President Donald Trump at CPAC 2017, Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr
On Monday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order allowing companies that do business with the federal government to avoid disclosing past instances of discrimination or violating labor laws.
Trump’s order rescinds an Obama-era executive order that required companies with federal contracts to report whether they have been found liable for violations of any labor laws or executive orders, including those that prohibit discrimination against protected classes of people, including LGBTQ individuals. The executive order also instructed federal officials to consider those violations when awarding contracts.
LGBTQ legal advocacy organization Lambda Legal slammed Trump for rescinding Obama’s executive order. The group’s CEO, Rachel Tiven, called the now-rescinded regulations in the order a valuable enforcement tool intended to hold employers responsible for violations of nondiscrimination laws. She also encouraged LGBTQ employees of federal contractors, and those with HIV, to contact the organization if they believe their rights have been discriminated against because of their sexual orientation or HIV status.
“This sends a message that the government condones discrimination,” Tiven said of Trump’s actions. “Scrapping an order like this one is different than not adopting one. It’s not surprising given Donald Trump’s sordid history with women that this administration is allowing companies to hide sex discrimination — including sexual harassment.
“Furthermore,” Tiven added, “this administration is inviting businesses to the table that violate equal pay and fair wage laws, ignore laws requiring family medical leave, or target employees for discrimination based on race, sex, gender identity, gender non-conformity (including being gay or lesbian), disability (including HIV), and numerous other grounds. All of these things violate the law. Companies that flout the law should be sued — not invited to win our tax dollars.”
In a landmark and historic ruling, Namibia's high court overturned two colonial-era laws that criminalize consensual sex between male partners as unconstitutional.
Friedel Dausab, a Namibian LGBTQ activist, filed the lawsuit challenging the anti-sodomy laws, assisted by the British-based nongovernmental organization Human Dignity Trust.
Dausab claimed that the laws criminalizing same-sex relations and other forms of sexual conduct -- which are rarely enforced but remain on the books -- are discriminatory and infringe on Namibian citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms.
GOP delegates adopted a convention platform ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The new platform, at the behest of former President Donald Trump, walks back some of the previous platform's harsher language on issues like reproductive rights and same-sex marriage.
Trump advisers said they wanted the platform to more closely reflect the former president's stances on various issues.
"This is something hopefully you will pass," Trump reportedly told delegates when he called into a meeting of delegates last week, as reported by The Washington Post. "You will pass it quickly, and we will show unity in our party as opposed to the disaster that is going on with the Democrats.
The Queer calendar promises us that come late May/early June 2025, World Pride will fill Washington, D.C.'s streets with affirming, magical mirth. This year, the Capital Pride Alliance gave us a great trial run. While a jubilee in its own right, this year's festivities illustrated that World Pride 2025 should be safe, secure, and glorious.
It may, however, also be a righteously angry occasion, as 2025 Washington could be the epicenter of a new, awful age. Barring any seismic shenanigans, either President Joe Biden will hold the White House, or Donald Trump and his bully boys and goon girls will move in. If Hillary Clinton's loss to The Don taught us anything, it is that we live in absurdly uncertain times. (And that the Electoral College should be abolished.)
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