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Will Kennedy stick with gays in Masterpiece Cakeshop case?

All eyes on swing justice as oral arguments arrive next week

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Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court, gay news, Washington Blade
Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court, gay news, Washington Blade

Eyes will be on Justice Kennedy during the Masterpiece Cakeshop arguments. (Photo public domain)

When the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case on Tuesday, all eyes will be on U.S. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy to ascertain whether the court will uphold Colorado law in the face of a First Amendment challenge that could enable the denial of services to LGBT people not just in that state, but throughout the country.

After all, Kennedy is the swing vote and will be asked to uphold LGBT rights yet again after a long career advancing them on the bench as the author of several milestone decisions: the 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down state sodomy laws; the 2013 ruling in Windsor v. United States against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act; and the 2015 ruling for marriage equality nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges.

But there’s an earlier decision on LGBT rights written by Kennedy, the 1996 decision in Romer v. Evans striking down Colorado’s Amendment 2, which may also weigh on Kennedy even though the legal principles at hand are different from the Masterpiece Cakeshop arguments.

In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court found Amendment 2, which barred the Colorado Legislature or municipalities from enacting pro-gay non-discrimination ordinances, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The Romer decision paved the way for Colorado to bar anti-LGBT discrimination in its anti-discrimination law. Now, 21 years after the ruling, anti-LGBT forces in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case are seeking a First Amendment right to refuse to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples despite the statute.

The petitioner in the case, Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop, argues that making a wedding cake is inherently an artistic act of expression protected under the First Amendment, therefore he should be able to deny wedding cakes out of religious objections to same-sex couples like Charlie Craig and David Mullins, who sought to buy a cake for their wedding in 2012.

Both the Romer and Masterpiece Cakeshop cases originated in Colorado. While the Romer case asked the court whether the state could deny non-discrimination protections to LGBT people with Amendment 2, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case asks whether the First Amendment takes precedence over LGBT protections in a way that undermines the the Romer decision.

Jean Dubofksy, who successfully argued the Romer case in 1996 and is now a law professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, said a decision in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop “would really undo the decision in Romer” because that ruling enabled Colorado to add sexual orientation to its public accommodations law.

“If you make an exemption to a person who says, ‘Well, I’m not going to provide rental housing, or I’m not going to provide various kinds of services, whether they’re medical services or grocery stores or whatever to a person because I don’t believe in gay marriage,’ then all of a sudden all of those protections are undone, and so if I were Justice Kennedy, I think I’d be concerned about that,” Dubofksy said.

One friend-of-the-court brief before the Supreme Court filed by the New York-based Kaplan & Company, LLP, on behalf of legal scholars on the separation of church and state cites the Romer decision in a section arguing a ruling for Masterpiece Cakeshop on First Amendment grounds would have no limiting principle.

“In another instructive case from Colorado, this Court rejected an effort to single out gays and lesbians for exclusion,” the brief says. “It would be peculiar for the same court that decided Romer to hold now that Colorado uniquely lacks the power to protect gays and lesbians in public accommodations. Petitioner’s rule must therefore be seen as a general theory that arises from the context of gay rights but would sweep much further.”

Joshua Matz, an attorney for Kaplan & Company, LLP, and former clerk for Kennedy, said Romer becomes relevant in the pending case before the Supreme Court because justices held in 1996 gay people can’t be singled out for discrimination.

“It would be strange if the same court that said in another case from Colorado were now to say that you can’t do that as a matter of your state constitution, but as a matter of the federal constitution, in fact, you can single out gay people and deny them rights either under the Free Exercise Clause or under the Free Speech Clause, but it turns out that that principle doesn’t apply anywhere else,” Matz said. “It would be the total inverse of Romer in a way that would really make no sense.”

LGBT rights advocates have argued a decision in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop would result in sweeping discrimination not just for same-sex couples seeking wedding cakes, but LGBT people seeking a range of services — and perhaps other individuals who could face discrimination based on race or religion.

The Center for American Progress published an issue brief one week before the Masterpiece Cakeshop arguments titled, “The Harms of Refusing Service to LGBTQ People and Other Marginalized Communities,” which outlines the potential harms if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Phillips.

