On March 2, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, the legal challenge to Texas House Bill 2 that severely restricts a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy. This will be the first time the Supreme Court takes up the issue of abortion in more than 20 years and will be only the third abortion case that the high court has heard in its entire history. Setting aside the debate over abortion, the reality is that the state of Texas is restricting...
Our Voices
When I first heard the story of what was happening to Alex in St. George, Utah a few years ago, I could not believe it. I’m from Utah, and I know it can be tough for LGBTQ kids there, but I had no idea that charlatans could torture and keep prisoner a young girl based on her refusal to deny who she was. Alex’s parents’ attempts to change her sexual orientation were wrong, misguided, and ill informed, but what makes Alex’s story—detailed in her book, “Saving Alex,” out March...
One of the most horrific anti-transgender bills in the country will move before South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard for consideration as early as today. House Bill 1008 forces transgender students to use a separate bathroom from all other students and prohibits schools from having supportive policies treating them the same as other students. If Governor Dennis Daugaard signs it into law, South Dakota will be the first state to pass this shameful attack on transgender students, but trust me: It...
Today the nation commemorates the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Today, as this fundamental right faces unprecedented attacks, it is time that we reclaim the promise of Roefor this and future generations. Roe held that one of the most personal and intimate decisions one can make — whether and when to bear a child — belongs to the individual. While the precise contours of the right and the...
Over the past holiday weekend, as many of us relaxed with our families and celebrated the beginning of a new year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the homes of Central American refugees in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina and arrested 121 people, many of them mothers with young children. Sadly, there is nothing new about the ICE raids. They are a component of the Obama administration’s enforcement policy that targets these refugees who arrived in the United States in...
This week, NCLR and a coalition of 13 other LGBT, racial justice, and health equity organizations filed an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down draconian restrictions on abortion providers enacted by the State of Texas in 2013 which, if upheld, would lead to the closing of most abortion clinics in the state. The brief urges the Court to carefully scrutinize the state’s asserted justification for the law, just as the Court has done with other...
Beginning January 1, 2016, California law will fully protect families conceiving children through assisted reproduction, regardless of how they conceive. California law already recognized many families using assisted reproduction, but it only provided protections to certain families. Assembly Bill 960—signed into law by California Gov. Jerry Brown in late 2015—provides several important new protections to ensure that all families are treated equally by the law. First, California did not...
When leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested that we respond to the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., by barring Muslims from entering the U.S., most Americans, even many in the Republican Party, were rightly appalled if not completely surprised. Trump’s preposterous and shocking pronouncements are, at this point, predictable. But what is truly disturbing is his boisterous refusal to be accountable to facts and the significant percentage of Republican voters...
In September of this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through its Office for Civil Rights (OCR), issued a proposed rule implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that will prohibit discrimination in certain health programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. The new rule has the potential to eradicate numerous forms of discrimination and mistreatment that LGBTQ people often face in our health care...
I just did something I thought I would never do. I resigned my membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) and asked that my name be removed from the records. Even at the height of church involvement in the passage of Proposition 8 in California, I never seriously considered removing my name. It just didn’t matter that much to me. Spiritually and emotionally, I left the church I grew up in decades ago. And despite being a “known gay activist” to the church, I...
