Tag: discrimination

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Oregon: Baker under investigation after refusing wedding cake for lesbian couple

The state of Oregon is following up on a discrimination complaint from a lesbian couple who were refused service by a wedding cake baker.

The women claim Sweet Cakes owner Aaron Klein called the women “abominations to the Lord.” Klein denies saying that, but admits that he wouldn’t make the cake.

“I apologized for wasting their time and said we don’t do same-sex marriages,” he told the local media. I “honestly did not mean to hurt anybody, didn’t mean to make anybody upset, (it’s) just something I believe in very strongly.”

An Oregon statute bans sexual orientation discrimination in public accomodation, which includes businesses. The same law would apply had the baker refused to serve customers based on race or sex. But critics argue that could conflict with Klein’s constitutional right to practice his religion. The office of Oregon’s attorney general is now investigating the matter.

(source)

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Bryan Fischer at American Family Assoc. losing his mind that Boy Scouts may drop gay discrimination policy

American Family Association hate group leader Bryan Fischer is going ballistic over the news that the Boy Scouts of America might drop its policy against gay scouts and scout leaders, claiming that “male homosexuals offend against children at roughly 10 times the rate at which heterosexuals offend” and warns that it’s an open invitation to pedophiles.

According to Fischer, should the policy be dropped, the Boy Scouts “are done, they’re toast, they’re history. From this day forward, there is not one loving father in America that ever, ever, EVER oughta entrust his son to the Boy Scouts of America.”

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North Dakota: Gay college football player dismissed from team

Jamie Kuntz was dismissed from the North Dakota State College of Science’s football team after he was caught kissing his 65 year old boyfriend during an away football game.

The school feels that he was an ongoing distraction but Jamie thinks that his sexual orientation was a factor in his dismissal.

SB Nation’s Amy K. Nelson gives excellent coverage to this very complicated story from all points of view, talking to Jamie, his teammates, and the school’s athletic director for the first time on camera.

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PA: School to pay student $700,000 for HIV discrimination

Back in December of last year I wrote about the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania and its denial of admission to a student, known under the pseudonym Abraham Smith, over his HIV-positive status. Since that time, the Department of Justice and the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania became involved, filing a lawsuit with the boy’s parents and charging the school with violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The school reversed its decision last month.

Smith, now a 14-year-old ninth-grader, was denied admission last year to the eighth-grade class at the Milton Hershey School, founded by the chocolate magnate and his wife. School administrators said the honor roll student, who has HIV, presented a “direct threat” to the health and safety of other students, according to a press release announcing the settlement, which also requires the school to conduct HIV training for its staff and students.
“Children should not be denied educational opportunities simply because they have HIV,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department, in a press release. “This settlement sends a clear message that unlawful discrimination against persons with HIV or AIDS will not be tolerated.”
The settlement concludes a federal HIV discrimination lawsuit brought against the school by the nonprofit AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania.
The AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania reports that the Smith and his mother have decided not to enroll Smith at the Hershey school but will instead use the settlement to cover other educational expenses.
Via the Advocate
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Hospital tells lesbian domestic partners “you need medical power of attorney”

At Spring Valley Hospital, in Las Vegas, Nevada,  a lesbian couple – Brittney Leon and Terri-Ann Simonelli – was told at admissions that even though they had a legal domestic partnership, they would need a medical power of attorney for one gay partner to make decisions in the event of a crisis.

Brittney Leon was checking into the hospital for complications related to her pregnancy.  During the admittance, the admissions officer informed the couple that the hospital policy required gay couples to have a medical power of attorney.  Even though the couple offered to go home and get their certificate designating them as legal domestic partners, the admissions officer said that it wouldn’t matter – the policy was the policy.

In Nevada, the domestic partnership law passed in 2009 provides all the rights of married couples.

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:

A woman who identified herself as public relations representative at Spring Valley Hospital told a Review-Journal reporter in a phone interview that the hospital policy requires gay couples have power of attorney in order to make medical decisions for each other .

When asked if she was aware of Nevada’s domestic partnership law, she accused the reporter of bias and hung up the telephone.

The domestic partnership law states: “Domestic partners have the same rights, protections and benefits, and are subject to the same responsibilities, obligations and duties under law, whether derived from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses.”

What confuses me is no one has brought up that on April 15, 2010, the White House released a statement by Obama instructing his Health and Human Services secretary to draft rules requiring hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid payments to grant all patients the right to designate people who can visit and respect patients’ choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them. That should have come into play here, domestic partnership or not, no?