“In reality, service refusals act like a one-two punch,” the brief says. “The discrimination itself causes harm that negatively affects both psychological and physical health and well-being, as shown by research and lived experiences of LGBTQ people and their families. Then, compounding that harm, the refusal can make it harder or impossible for LGBTQ people to access services at all, denying them full participation in the public square.”

Citing data from a January 2017 Center for American Progress report, the issue brief says in the event of being turned away from a retailer, a significant minority of LGBT people would have difficulty finding an alternative.

One in five said it would be “very difficult” or “not possible” to find the same type of service at a different retail store selling wedding attire, while in one in 10 said the same about finding the same type of service at a different bakery or florist.

The difficulty is compounded for LGBT people living in non-metropolitan areas. Four in 10 non-metro LGBT people said it would be “very difficult” or “not possible” to find the same type of service at a different retail store selling wedding attire, three in 10 non-metro LGBT people said the same about finding the same type of service at a different bakery and one in five said the same about finding service at a different florist.

The attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union representing the same-sex couple in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, David Cole, may hit on this potential impact on LGBT people during oral arguments, as could Colorado Solicitor General Frederick Richard Yarger, who’s representing the state.

Meanwhile, Kristen Waggoner, the attorney for the anti-LGBT legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom, will rely on primacy of the First Amendment. U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who was granted time to speak by the Supreme Court, will also likely make similar arguments.

Determining whether Kennedy will seek to mitigate this kind of discrimination or side with Masterpiece Cakeshop is difficult. In addition to being the author of gay rights decisions, Kennedy has also ruled in favor of expansive views of the First Amendment, such as the 2010 decision in Citizens United that ruled campaign finance laws limiting contributions are unconstitutional because those activities amount to speech.

Moreover, Kennedy’s decision may determine the outcome of the case if the four liberal justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — side with the Colorado law and the four conservatives justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch — side with Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Dubofksy said she thinks Kennedy may vote to uphold Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Law because other First Amendment libertarians “of whom Justice Kennedy apparently is particularly drawn to have stated baking a wedding cake amounts to conduct, not speech, as shown in a recent Washington Post article.

“It’s saying that wedding-cake makers are conducting themselves,” Dubofksy said. “That’s conduct, it’s not expression, and so, you draw the line at a wedding photographer who’s doing an expressive activity and a maker of a cake who isn’t required to be at the wedding and is really just making a cake.”

Additionally, Dubofksy predicted Kennedy will seek to uphold the Colorado law because he’ll want to uphold the impact of the Romer decision.

“There’s a good reason to be worried, but I’m not sure the court will take that sweeping of an approach because it would cut back on the sexual orientation discrimination cases in a way that could completely undermine Romer,” Dubofksy said. “I don’t see that happening.”

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, said Kennedy may be in conflict in the case because of the history of rulings for gay rights and the First Amendment.

“He is on the one hand the great architect of the gay rights decision, but at the very same time, he is a very important justice on First Amendment issues, on both free speech and the role of religious liberty and religious conscience have also been very important to Justice Kennedy,” Olson said.

Olson, whose organization has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Masterpiece Cakeshop, said Kennedy may lead the court to a “center territory” other than a sweeping ruling one way or the other.

“Neither side wants to inflict a culture war on the country; they’re trying to work out something without culture war,” Olson said. “That’s why it won’t surprise me if the court comes up with something a little muddled and a little bit hard to read because certainly Kennedy personally, and I think the court generally is trying to reach the center ground here.”

Matz said despite his history with Kennedy he doesn’t know which way the justice will rule, but also noted there are other ways the court could decide other than in favor of the Colorado law or a sweeping ruling for Masterpiece Cakeshop.

“If the court is going to rule for the baker, it could just rule for the baker and if its ruling has these extraordinarily disruptive and chaotic implications, it could simply refuse to address them and leave them for the future, which is often how the court does this,” Matz said.

As an example, Matz cited the ruling the Hobby Lobby case — a decision Kennedy joined that closely held for-profit companies need not comply with the contraception mandate under Obamacare under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

“Justice Alito’s majority opinion essentially said, ‘Well, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, preventing racial discrimination is always super compelling, but we’re not going to tell you in advance whether anything else is,” Matz said. “You can imagine the court doing something like that, which I don’t think would be prudent and would, in fact, unleash enormous uncertainty and confusion, and could harm not just gay people, but many others, but the Supreme Court doesn’t always tell you in advance how far it will allow its principles to go.”

