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Florida Man Being Evicted From New Apartment For Being Gay

Randall Coffman of Florida is being evicted from his new apartment for being gay
Randall Coffman is being evicted for being gay

On December 1, just 21 days ago, Randall Coffman moved into his new apartment in Clay County, located just outside of Jacksonville, Florida.

The apartment has its own entrance but is attached to the home of his landlord, Jackie Cooper.

A couple of weeks after moving in, Cooper saw Coffman and told him she didn’t want him inviting girls over late into the night.

Coffman informed his landlord that wouldn’t be a problem since he’s gay.

“I’ve been gay since I was born,” said Coffman according to First Coast News. “After that, the harassment for being gay started.”

The next day, Cooper approached her new tenant and told him he had to leave – because he’s gay.

Sensing trouble, Coffman recorded the conversation. Watch the report from First Coast News below.

“Listen to me now, you have to leave this place,” says Cooper in the video. “You didn’t tell me you’re gay until yesterday.”

“Why do I have to tell you I’m gay?,” asked Coffman. “I don’t have to tell you.”

Cooper responded, “You think I want homosexuals coming in and out of my place like that?”

Cooper denies the issue is Coffman being gay, even though she’s caught on video saying exactly that. She says Coffman failed to provide a copy of his driver’s license.

Even though Cooper’s position is discriminatory, the law is currently on her side.

Jacksonville’s 2017 Human Rights Ordinance protects LGBTQ tenants from housing discrimination, but Cooper’s Clay County home is located outside of the city limits.

Neither Cooper nor Coffman signed a lease making his arrangement a verbal month-to-month agreement. In such cases, a landlord can kick a tenant out with 15 days notice.

According to Coffman, Cooper gave him until the 27th to vacate the apartment, which is just shy of the 15-day rule.

But Coffman, currently looking for a new place to live, says he won’t put up a fight. He tells First Coast News he’s uncomfortable about returning to the property.

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Trump Says Democrats ‘Own’ Government Shutdown After Saying He Would Shoulder The Blame

Donald Trump summoned Senate Republicans to the White House this morning in a rallying cry to get them to somehow pass the newly-approved House spending bill that includes $5 billion for Trump’s border wall.

Remember the 2016 campaign? 

 ‘Who’s gonna pay for ‘the wall?’ ‘Mexico!’

Mind you, you need 60 votes in the Senate to pass a spending bill. There are nowhere near enough Democratic votes (if one) to get close to 60.

But Trump took to Twitter this morning already blaming the Democrats for any government shutdown that might occur tonight at midnight.

But if you take a little trip on the Wayback Machine, you’ll recall on December 11th in a nationally televised Oval Office meeting, Trump said:

“If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other, I will shut down the government. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it. I’ll tell you what, I am proud to shut down the government.”

As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer points out, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill to keep the government open and running.

In the case of a shutdown, nine federal departments and a number of agencies – Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, State, Transportation and Treasury Departments – will all shutter.

More than 420,000 people will work without pay and an additional 380,000 workers will be furloughed.

Right before Christmas.

#ThanksTrump

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Ohio Gov. Kasich Bans Trans Discrimination With Executive Order

Ohio Gov. John Kasich

Ohio Gov. John Kasich Wednesday issued an Executive Order, 2018-12K, changing the anti-discrimination policy for state employees to include “gender identity or expression,” reports local NBC News affiliate, WCMH.

With just weeks left in Kasich’s term as governor, the order bans discrimination based on “gender identity and expression” in state personnel decisions.

The new language replaces the executive order put in place by Kasich when he took office in 2011, which included race, color, religion, gender, national origin, military status, disability, age and sexual orientation, but not gender identity.

LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans says the executive order makes Kasich “the first Republican Governor of a state without statutory protections for LGBTQ people to issue an executive order protecting state employees on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.”

An outspoken critic of Donald Trump, Kasich has indicated he’s considering a 2020 challenge for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020, and this may be an attempt to show GOP voters a more moderate side of the Republican Party.

A statement from Equality Ohio applauded the move:

This leadership has never been more important. At a time when the basic rights of transgender people to exist in public, to serve in our military, and to access basic health care are at risk, we applaud Governor Kasich for his recognition of our shared humanity with common-sense protections.

