Latest news with #LambdaLegal
CBS News
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
NYC Pride Weekend gets underway with festivities ahead of Sunday's March
New York City's Pride Weekend is in full swing with the final preps underway for Sunday's March through Greenwich Village. Over 1 million people are expected to line the streets, and heavy security and street closures will be in place. Thousands participate in annual NYRR Pride Run Racers were up early Saturday morning as the 44th Annual New York Road Runners Pride Run brought an estimated 8,000 runners to Central Park. Proceeds benefited Lambda Legal, a nonprofit working to secure rights for LGBTQ+ people and those living with HIV. "Running brings people together, and we love the fact that this event brings both allies and members of the community together to celebrate Pride, to let people know that they are seen and heard and part of the running community," NYRR CEO Rob Simmelkjaer said. Lifelong LGBTQ+ activist Mark Segal stops by visitor center Saturday afternoon in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center on Christopher Street celebrated its first anniversary with a special guest – Mark Segal. The lifelong LGBT activist was there the night of the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969, and in 1973, he became famous for interrupting a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and holding up a sign reading, "Gays protest CBS prejudice." "It created visibility for us. Sixty million people saw that," Segal said. NYC Pride March steps off Sunday CBS News New York Saturday's events are all leading up to Sunday's massive Pride March. It kicks off at noon on Fifth Avenue near Madison Square Park before heading west, snaking its way through Greenwich Village and the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, then heading north up Seventh Avenue and ending around 15th Street. This year's theme is "Rise Up: Pride in Protest," marking 56 years since the Stonewall Riots. That is the reason Heritage of Pride calls it the Pride March, instead of a parade.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
After 10 years of marriage equality, the fight continues for LGBTQ+ rights
A lot of queer people can tell you exactly where they were at 10 a.m. on Friday, June 26, 2015. That was the moment the Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that grants same-sex couples marriage equality. For many – me included – it was a dream come true. Growing up gay in rural North Carolina in the sixties and seventies, when a large majority of states still made same-sex relationships a felony, the idea of same-sex couples marrying seemed so far-fetched as to be ridiculous. Today, thanks in part to the organization I now run, Lambda Legal (which was co-counsel in Obergefell), it is the law of the land. More than 600,000 married same-sex couples in the U.S. have tied the knot since then according to the Williams Institute, 'double the 390,000 who were married in June 2015 when Obergefell was decided.' Ten years later, the picture is much darker. Today, we are seeing a massive attack on the rights of LGBTQ+ people. Since 2022, an astounding 1,903 bills aimed at restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ people have been introduced – at least one in each of our 50 state legislatures. 220 have become law in 27 states. Obergefell and its protections are in danger of being rolled back. In 2023, Tennessee enacted a law that allows government officials to refuse to marry same-sex couples. In 2025, five state legislatures (Idaho, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota) considered bills calling upon the Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell. (Idaho's resolution passed.) The Southern Baptist Convention (America's second-largest Christian denomination) recently voted to pursue a legal strategy to reverse Obergefell modeled on the successful effort to overturn Roe v. Wade. Related: If a challenge to Obergefell makes it to the Supreme Court, it will find at least two friendly faces there. Justice Samuel Alito has repeatedly called for its reversal. And in his concurring opinion in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas went even further: 'In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [which gave us the right to birth control in 1965], Lawrence [which decriminalized same-sex relationships in 2003] and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous, the Court has a duty to 'correct the error' established in those precedents.' On the bench of the highest court in our land sits a man who wants to make us criminals again. How did we get here? It wasn't by accident: it's part of a well-funded effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights nationwide. Led by right-wing extremist groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom ('ADF,' which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a 'hate group'), a concerted effort to roll back the rights of LGBTQ+ people has been underway for many years. This network of right-wing extremist legal groups – including the ADF, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the American Center for Law and Justice, the First Liberty Institute, and the Becket Fund – had a combined budget of $231 million in 2023. By contrast, pro-LGBTQ+ legal groups – such as Lambda Legal, GLADLaw, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the ACLU LGBTQ+ Rights Project, the Transgender Law Center, and the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund – had a combined budget of $75 million in the same year. Anti-LGBTQ+ forces are outspending pro-LGBTQ+ forces by a factor of 3:1, so it's no surprise we are on