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Date

Month: October 2014

Our Voices blog

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to voting rights by allowing Texas to enforce one of the most restrictive voter identification laws in the country. The new law will not only subject Texas voters to a highly restrictive identification process, but it will also have a devastating impact on the right to vote for many nationalized immigrants, people of color, and thousands of young voters. The law, passed in 2011, requires voters to present one of seven potential forms of...

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A groundbreaking new report released by Services and Advocacy Group for LGBTQ Elders (SAGE) is giving us a better understanding of the needs and concerns of this community. The new report, Out and Visible: The Experiences and Attitudes of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Older Adults, Ages, 45-75, is a uniquely comprehensive qualitative study  based on a national survey of more than 1,800 LGBTQ older adults that measures the challenges this community continues to face. The report...

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We often hear the figure that women still earn 78 cents to a man’s dollar. However, what that figure fails to capture is how many other factors contribute to an even more significant disparity for some women. Women of color face even more pay inequity, with black women earning 64 cents to the dollar and Latina women earning 55 cents to the dollar of their white male counterparts. Other marginalized identities likewise impact the pay gap such as immigrant women or women in the lesbian, gay,...

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Over the last week, the LGBTQ community has experienced historic victories in the fight for marriage equality. But amidst these game-changing victories, it’s important to remember the many ways that LGBTQ people and families remain especially vulnerable.  October is Domestic Violence Awareness month, which provides the opportunity to focus on the need to address the often-ignored issue of domestic violence and intimate partner violence (IPV) in the LGBTQ community. A 2013 report published by...

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Today, on National Coming Out Day, countless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people around the world will find the courage,  through one another, to tell the world who they really are. But this day is more than a just a celebration of the freedom to be ourselves.  It commemorates the 1987 National March on Washington, a grass roots protest against the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick upholding criminal sodomy laws, and the Reagan administration’s refusal to...

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On Monday morning, I was in my hotel room in Washington, D.C. The news was on, all was as expected, and I was finishing up e-mails before heading out to a breakfast meeting. A minute later, the world was gloriously, fabulously, improbably turned upside down. I was nervously waiting, as we all were, to see which case(s) the U.S. Supreme Court might take this term to decide whether same-sex couples throughout the country have the freedom to marry. Then, that penultimate question was suddenly...

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NCLR Is Here for All Of Us

By Robert Holgate NCLR’s Major Gifts Campaign Co-Chair I first heard about NCLR from a friend and interior design client who does pro bono legal work for Legal Services for Children. During the early years of my business, this client and I would meet, and we would often talk about the cases she was working on. I’m a big advocate for children’s rights and especially young LGBTQ kids. When my friend was describing one of her cases, she mentioned how impressed she was with NCLR, saying that...

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