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Honoring the legacy of New Orleans’ 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire

Why the arson attack that killed 32 gay men still resonates 50 years later

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Fifty years ago this week, 32 gay men were killed in an arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. (Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and accommodation, in the face of institutional and official failures, are a path to healing.  

The story I related to them began on a typical Sunday night at a second-story bar on the fringe of New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1973, where working-class men would gather around a white baby grand piano and belt out the lyrics to a song that was the anthem of their hidden community, “United We Stand” by the Brotherhood of Man. 

“United we stand,” the men would sing together, “divided we fall” — the words epitomizing the ethos of their beloved UpStairs Lounge bar, an egalitarian free space that served as a forerunner to today’s queer safe havens. 

Around that piano in the 1970s Deep South, gays and lesbians, white and Black queens, Christians and non-Christians, and even early gender minorities could cast aside the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the times to find acceptance and companionship for a moment. 

For regulars, the UpStairs Lounge was a miracle, a small pocket of acceptance in a broader world where their very identities were illegal. 

On the Sunday night of June 24, 1973, their voices were silenced in a murderous act of arson that claimed 32 lives and still stands as the deadliest fire in New Orleans history — and the worst mass killing of gays in 20th century America. 

As 13 fire companies struggled to douse the inferno, police refused to question the chief suspect, even though gay witnesses identified and brought the soot-covered man to officers idly standing by. This suspect, an internally conflicted gay-for-pay sex worker named Rodger Dale Nunez, had been ejected from the UpStairs Lounge screaming the word “burn” minutes before, but New Orleans police rebuffed the testimony of fire survivors on the street and allowed Nunez to disappear.

As the fire raged, police denigrated the deceased to reporters on the street: “Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.” 

For days afterward, the carnage met with official silence. With no local gay political leaders willing to step forward, national Gay Liberation-era figures like Rev. Troy Perry of the Metropolitan Community Church flew in to “help our bereaved brothers and sisters” — and shatter officialdom’s code of silence. 

Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. “It’s high time that you people, in New Orleans, Louisiana, got the message and joined the rest of the Union,” Perry said. 

Two days later, on June 26, 1973, as families hesitated to step forward to identify their kin in the morgue, UpStairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve stood in his badly charred bar, the air still foul with death. He rebuffed attempts by Perry to turn the fire into a call for visibility and progress for homosexuals. 

“This fire had very little to do with the gay movement or with anything gay,” Esteve told a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I do not want my bar or this tragedy to be used to further any of their causes.” 

Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath — and the bar owner also remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business. 

“Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recounted Esteve’s friend Bob McAnear, a former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.” 

The next day, gay bar owners, incensed at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting. “How dare you hold your damn news conferences!” one business owner shouted. 

Ignoring calls for gay self-censorship, Perry held a 250-person memorial for the fire victims the following Sunday, July 1, culminating in mourners defiantly marching out the front door of a French Quarter church into waiting news cameras. “Reverend Troy Perry awoke several sleeping giants, me being one of them,” recalled Charlene Schneider, a lesbian activist who walked out of that front door with Perry.

(Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

Esteve doubted the UpStairs Lounge story’s capacity to rouse gay political fervor. As the coroner buried four of his former patrons anonymously on the edge of town, Esteve quietly collected at least $25,000 in fire insurance proceeds. Less than a year later, he used the money to open another gay bar called the Post Office, where patrons of the UpStairs Lounge — some with visible burn scars — gathered but were discouraged from singing “United We Stand.” 

New Orleans cops neglected to question the chief arson suspect and closed the investigation without answers in late August 1973. Gay elites in the city’s power structure began gaslighting the mourners who marched with Perry into the news cameras, casting suspicion on their memories and re-characterizing their moment of liberation as a stunt. 

When a local gay journalist asked in April 1977, “Where are the gay activists in New Orleans?,” Esteve responded that there were none, because none were needed. “We don’t feel we’re discriminated against,” Esteve said. “New Orleans gays are different from gays anywhere else… Perhaps there is some correlation between the amount of gay activism in other cities and the degree of police harassment.” 