the defensive. The LGBTQ+ movement finds itself at a conflicted moment on this tenth anniversary of marriage equality – feeling both celebratory and concerned about Obergefell, particularly in the wake of the recent ruling in in our Skrmetti case with the ACLU and ACLU of Tennessee. The decision upheld Tennessee's ban on the right of trans young people to access the health care they need. The world I was born into in 1963 – one where in all 50 states but one (Illinois), same-sex relations were a crime – was changed through litigation, including Lambda Legal's Lawrence v. Texas victory at the Supreme Court in 2003, which decriminalized same-sex relationships nationwide. Will the courts champion the cause of equality as they have done in some landmark cases like Lawrence and Obergefell or continue to bring setbacks to equality as they did in Skrmetti? We may be about to find is dedicated to featuring a wide range of inspiring personal stories and impactful opinions from the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. Visit to learn more about submission guidelines. Views expressed in Voices stories are those of the guest writers, columnists, and editors, and do not directly represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride. - YouTube This article originally appeared on Advocate: After 10 years of marriage equality, the fight continues for LGBTQ+ rights
The Hill
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Supreme Court turns to backlog of transgender cases after Tennessee ban ruling
The Supreme Court on Thursday will confront the next frontiers of the legal battles surrounding transgender rights now that the justices have signed off on Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. After the justices announce opinions from the bench, they'll meet behind closed doors to discuss how to proceed with more than a half-dozen petitions concerning states' transgender athlete bans, bathroom restrictions and prohibitions on gender-affirming surgeries in Medicaid plans. Transgender rights advocates are holding out hope that the conservative majority's ruling last week upholding the Tennessee law is limited and they can still eke out victories as the cases press ahead. 'As frustrating an answer as it is, I don't actually think this tells us much at all of how those other contexts will proceed before this court,' said Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of Lambda Legal's constitutional law practice. 'In as much as I think we can try to read tea leaves and find doctrinal through-lines, this is one of those instances where the court made clear that they were just doing something different and specific here.' The Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, marking one of their biggest cases implicating LGBTQ protections in recent years. Petitions asking the court to hear other transgender rights disputes piled up for months as the justices punted action to consider the Tennessee case, U.S. v. Skrmetti. With the decision now in, the freeze is thawing. At their weekly closed-door conference Thursday, the justices will return to nine petitions implicating transgender rights, case dockets show. Their usual practice is to send them back to lower courts to take another look in light of an intervening decision. But two Republican-controlled states are urging the court to forgo that exercise, warning it won't resolve their disputes, so the court should take them up now for their next term. In West Virginia, Attorney General JB McCuskey (R) asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to hear the state's defense of its transgender athlete ban. It is the third time the state has asked the justices to step in to allow it to enforce the 2021 law, which lower courts have blocked. In court filings, McCuskey, the Alliance Defending Freedom and attorneys for several West Virginia Board of Education members said the Tennessee case left constitutional questions relevant to the case unanswered. 'United States v. Skrmetti disclaims any guidance on the Title IX question presented here, and the decision's equal-protection analysis does not address critical questions unique to athletics,' they wrote. Public schools, they said, remain 'between a rock and a hard place,' citing President Trump's executive order to ban trans students from girls' and women's sports and the administration's statements that Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination, prohibits trans athletes from competing. 'Should they follow an executive order that threatens all their funding — even funding unrelated to athletics? Or should they follow a court order that has not yet been applied to them?' McCuskey's office asked in court filings. 'The years of delay that would follow were the Court to grant, vacate, and remand here would not help.' In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little (R) similarly asked the court to take up his state's trans athletes law, saying that lower court proceedings would otherwise 'delay the inevitable.' 'Whether designating sports teams based on biological sex violates the Equal Protection Clause is a critically important issue that has been roiling the lower courts, frustrating female student athletes, and confounding every level of government for years,' the state wrote in court filings this week. Other cases are also waiting in the wings Thursday, though those parties haven't tried to sway the justices following the court's Skrmetti ruling. Arizona's Senate president is defending the state's transgender athlete ban. West Virginia and Idaho are defending their gender-affirming surgery bans in Medicaid plans. North Carolina is trying to vindicate its similar ban for a government employee health plan. And Oklahoma wants the court to uphold its law banning people from changing their sex designation on official documents to match their gender identity. Challengers to Tennessee's gender-affirming care ban for minors had hoped to convince the Supreme Court that the law, S.B. 1, classified based on sex and transgender status, which could require it to clear a more exacting constitutional standard known as heightened scrutiny. Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion said it did neither and instead drew lines based on age and the treatments' medical purpose. 'Rather, S.B. 1 prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers and hormones to minors for certain medical uses, regardless of a minor's sex,' Roberts wrote. But in some of the other cases set for the justices' consideration Thursday, Republican-led states directly admit their laws turn on sex, which could force the court to confront the issue. And because the justices deemed that Tennessee's law does not discriminate against transgender Americans either, the court has yet to decide whether they qualify as a 'suspect class' that would independently trigger a higher level of constitutional scrutiny. Only three conservative justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett — signed onto concurring opinions explicitly rejecting the idea. 'That important question has divided the Courts of Appeals, and if we do not confront it now, we will almost certainly be required to do so very soon,' Alito cautioned in a solo opinion.
The Hill
21-06-2025
- Health
- The Hill
Supreme Court ruling scrambles battle for transgender care
The Supreme Court on Wednesday delivered a substantial blow to transgender-rights advocates in upholding a 2023 Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors, a decision that could have far-reaching consequences for the future of transgender health in the U.S. but whose impact won't be felt right away. 'The immediate outcome is that it doesn't change anything,' said Kellan Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at Whitman-Walker, a Washington-based nonprofit. 'It doesn't affect the availability or legality of care in states that do not have bans, and it simply says that states that have decided to ban this care can do so if they survive other challenges.' Twenty-seven Republican-led states since 2021 have adopted laws that ban transition-related care, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and rare surgeries for minors. Laws passed in Arizona and New Hampshire — the first Northeastern state to have restricted gender dysphoria treatments for youth — only prohibit minors from accessing surgeries, a provision that was not at issue before the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 decision, the high court upheld a lower court ruling that found Tennessee's restrictions do not violate the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. The state's law, which allows cisgender children and teens to access medications that it bans for trans minors, makes distinctions based on age and diagnosis, the courts ruled, rather than sex and transgender status. Three Tennessee families, a doctor and the Biden administration, along with attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Lambda Legal, argued the measure amounts to illegal sex discrimination, warranting heightened review. 'Having concluded it does not,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority on Wednesday, 'we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.' At least 10 legal challenges to state laws prohibiting health professionals from administering gender-affirming care to minors argue the restrictions discriminate based on sex in violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court's ruling Wednesday could potentially weaken, in some cases, that line of attack, but it is not the only approach opponents of the laws have pursued. More than a dozen other lawsuits, including ones arguing equal protection under the U.S. Constitution, claim bans on transition-related health care for minors violate the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause, federal disability law or provisions of a state's constitution. In May, a federal judge struck Montana's ban on gender-affirming care for youth on grounds it violated privacy, equal protection and free speech rights guaranteed by its constitution. 'This ruling allows challenges to other state bans to continue,' said Baker, of Whitman-Walker, 'and they will.' Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of Lambda Legal's constitutional law practice, told reporters on a Zoom call following Wednesday's ruling that the civil rights organization and others challenging state bans on gender-affirming care have other options at their disposal. 'The Supreme Court did not endorse the entirety of the lower court's ruling; it did not mandate or even greenlight other bans on gender-affirming medical care, even for young people, or other forms of discrimination,' she said. 'It really is about how it viewed Tennessee's in this specific way, and left us plenty of tools to fight other bans on health care and other discriminatory actions that target transgender people, including other equal protection arguments about transgender status discrimination, about the animus-based targeting of trans people.' Loewy added that the court's ruling also left the door open to arguments based on state and federal sex discrimination statutes and parental rights, which the justices did not address Wednesday. Nearly all of the cases brought against youth gender-affirming care bans argue those laws infringe on the rights of parents to make medical decisions on behalf of their children. 