Although Kasich’s successor, Governor-elect Mike DeWine (R), could rescind the order when he takes office next month, Freedom for All Americans reports he has “expressed an openness to preserving Kasich’s executive orders.”

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Trump Goes Back To Government Shutdown Threats Over Wall Funding

After indicating he would go along with a continuing resolution to keep the government open, Donald Trump reversed course today and said he would not sign the bill unless it included money for his long-promised wall.
Donald Trump

After indicating he would go along with a continuing resolution to keep the government open, Donald Trump reversed course today and said he would not sign the bill unless it included money for his long-promised wall.

ABC News reports:

House Speaker Paul Ryan emerged from a last-minute White House meeting Thursday between President Donald Trump and House Republicans to say that the president told them he will refuse to sign a stopgap funding bill as it’s currently written — a measure that would avert a shutdown before a Friday midnight deadline.

Ryan told reporters that he and other GOP leaders were going back to try to add more border security funding to the legislation.

“The president informed us that he will not sign the bill that came over from the Senate last evening because of his legitimate concerns for border security, so what we’re gonna do is go back to the House and work with our members,” Ryan, R-Wis., said. “We want to keep the government open but we also want to see an agreement that protects the border.”

At the signing of a federal farm bill, Trump addressed his decision:

Earlier this week, after the White House indicated Trump would not shut down the government over funding for his wall, The Washington Examiner reported that conservative pundit Ann Coulter was heavily critical of the president saying she would not vote for him in 2020.

“No. Nor will, I think, most of his supporters. Why would you? To make sure, I don’t know, Ivanka and Jared can make money? That seems to be the main point of the presidency at this point.

“They’re about to have a country where no Republican will ever be elected president again. Trump will just have been a joke presidency who scammed the American people, amused the populists for a while, but he’ll have no legacy whatsoever.”

The stock market immediately reacted on today’s news:

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Asst Principal Bullies Trans Student In Bathroom “If You Can’t Use This Urinal, You Shouldn’t Be In Here”

(image via Depositphotos)

An assistant principal at a West Virginia high school has been suspended after a complaint was filed alleging he had bullied a transgender male student in a bathroom.

Late last month, before boarding a bus for an after-school marching band trip, 15-year-old Michael Critchfield went to the boys bathroom and asked if anyone was present before entering a stall. As a trans boy, he had made a habit of checking to avoid potential confrontations.

Critchfield and his parents have been open with the school administration, since he began attending as a freshman last year, that he is transgender.

According to Critchfield, Liberty High School assistant principal Lee Livengood entered the bathroom and began harassing the student from outside the stall.

Critchfield says Livengood yelled, “Why are you in here? You shouldn’t be in here.”

Livengood reportedly misgendered Critchfield continually and ordered him to “come out here and use the urinal” to prove he was a boy.

“If you can’t use this urinal, then you shouldn’t be in here,” Livengood yelled, according to Critchfield. “What if a student said you were checking them out in here?”

Critchfield later told the ACLU of West Virginia he felt “degraded and discriminated against.”

According to The Huffington Post, other students could hear the screaming coming from the bathroom and alerted a parent who was acting as a chaperone that day.

The chaperone confronted the assistant principal outside the bathroom where Livengood allegedly admitted in front of Critchfield, “Not going to lie. You freak me out.”

When Caroline Critchfield picked up her son later that day, she found Michael terrified and traumatized.

The mother addressed the issue with Liberty High School administrators the next day where she was told Livengood would not have any further contact with her son and that an investigation would be launched into the matter.

But after several weeks, no update was forthcoming from the administration.

Additionally, Livengood would reportedly station himself in the cafeteria during Michael’s lunch period, which he hadn’t done before.

The family reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia for help regarding the incident.

‘It shocks the conscience that they’ve apparently taken no steps to discipline Mr. Livengood on this,’ ACLU-WV Executive Director Joseph Cohen told The Daily Beast.

After sending a letter to the superintendent of Harrison County Schools, Dr. Mark A. Manchin, requesting a meeting about the altercation, neither the Critchfields nor the ACLU received a response.

That is, until the media began reporting on the incident.

On Tuesday this week, Manchin told local media that Livengood would be suspended without pay until 2019.

“I was able to confirm the interaction with Mr. Livengood and that indeed he acted inappropriately,” Manchin told West Virginia MetroNews. “We need to address it and we will address it.”