(Photo by H.J. Patterson/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

An attitude of nihilism and disavowal descended upon the memory of the UpStairs Lounge victims, goaded by Esteve and fellow gay entrepreneurs who earned their keep via gay patrons drowning their sorrows each night instead of protesting the injustices that kept them drinking. 

Into the 1980s, the story of the UpStairs Lounge all but vanished from conversation — with the exception of a few sanctuaries for gay political debate such as the local lesbian bar Charlene’s, run by the activist Charlene Schneider. 

By 1988, the 15th anniversary of the fire, the UpStairs Lounge narrative comprised little more than a call for better fire codes and indoor sprinklers. UpStairs Lounge survivor Stewart Butler summed it up: “A tragedy that, as far as I know, no good came of.” 

Finally, in 1991, at Stewart Butler and Charlene Schneider’s nudging, the UpStairs Lounge story became aligned with the crusade of liberated gays and lesbians seeking equal rights in Louisiana. The halls of power responded with intermittent progress. The New Orleans City Council, horrified by the story but not yet ready to take its look in the mirror, enacted an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and public accommodations that Dec. 12 — more than 18 years after the fire. 

“I believe the fire was the catalyst for the anger to bring us all to the table,” Schneider told The Times-Picayune, a tacit rebuke to Esteve’s strategy of silent accommodation. Even Esteve seemed to change his stance with time, granting a full interview with the first UpStairs Lounge scholar Johnny Townsend sometime around 1989. 

Most of the figures in this historic tale are now deceased. What’s left is an enduring story that refused to go gently. The story now echoes around the world — a musical about the UpStairs Lounge fire recently played in Tokyo, translating the gay underworld of the 1973 French Quarter for Japanese audiences.

When I finished my presentation to the City Council last June, I looked up to see the seven council members in tears. Unanimously, they approved a resolution acknowledging the historic failures of city leaders in the wake of the UpStairs Lounge fire. 

Council members personally apologized to UpStairs Lounge families and survivors seated in the chamber in a symbolic act that, though it could not bring back those who died, still mattered greatly to those whose pain had been denied, leaving them to grieve alone. At long last, official silence and indifference gave way to heartfelt words of healing. 

The way Americans remember the past is an active, ongoing process. Our collective memory is malleable, but it matters because it speaks volumes about our maturity as a people, how we acknowledge the past’s influence in our lives, and how it shapes the examples we set for our youth. Do we grapple with difficult truths, or do we duck accountability by defaulting to nostalgia and bluster? Or worse, do we simply ignore the past until it fades into a black hole of ignorance and indifference? 

I believe that a factual retelling of the UpStairs Lounge tragedy — and how, 50 years onward, it became known internationally — resonates beyond our current divides. It reminds queer and non-queer Americans that ignoring the past holds back the present, and that silence is no cure for what ails a participatory nation. 

Silence isolates. Silence gaslights and shrouds. It preserves the power structures that scapegoat the disempowered. 

Solidarity, on the other hand, unites. Solidarity illuminates a path forward together. Above all, solidarity transforms the downtrodden into a resounding chorus of citizens — in the spirit of voices who once gathered ‘round a white baby grand piano and sang, joyfully and loudly, “United We Stand.” 

(Photo by Philip Ames/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

Robert W. Fieseler is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of “Tinderbox: the Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation.”

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New Supreme Court term includes critical LGBTQ case with ‘terrifying’ consequences

Business owner seeks to decline services for same-sex weddings

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The U.S. Supreme Court is to set consider the case of 303 Creative, which seeks to refuse design services for same-sex weddings. (Blade file photo by Michael Key)

The U.S. Supreme Court, after a decision overturning Roe v. Wade that still leaves many reeling, is starting a new term with justices slated to revisit the issue of LGBTQ rights.

In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court will return to the issue of whether or not providers of custom-made goods can refuse service to LGBTQ customers on First Amendment grounds. In this case, the business owner is Lorie Smith, a website designer in Colorado who wants to opt out of providing her graphic design services for same-sex weddings despite the civil rights law in her state.