'As a parent, I know my child better than any government official ever will,' Samantha Williams, the mother of L.W., a transgender teenager who was at the center of the case before the Supreme Court, wrote in a New York Times op-ed after Wednesday's ruling. The Supreme Court's determination that Tennessee's law does not discriminate based on sex also raises questions about how opponents of transition-related health care for minors will use the ruling to inform their own legal strategies. In Arkansas, the ACLU successfully argued in 2023 that the first-in-the-nation ban on gender-affirming care for minors violated the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, as well as its Due Process Clause and the First Amendment's protections of free speech. 'We'll have to see, but it's possible that that ban could stand because the court made that decision on equal protection, as well as on other grounds,' said Lindsey Dawson, director for LGBTQ health policy at KFF, a nonprofit health policy research, polling and news organization. 'This is likely to be an area that's going to face continued litigation and is not settled at this point in time.' In a statement Wednesday, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin (R) said he is 'preparing an official notification' for an appeals court detailing the implications of Wednesday's Supreme Court decision on the state's ban, which the Legislature passed — and former Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson initially vetoed — in 2021. 'Because our law is similar to Tennessee's law, today's decision has positive implications for our case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit,' he said. Montana and Arkansas are the only states whose bans on gender-affirming care for youth remain blocked by court orders, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit group that tracks LGBTQ laws. The Supreme Court's ruling Wednesday also declined, as some court watchers had anticipated, to apply the reasoning of its earlier decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shields employees from discrimination based on their sex or gender identity. Some lawsuits challenging state bans on care for minors have said the ruling should apply to contexts other than workplace discrimination. Former President Biden's administration similarly sought to use the court's reasoning in Bostock to back new nondiscrimination policies protecting transgender people in health care and sports, arguments largely rejected by conservative political leaders and courts. 'We still don't have a sole understanding of where Bostock might apply outside of Title VII, and it's going to be something that's important to watch,' Dawson said. 'It's certainly something that the Bostock court warned us about,' she said. 'In that decision, the court said, this court is making its ruling and it's quite narrow, but it's going to be for future courts to decide how this applies outside of Title VII. That remains a question mark.'
New York Times
18-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
My Daughter Was at the Center of the Supreme Court Case on Trans Care. Our Hearts Are Broken.
There is something incredibly surreal about finding your family at the center of a landmark Supreme Court decision, from the robes and the formality to the long, red velvet curtains behind the justices. No mother imagines that her everyday fight to do right by her child would land her there. My daughter, L.W., came out as transgender late in 2020. She was just shy of 13. Four and a half years later, she is thriving, healthy and happy after pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care. But the very care that is improving her life became a primary political target of the Republican supermajority in our home state, Tennessee. When the legislature banned my daughter's care in 2023, we fought back by suing the state. Today, we found out that we lost that case when the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to uphold Tennessee's ban on such care. I am beside myself. Our heartfelt plea was not enough. The compelling, expert legal arguments by our lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal were not enough. I had to face my daughter and tell her that our last hope is gone. She's angry, scared and hurt that the American system of democracy that we so put on a pedestal didn't work to protect her. My family did not start this journey to land in Washington in front of that white marble hall of justice. We ended up there through parental and civic duty. My and my husband's demands in our lawsuit against the ban felt quite basic: Let us do our job as parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how. Don't let our child's very existence be a political wedge issue. Being a teenager is hard enough. Being a parent of a teenager is hard enough. Raising a transgender kid in Tennessee, we know that not everyone understands people like her or her health care — and that's OK. We don't need to agree on everything. But we do need our fundamental rights respected. I have devoted myself to finding our daughter consistent care in one state after another. The nightmare of our disrupted life pales in comparison to the nightmare of losing access to the health care that has allowed our daughter to thrive. After Tennessee passed its ban, we traveled to another provider in a different state. After that state passed a ban, we moved on to another one. We are now on our fourth state. The five-hour drive each way, taking time off work and school, is hard, but thankfully, we found a clinic and pharmacy that take our insurance. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