With the Christmas holiday next week, that suspension ‘without pay until 2019′ amounts for four days.

“While we are heartened to hear the administration admit to wrongdoing, a four day paid suspension of an employee is not sufficient,” Cohen said in a public statement. “The Harrison County School District needs to make significant changes to its culture.”

Cohen’s statement continued, “We look forward to meeting with Mr. Manchin and developing a real plan to ensure that every student is safe.”

Cohen also underscored how the issue of harassment of transgender teens is literally a life or death issue as the American Academy of Pediatrics published a study earlier this year indicating 51 percent of trans male adolescents had attempted suicide.

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Darren Criss Doesn’t Want To Take Any More Gay Roles From Gay Actors

Darren Criss (image via Facebook)

Darren Criss first burst onto the national stage playing openly gay ‘Blaine Anderson’ on the hit TV series, GLEE.

He followed that with an acclaimed turn on Broadway in the decidedly queer title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

And now, after his star-making performance as ‘Andrew Cunanan’ in the TV mini-series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, he’s not only won a Prime-time Emmy Award but is nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award.

But Criss has decided to no longer take on gay roles – and for the very best reason.

“There are certain [queer] roles that I’ll see that are just wonderful,” Criss recently shared in an interview with Bustle. “But I want to make sure I won’t be another straight boy taking a gay man’s role.”

Calling the creative experiences of playing these varied queer roles “a real joy,” Criss says he isn’t comfortable taking those roles, which he describes as “unfortunate.”

“The reason I say that is because getting to play those characters is inherently a wonderful dramatic experience,” the 31-year-old told Bustle. “It has made for very, very compelling and interesting people.”

As we’ve reported several times on Instinct, there’s an important, ongoing discussion about straight people playing gay roles, cisgender actors taking on transgender characters

GLAAD noted in its 2018 “Where We Are On TV” report that of 857 series regular characters on the five broadcast networks (ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, The CW) in primetime in the upcoming TV year, only 75 were identified as LGBTQ. And, at 8.8 percent, this is the highest representation of LGBTQ characters the “Where We Are On TV” report has ever seen.

Criss acknowledges the issue of representation in film and television has been on his mind more lately having played ‘Cunanan,’ a Filipino-American. Criss’s mother hails from the Philippines and the bombastic role was the first time he was playing a character with which he shared that commonality.

He’s also aware that Asian-American roles only make up about 1% of leading roles in television and film.

Looking forward, as television series from the past are getting the reboot treatment – like the recent Queer As Folk announcement – Criss is pretty confident he’s not all that interested in returning to the world of GLEE.

When asked if he’d consider revisiting GLEE’s ‘Blaine Anderson,’ Criss is of a ‘never say never’ mindset, but also doesn’t think that would happen anytime soon anyway.

“It’s not because I don’t love GLEE, or didn’t love my time on GLEE, it’s just GLEE was a new thing,” he told Bustle. “The thing that made it special was its freshness. That’s hard to recreate.”

“I like what it celebrated,” adds Criss. “New faces and new voices and I’d want to see that incarnated but with somebody new.”

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Trump Administration Quietly Begins Discharging HIV+ Soldiers

The Trump administration has quietly begun to discharge HIV+ soldiers from the U.S. military.

The Trump administration has quietly begun to discharge HIV+ soldiers from the U.S. military.

Despite the fact that they qualify due to fitness assessments and medical treatment, and strong support from their commanding officers, two airmen were informed shortly before Thanksgiving that they were found “unfit for continued military service.”

They have filed suit against Defense Secretary Jim Mattis after receiving the news they were being discharged.

From The Washington Post:

Both active-duty airmen tested positive for HIV last year during Air Force screenings. After they started antiretroviral treatments, their doctors deemed them asymptomatic and physically fit to deploy, and their commanders backed their continued service. They intended to pursue lengthy Air Force careers after serving for more than half a decade in logistics and maintenance roles.

Last month, however, the two airmen received word that they had been deemed unfit for military service and would be discharged. The stated reason: The U.S. military bans personnel with HIV from deploying to the Middle East, where the majority of Air Force members are expected to go.

“Policies singling out service members living with HIV for starkly different treatment are an unfortunate vestige of a time when HIV was untreatable and invariably fatal,” the airmen argued in the complaint. “These anachronistic policies are no longer justified in light of modern medical science.”