Jennifer Pizer, acting chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, said in an interview with the Blade, “it’s not too much to say an immeasurably huge amount is at stake” for LGBTQ people depending on the outcome of the case.

“This contrived idea that making custom goods, or offering a custom service, somehow tacitly conveys an endorsement of the person — if that were to be accepted, that would be a profound change in the law,” Pizer said. “And the stakes are very high because there are no practical, obvious, principled ways to limit that kind of an exception, and if the law isn’t clear in this regard, then the people who are at risk of experiencing discrimination have no security, no effective protection by having a non-discrimination laws, because at any moment, as one makes their way through the commercial marketplace, you don’t know whether a particular business person is going to refuse to serve you.”

The upcoming arguments and decision in the 303 Creative case mark a return to LGBTQ rights for the Supreme Court, which had no lawsuit to directly address the issue in its previous term, although many argued the Dobbs decision put LGBTQ rights in peril and threatened access to abortion for LGBTQ people.

And yet, the 303 Creative case is similar to other cases the Supreme Court has previously heard on the providers of services seeking the right to deny services based on First Amendment grounds, such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. In both of those cases, however, the court issued narrow rulings on the facts of litigation, declining to issue sweeping rulings either upholding non-discrimination principles or First Amendment exemptions.

Pizer, who signed one of the friend-of-the-court briefs in opposition to 303 Creative, said the case is “similar in the goals” of the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation on the basis they both seek exemptions to the same non-discrimination law that governs their business, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, or CADA, and seek “to further the social and political argument that they should be free to refuse same-sex couples or LGBTQ people in particular.”

“So there’s the legal goal, and it connects to the social and political goals and in that sense, it’s the same as Masterpiece,” Pizer said. “And so there are multiple problems with it again, as a legal matter, but also as a social matter, because as with the religion argument, it flows from the idea that having something to do with us is endorsing us.”

One difference: the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation stemmed from an act of refusal of service after owner, Jack Phillips, declined to make a custom-made wedding cake for a same-sex couple for their upcoming wedding. No act of discrimination in the past, however, is present in the 303 Creative case. The owner seeks to put on her website a disclaimer she won’t provide services for same-sex weddings, signaling an intent to discriminate against same-sex couples rather than having done so.

As such, expect issues of standing — whether or not either party is personally aggrieved and able bring to a lawsuit — to be hashed out in arguments as well as whether the litigation is ripe for review as justices consider the case. It’s not hard to see U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has sought to lead the court to reach less sweeping decisions (sometimes successfully, and sometimes in the Dobbs case not successfully) to push for a decision along these lines.

Another key difference: The 303 Creative case hinges on the argument of freedom of speech as opposed to the two-fold argument of freedom of speech and freedom of religious exercise in the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation. Although 303 Creative requested in its petition to the Supreme Court review of both issues of speech and religion, justices elected only to take up the issue of free speech in granting a writ of certiorari (or agreement to take up a case). Justices also declined to accept another question in the petition request of review of the 1990 precedent in Smith v. Employment Division, which concluded states can enforce neutral generally applicable laws on citizens with religious objections without violating the First Amendment.

Representing 303 Creative in the lawsuit is Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that has sought to undermine civil rights laws for LGBTQ people with litigation seeking exemptions based on the First Amendment, such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

Kristen Waggoner, president of Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote in a Sept. 12 legal brief signed by her and other attorneys that a decision in favor of 303 Creative boils down to a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment.

“Colorado and the United States still contend that CADA only regulates sales transactions,” the brief says. “But their cases do not apply because they involve non-expressive activities: selling BBQ, firing employees, restricting school attendance, limiting club memberships, and providing room access. Colorado’s own cases agree that the government may not use public-accommodation laws to affect a commercial actor’s speech.”

Pizer, however, pushed back strongly on the idea a decision in favor of 303 Creative would be as focused as Alliance Defending Freedom purports it would be, arguing it could open the door to widespread discrimination against LGBTQ people.

“One way to put it is art tends to be in the eye of the beholder,” Pizer said. “Is something of a craft, or is it art? I feel like I’m channeling Lily Tomlin. Remember ‘soup and art’? We have had an understanding that whether something is beautiful or not is not the determining factor about whether something is protected as artistic expression. There’s a legal test that recognizes if this is speech, whose speech is it, whose message is it? Would anyone who was hearing the speech or seeing the message understand it to be the message of the customer or of the merchants or craftsmen or business person?”

