Sean Cormie, a newly out gay man, and his boyfriend, Gary Gardner, were attacked at First Assembly of God in Blackwell, Oklahoma after being lured there by Cormie's family.
Cormie says that he is traumatized by what happened.
"I wanted to go to church to make my mom proud and make her happy."
What started off as a normal service soon turned ugly when the pastor began preaching directly at Cormie and Gardner that homosexuality was "an abomination."
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK, actor Kristen Stewart, who has been romantically linked to model Stella Maxwell since 2017, said, “I have fully been told, ‘If you just like do yourself a favor, and don’t go out holding your girlfriend’s hand in public, you might get a Marvel movie.’ I don’t want to work with people like that.”
Stewart has said publicly she does not identify as bisexual or lesbian, and doesn’t want to choose a label for her sexuality. In the same interview she added, “I was informed by an old school mentality, which is — you want to preserve your career and your success and your productivity, and there are people in the world who don’t like you, and they don’t like that you date girls, and they don’t like that you don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘lesbian’, but you also don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘heterosexual’. And people like to know stuff, so what the fuck are you?’”
A prominent LGBTQ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) announced Thursday that it will host a presidential town hall on LGBTQ issues next month. The event will air on CNN.
LGBTQ advocacy groups told ThinkProgress that they know exactly what ideas they want to hear discussed at the town hall set for Oct. 10, which is National Coming Out Day. Many said that first and foremost, they want candidates to acknowledge the struggles of the most marginalized in the community, including LGBTQ people of color, and put forward policies to respond to anti-LGBTQ bias in the criminal justice system.
“LGBTQ people are more likely to come into contact with the police due to discriminatory policing, be incarcerated, and experience violence while locked up than non-LGBTQ people. Black and Latinx LGBTQ people are most impacted,” Tyrone Hanley, senior policy counsel for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told ThinkProgress.
The Winchester Star, a daily newspaper in Virginia that claims to be pro-LGBTQ, published an editorial recently that both called into question the right of same-sex couples to marry and the very existence of transgender people.
The publication, part of the Ogden Newspapers chain, is controlled by the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, Robert Nutting.
As first noted by the progressive blog Blue Virginia, the paper published an editorial on Wednesday slamming Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) for boycotting President Donald Trump’s recent appearance at the 400th anniversary commemoration of the Jamestown settlement.
“Gov. Northam?” the paper opined. “He made a speech earlier in the day, a few hours before Mr. Trump, speaking not of the tradition’s majesty, but of Virginia’s dubious 21st century achievements — i.e., homosexual marriage, elevation of the transgender lifestyle, etc. And then disgracefully departed, nowhere to be seen or heard when Mr. Trump spoke.”
A new law in Illinois will promote a more LGBTQ-inclusive history curricula in schools across the state. The measure goes into effect in July of next year.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed the legislation into law on Friday. The bill, which passed the House in March and the Senate in May, would amend the school code to ensure public schools “teach about the the roles and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people” in U.S. and state history.
The measure provides for textbooks in public schools that include the “roles and contributions of all people protected under the Illinois Human Rights Act” and mandates that they be non-discriminatory toward those groups. Queer, trans, and nonbinary people are protected under state law.
Lawmakers who supported the bill say that LGBTQ-inclusive curricula will not only provide a more accurate telling of history but will work against transphobia and queerphobia and help LGBTQ students feel more welcome at school.
By almost all measures, AT&T has been a stalwart supporter of LGBTQ equality for a long time. It has protected workers from sexual orientation discrimination since 1975. It sponsors the Trevor Project to help LGBTQ youth in crisis. It received a perfect 100 score from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in its annual equality index, ranking among the nation’s most inclusive places to work.
By any measure, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is among the nation’s most anti-LGBTQ bigots. He defended bans on same-sex marriage as “sound public policy” and spearheaded the effort to block the elected government in Washington, D.C., from enacting marriage equality. He boasted of receiving a “True Blue Award” from the Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)-designated anti-LGBT hate group. He consistently earns a 0 score on HRC’s congressional scorecard, ranking among the lawmakers most virulently opposing equality.
Yet, AT&T’s corporate political action committee has given tens of thousands of dollars to Jordan’s campaigns since 2010, helping bankroll the re-elections of a man who HRC once inducted into its anti-equality “Hall of Shame” for “proactively [working] to undermine existing legal protections and promote anti-LGBT discrimination.” And AT&T’s PAC has given more than $400,000 to other firmly anti-LGBTQ members of Congress in recent years.
In 1966, three years before the world-famous Stonewall riot in New York, a group of trans women in San Francisco stood up to police inside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night restaurant in the Tenderloin neighborhood and popular queer gathering spot. A trans woman fed up with the harassment and abuse is said to have thrown a cup of coffee in an officer’s face, sparking a chaotic riot and unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence.Full story