Both airmen maintain they can head to the Middle East with no problem, so long as they take a supply of medication with them. But the ban on HIV positive service members there officially renders them unfit to deploy worldwide, placing them in a category of service members Mattis wants pushed out of the military. They weren’t offered alternative jobs, which both airmen said they would have accepted.

Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN filed the lawsuit with partner law firm Winston & Strawnon behalf of the two HIV-positive airmen.

Lambda Legal issued a statement today, which read in part:

“It’s disgusting that the Trump Administration is sending some men and women in uniform home for the holidays without jobs simply because of their HIV status,” said Scott Schoettes, Counsel and HIV Project Director at Lambda Legal.

“These decisions should be based on science, not stigma. Lambda Legal is suing to stop these separations and will not stop fighting until President Trump understands that there’s not a job in the world a person living with HIV cannot safely perform, including the job of soldier.”

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Donald Trump Declares Victory In Syria, Orders Withdrawal Of All US Troops

Donald Trump declares victory in Syria

The New York Times reports that Donald Trump has declared victory in Syria, and ordered a complete withdrawal of all U.S. ground troops within the next 30 days.

Trump tweeted that he was won the 4-year war on ISIS in the war-torn country.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” the president said in a Twitter post on Wednesday morning. He offered no details on his plans for the military mission, nor a larger strategy, in Syria.

But Pentagon officials who had sought to talk the president out of the decision as late as Wednesday morning argued that such a move would betray Kurdish allies who have fought alongside American troops in Syria and who could find themselves under attack in a military offensive now threatened by Turkey.

I’m not a military expert, and won’t pretend to be, but I do know when ending a military mission there needs to be communication and planning.

Plenty of folks, like Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, were blindsided by the sudden surprise announcement:

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Cuban Government Removes Marriage Equality Language From New Constitution

The government of Cuba announced Tuesday that the proposed constitutional Article 68, that would open the door for same-sex marriage in the island nation, has been removed from the draft of a new constitution

The government of Cuba announced Tuesday that the proposed constitutional Article 68, which would open the door for same-sex marriage in the island nation, has been removed from the draft of a new constitution

Cuba’s National Assembly announced the news in a series of tweets:

According to Emmy Award winning South Florida journalist Hatzel Vela, translated from Spanish the tweet read, “The [Constitutional] Commission proposes to defer the concept of marriage, meaning it will be taken out of the constitutional project, as a way to respect all opinions. Marriage is a social and jurisdictional institution. The law will define the rest of its elements.”

Another tweet said, “The Family Code should establish who can engage in marriage.” The Family code is scheduled to be updated shortly after the confirmation of the new constitution.

The first draft of the new constitution was made public in July.

For months now, LGBTQ activists had worked towards eliminating the description of marriage as a union of a man and woman. Instead, the language would have been changed to the union of “two people with absolutely equal rights and obligations.”

But, as the public debate continued, evangelical church leaders led protests at meetings on the new constitution. Cuba’s Catholic Church, Assembly of God Pentecostal Church, the Evangelical League and Methodist Church all vigorously oppose the idea of marriage equality.

Vela pointed to another National Assembly tweet that said, “Article 68 was the one most discussed by the people in the popular consultation, in 66 percent of the meetings (of citizen debate).”

The final version of the new constitution is scheduled to be voted on by the National Assembly later this week in advance of a public referendum on February 24.

Former President Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela Castro Espin, who has led to charge to legalize same-sex marriage, took to Facebook to say “there is no setback” and that the tweet from the National Assembly wasn’t accurate.

“There is no setback, the essence of Article 68 is maintained, the struggle continues, now let’s give the YES to the Constitution and then close ranks to achieve a Family Code as advanced as the new constitutional text,” she wrote according to Gay Star News. “Cuba is ours, Cuba belongs to everyone.”

However, The Washington Blade reports that several of the Cuban journalists and LGBT activists they communicate with on regular basis say “they face harassment and even arrest if they publicly criticize Mariela Castro and/or the Cuban government.”

Cuba bears a long, hideous history regarding the treatment of LGBTs.

In 1959, after the rise of Fidel Castro, 25,000 gay men were rounded up and sent to labor camps.

And during the height of the AIDS pandemic, those with HIV were quarantined in government-run sanitariums. That practice ended in 1993.