The couple says they don’t intend to file a complaint or lawsuit against Spring Valley Hospital. But they do hope their problem will lead to more awareness of the domestic partnership law and for fair treatment of gay people.

Sadly, in the addition to the stress at admissions, Leon lost her baby.

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Florida: Jacksonville rejects gay anti-discrimination bill

The Jacksonville City Council voted down a bill that would have protected LGBT residents from housing and employment discrimination by a vote of 10-9.

Seven of the “yes” votes were gained only after a clause protecting transgender individuals was stripped out of the bill.

The city already protects citizens against discrimination based on color, race, sex, national origin, religion, age, marital status or disability.

Councilman Warren Jones filed the bill in May hoping to add protections based on sexual orientation. To gain traction, the language including “gender identity” and “gender expression” had to be removed. In the end, though, that was not enough to pass the bill.

The Florida Times Union noted that the deciding vote Wednesday came from City Councilman Johnny Gaffney, whom had previously had supported the bill when it went through committees. But Gaffney voted against and made no public remarks giving his reason for switching his support.

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Affordable Care Act bars transgender discrimination

Chris Geidner is reporting at Buzzfeed  The Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that under the Affordable Healthcare Act, federally funded agencies and providers will be barred from discriminating against transgender patients:

In response to a letter sent by a dozen LGBT health and advocacy organizations to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in June, Leon Rodriguez — the director of HHS’s Office for Civil Rights — wrote on July 12 HHS considers discrimination based on “gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity” in federal health programs or activities receiving funding under the Affordable Care Act#39;s-covered programs to be illegal.

In the letter, obtained by BuzzFeed, Rodriguez agreed with the groups’ assessment that the prohibition on sex discrimination in Obama’s health care law prohibited discrimination against transgender people and stated that his office would investigate any complaints of such discrimination. Referring to a recent survey, National Center for Transgender Equality executive director Mara Keisling told BuzzFeed that 20 percent of transgender people report being turned away from a health-care provider for being transgender. “That’s illegal now,” she said.

Read the full report here.

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Boy Scouts uphold ban on gays

After a two year review, today the Boy Scouts issued a statement reaffirming its ban on openly gay Scout members or leaders.

An 11-member special committee, formed discreetly by top Scout leaders in 2010, “came to the conclusion that this policy is absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts,” the organization’ national spokesman, Deron Smith, told The Associated Press. Smith said the committee, comprised of professional scout executives and adult volunteers, was unanimous in its conclusion — preserving a long-standing policy that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 and has remained controversial ever since. As a result of the committee’s decision, the Scouts’ national executive board will take no further action on a recently submitted resolution asking for reconsideration of the membership policy.

Recently Ernst & Young CEO James Turley and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, both of whom sit on the Boy Scouts board of directors, signaled their willingness to lift the ban. Stephenson is pegged to head the national board beginning in 2014. The above-linked story notes that the Boy Scouts concede that today’s decision came with internal dissent on its board.

Via JoeMyGod

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Salvation Army Major: LGBT People Should Be Put to Death

In an interview with Australian LGBT journalists Serena Ryan and Pete Dillon, a senior Salvation Army official said that non-celibate LGBT people should be put to death.

The official, Major Andrew Craibe, is the Salvation Army’s Territorial Media Relations Director for the Southern Territory in Victoria.

Australian pop star Darren Hayes, the openly gay former lead singer of Savage Garden, recently called for a boycott of the Salvation Army because of the church’s anti-gay beliefs (just as I did here in the States). Hayes’s comments caused quite the firestorm, so Major Craibe appeared on Ryan and Dillon’s podcast, Salt and Pepper, to discuss the Salvation Army’s official position on homosexuality and whether it’s evolved over time.

Above is the interview with Salvation Army Major Andrew Craibe in full.

Ryan told Craibe that she prepared for the interview by reading all 170 pages of Salvation Story: Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine, a manual published by the group’s international headquarters in London and available online.

Ryan expressed incredulity that the official Salvation Army handbook cites a scriptural passage which calls for the execution of LGBT people, and asked Craibe how he would respond to a hypothetical LGBT person receiving guidance from the Salvation Army who discovers the homophobic citation (around the 7:00 mark).

RYAN: . . . that says, according to the Salvation Army, that [they] deserve death. How do you respond to that, as part of your doctrine?

CRAIBE: Well, that’s a part of our belief system.

RYAN: So we should die.

CRAIBE: We have an alignment to the Scriptures,  that’s our belief.

RYAN: Wow. So we should die.

There’s a lot more at Truth Wins Out.