Sen. Jeff Sessions, (R-Ala.) President Donald Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, has offered a glimpse at how the Department of Justice might enforce existing laws related to LGBT rights should Sessions be confirmed.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent the AG nominee a questionnaire in which he asked multiple questions probing Sessions’ views on LGBT rights, including the Alabama senator’s support for what Franken calls the “deceptively named” First Amendment Defense Act.Â
Following Donald Trump’s election, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) promised to reintroduce FADA, which is intended, primarily, to allow individuals — defined broadly to also include religious organizations, churches and even certain corporations — to discriminate against LGBT people if they have religious or moral objections to homosexuality, same-sex marriage, or LGBT rights. A version of FADA was introduced last year, but failed after conservative interest groups pulled their support over a broadly-written amendment that could have allowed discrimination against heterosexual couples. Although a new version of FADA has not been introduced yet during this congressional session, it remains a priority of many social conservatives. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to sign such an act into law should Congress approve it — a promise that remains on his campaign website.
“Some have argued that FADA is necessary to protect pastors, ministers and churches who fear that they’ll be forced to marry gay and lesbian couples,” Franken writes in his questionnaire to Sessions. “But the First Amendment already prevents clergy or churches from being forced to marry a couple if doing so is contrary to their beliefs. It always has. The Supreme Courtâs decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized that same-sex couples have the right to marry in all 50 states, did not change that.
“Why do you believe that a bill like FADA is necessary? And how do you reconcile your support for FADA, which would sanction discrimination against lawfully married gay and lesbian couples, with your claim to ‘understand the demands for justice and fairness made by the LGBT community?'”
Taking issue with Franken’s contention that FADA is “deceptively named,” Sessions responds: “During the oral argument in Obergefell, Justice Alito asked former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli whether a private university or college could lose its tax-exempt status if it opposed same-sex marriage. General Verrilli responded: ‘It’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that.’ Thus, the purpose of the legislation was to prohibit the federal government from taking discriminatory actions against any person based on their belief or action in accordance with a religious or moral conviction.
“I supported this legislation because I believe that we can, and should, protect the rights of all citizens — including LGBT individuals and those with traditional views of marriage,” adds Sessions. “I do not see freedom as a zero-sum game. I understand the critical and historic role of Department of Justice in upholding our nation’s civil rights laws. If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed as Attorney General, I will enforce those laws to the letter.”
Franken also asks Sessions about several other topics involving the senator’s voting record opposing LGBT rights, and whether he’ll enforce laws intended to protect the LGBT community from discrimination.Â
Sessions promises that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division will continue to defend the civil rights of all Americans, particularly the most vulnerable, should he be confirmed. In response to a question from Franken regarding past statements refusing to acknowledge the threat posed to the LGBT community by hate crimes, and his opposition to the LGBT-inclusive Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, Sessions insists that he was simply working “based on information available to me at the time,” and promises to “work diligently to ensure that all Americans receive equal protection under our laws.”
Sessions dodges the issue of hate crimes that go underreported, vowing only to “learn more about this issue” while refusing to lobby for changes to federal law that would require state and local law enforcement to report hate crime incidents to the FBI. He also explains his past opposition to reauthorizing the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act by saying: “I was concerned with what I believed to be overly broad and vague language in the bill that could have discriminated against faith-based organizations that help form the fabric of the United States’s social services, and would have undermined the goal of the bill by making it more difficult to protect and provide services for at-risk individuals.”
"The term homosexual was coined in 1869," says Jonathan D. Katz, the co-curator, along with art historian Johnny Willis, of The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939.
"It was actually written originally in a letter between the coiner of the term -- a man by the name of Kertbeny to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first gay rights campaigner in history. He wrote the first coming out letter and formed the first society for gay rights, and they're having a big fight because it is Ulrichs who has the argument that homosexuals are a third sex, and it's Kertbeny who argues that actually every human being alive has the capacity for same sex or different sex desire, that homosexuality is actually a universal human capacity, just like heterosexuality. He says both are universal capacities.
The Metropolitan Police Department is asking for the publicâs help in solving the fatal shooting of a transgender woman in Northeast D.C.
Dream Johnson, 28, was reportedly walking along Benning Road NE, between the Carver Langston and Kingman Park neighborhoods, when she was shot in the early morning hours of Saturday, July 5.
According to a news release from the Metropolitan Police Department, officers from MPDâs Sixth District were flagged down in the 2000 block of Benning Road NE for an unconscious woman. When they arrived, they found a female victim -- later identified as Johnson -- suffering from gunshot wounds.
Luke Ash, a Baptist pastor who worked at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, says he was fired after refusing to use a trans co-worker's preferred pronouns.
Luke Ash, lead pastor of Stevendale Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, says he was fired from his job as a library technician at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library after refusing to use a co-worker's preferred pronouns. He was reportedly dismissed after referring to the colleague by female pronouns during a July 7 conversation with another library employee.
"That co-worker corrected me, said that the person she was training preferred to be called 'he,' and I refused to use those preferred pronouns," Ash told anti-LGBTQ activist and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins during an interview on the conservative Christian political show Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.
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