Despite the implications in the case for LGBTQ rights, 303 Creative may have supporters among LGBTQ people who consider themselves proponents of free speech.

One joint friend-of-the-court brief before the Supreme Court, written by Dale Carpenter, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who’s written in favor of LGBTQ rights, and Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues the case is an opportunity to affirm the First Amendment applies to goods and services that are uniquely expressive.

“Distinguishing expressive from non-expressive products in some contexts might be hard, but the Tenth Circuit agreed that Smith’s product does not present a hard case,” the brief says. “Yet that court (and Colorado) declined to recognize any exemption for products constituting speech. The Tenth Circuit has effectively recognized a state interest in subjecting the creation of speech itself to antidiscrimination laws.”

Oral arguments in the case aren’t yet set, but may be announced soon. Set to defend the state of Colorado and enforcement of its non-discrimination law in the case is Colorado Solicitor General Eric Reuel Olson. Just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would grant the request to the U.S. solicitor general to present arguments before the justices on behalf of the Biden administration.

With a 6-3 conservative majority on the court that has recently scrapped the super-precedent guaranteeing the right to abortion, supporters of LGBTQ rights may think the outcome of the case is all but lost, especially amid widespread fears same-sex marriage would be next on the chopping block. After the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against 303 Creative in the lawsuit, the simple action by the Supreme Court to grant review in the lawsuit suggests they are primed to issue a reversal and rule in favor of the company.

Pizer, acknowledging the call to action issued by LGBTQ groups in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, conceded the current Supreme Court issuing the ruling in this case is “a terrifying prospect,” but cautioned the issue isn’t so much the makeup of the court but whether or not justices will continue down the path of abolishing case law.

“I think the question that we’re facing with respect to all of the cases or at least many of the cases that are in front of the court right now, is whether this court is going to continue on this radical sort of wrecking ball to the edifice of settled law and seemingly a goal of setting up whole new structures of what our basic legal principles are going to be. Are we going to have another term of that?” Pizer said. “And if so, that’s terrifying.”

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Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman, named president of Human Rights Campaign

Progressive activist a veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund

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Kelley Robinson (Screen capture via HRC YouTube)

Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman and veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, is to become the next president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ group announced on Tuesday.

Robinson is set to become the ninth president of the Human Rights Campaign after having served as executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and more than 12 years of experience as a leader in the progressive movement. She’ll be the first Black, queer woman to serve in that role.

“I’m honored and ready to lead HRC — and our more than three million member-advocates — as we continue working to achieve equality and liberation for all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people,” Robinson said. “This is a pivotal moment in our movement for equality for LGBTQ+ people. We, particularly our trans and BIPOC communities, are quite literally in the fight for our lives and facing unprecedented threats that seek to destroy us.”

Kelley Robinson IS NAMED as The next human rights Campaign president

The next Human Rights Campaign president is named as Democrats are performing well in polls in the mid-term elections after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving an opening for the LGBTQ group to play a key role amid fears LGBTQ rights are next on the chopping block.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reminds us we are just one Supreme Court decision away from losing fundamental freedoms including the freedom to marry, voting rights, and privacy,” Robinson said. “We are facing a generational opportunity to rise to these challenges and create real, sustainable change. I believe that working together this change is possible right now. This next chapter of the Human Rights Campaign is about getting to freedom and liberation without any exceptions — and today I am making a promise and commitment to carry this work forward.”

The Human Rights Campaign announces its next president after a nearly year-long search process after the board of directors terminated its former president Alphonso David when he was ensnared in the sexual misconduct scandal that led former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign. David has denied wrongdoing and filed a lawsuit against the LGBTQ group alleging racial discrimination.

Kelley Robinson, Planned Parenthood, Cathy Chu, SMYAL, Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders, Amy Nelson, Whitman-Walker Health, Sheroes of the Movement, Mayor's office of GLBT Affairs, gay news, Washington Blade
Kelley Robinson, seen here with Cathy Chu of SMYAL and Amy Nelson of Whitman-Walker Health, is the next Human Rights Campaign president. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
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