Nearly a decade after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis is back in the headlines and this time, she’s asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that made marriage...
In order to increase their impact in the Richmond Region and the Commonwealth, Diversity Richmond and VA Pride have joined forces and will officially merge on April 1. On Tuesday, they made it official. February 23 saw the announcement by Diversity Richmond and VA Pride, two of the leading LGBTQ organizations in the state, that they will...
Jennifer Carroll Foy is currently running for Governor in Virginia. If elected, not only will she be Virginia's first female governor, she'll institute a detailed plan to protect the rights and advance the interests of LGBTQ Virginians. More than a decade ago, 57 percent of Virginians approved a constitutional amendment that defined marriage as a...
The bill has been introduced over and over since the 1970s, but this time the Biden Administration has made clear that passing the Equality Act is "a priority" for the President. In almost every Congress since the 1970s, the LGBTQ Equality Act has been introduced in some form or another. On Thursday Congressman David Cicilline (D-RI) and Senator...
The bill, introduced by Del. Mark Levine, would have protected citizens against bias-based profiling on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as requiring police to provide aid to the injured and report misconduct by other officers. A Senate committee recently killed a bill intended to minimize police misconduct and...
In this month's Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch recounts her experience getting her first of two COVID vaccines, and recalls her childhood experience of receiving an experimental dose of Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. Now that President Biden and Vice President Harris are in office, I’ve been able to have my first COVID-19 vaccine shot. It was no big...
Richard Shelby is the fourth Republican Senator to announce his retirement since Joe Biden was elected president. His longtime opposition to LGBTQ rights makes his retirement something to be grateful for. The mass exodus of Republicans from the U.S. Senate continues, with Richard Shelby of Alabama announcing Monday his retirement at the...
Roger Severino, the anti-LGBTQ right-wing Christian activist who made things difficult for LGBTQ Americans during his time running HHS's Office Of Civil Rights for Trump, is suing the Biden administration for firing him. Roger Severino, a former Trump appointee at the Dept. of Health and Human Services who targeted LGBTQ Americans in his...
Sen. Ghazala Hashmi's bill to expand hate crimes to include crimes based on perception -- which would have had the effect of protecting gender expression, not covered under current hate crime statutes -- failed in the Virginia state Senate after backlash from both parties. Legislators attempted to pass a bill that would expand the definition of a...
This court decision pushes Alabama one step closer to the modern age, whether they like it or not. (Sure enough, the state's attorney general plans to appeal.) Alabama is one of the eight remaining U.S. states that require transgender people to undergo gender-affirmation surgery before they can get a state-issued identification that lists their...
