know the results of the trial for some time, but it’s still promising that the research has progressed to the point where such a trial is even possible!
What was the New Republic thinking?
There have been a number of interesting conversations among queer people assessing what it means that Pete Buttigieg is gay and how we should feel about his candidacy for president. But the New Republic published a pretty ugly hit piece that seemed to suggest that Buttigieg would be too obsessed with having lots of gay sex to do the job well. I think? The number of people who would have had to okay such a piece for publication is pretty astounding.
The New Republic has since deleted the piece, claiming it “was largely intended as satire.” I’m not sure anyone’s buying that.
What does gender have to do with driving?
There are a lot of ways to confirm someone’s identity, but once you’re looking at a person’s face and trying to decide whether it seems to match their marked gender, you can get into some dangerous profiling territory. That’s why many states are working to create options to accommodate people who are non-binary or otherwise gender nonconforming. New Hampshire is now the 13th state to add an “X” gender option on its driver licenses. It would probably be ideal if they just didn’t require gender be listed at all, but it’s still a step forward.
Wait, what was DOMA again?
Bernie Sanders has a new campaign video out highlighting his legacy of supporting LGBTQ equality. A focus of the video is his 1996 opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act, which limited federal recognition of same-sex marriages. This appears designed to stand against Joe Biden, who supported the backwards bill. Sanders deployed a similar tactic to defend his LGBTQ bonafides against Hillary Clinton because her husband had signed DOMA into law. If marriage equality is your issue of primary concern, I guess this is interesting?
Kissing does not warrant homophobia
A lesbian couple in Barcelona reported that their simple kiss on the subway prompted another woman on the train to hurl all kinds of homophobic epithets at them.
Pride, the video game
A new video game coming out later this year will give players the chance to organize and ensure the success of their own Pride parades. At the end of the parade, players will get to face off with one of the world’s biggest opponents of LGBTQ equality.
A lavish same-sex Indian wedding
India only just decriminalized homosexuality last year, and it doesn’t yet have marriage equality. But that isn’t stopping same-sex couples from having weddings in the lavish Indian cultural tradition. Check out this Texas couple’s gorgeous ceremony:
Thanks for reading! As always, it’d be great if you could show a little support for this newsletter on your social media, or just tell a friend about it and encourage them to subscribe.
Until next time, stay platinum!