How North Carolina Just Passed a Blood-Curdling Anti-LGBT Law Right Before Our Eyes; Huffington Post, 3/24/16

Michelangelo Signorile, Huffington Post; How North Carolina Just Passed a Blood-Curdling Anti-LGBT Law Right Before Our Eyes:

"For over a year, long before the Obergefell marriage equality ruling, many warned that the backlash to LGBT equality would be ugly and intense, and that too many LGBT leaders and much of the media weren’t paying attention, caught up in the wins — what I’ve dubbed victory blindness.

The cost, it was noted, would be the stripping of LGBT rights under the radar, with little focus on our issues. Lo and behold, while LGBT rights were front and center for several years and at the forefront of the 2012 presidential election, there’s been hardly any discussion of the issues in the current election campaign, even as anti-LGBT forces in the states, in the GOP leadership, and in Congress have been in overdrive...

The speed with which a horrifically anti-LGBT bill passed the North Carolina legislature was sickening. Within hours of of being introduced in the legislature and getting overwhelming support, a sweeping bill which overturned existing ordinances protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in cities and counties across the state — and which banned transgender people from using restrooms that correspond with their gender identity — was signed by the GOP governor, Pat McCrory.

HB2 is the most heinous, homophobic, transphobic law we have ever seen — just read it."

HRC Calls Out Transphobic Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Column; Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Blog, 6/5/15

HRC Staff, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Blog; HRC Calls Out Transphobic Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Column:

" Today, in light of a national outcry about a deeply transphobic column published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on June 4th, the HRC Foundation’s Director of Research and Public Education Jay Brown, himself a former Pittsburgh resident of six years and a transgender man, wrote to the paper’s executive editor David Shribman and called for consequences for the column’s author, Jennifer Graham:

“Graham not only failed to offer any information of value to your readership, she openly spewed lies and misinformation about transgender people—a community that disproportionately experiences harassment, unemployment, discrimination and violence,” Brown wrote. “Rather than offer an informed opinion on the news of the day—in particular, the very public coming out of Caitlyn Jenner—Ms. Graham chose only to expose her personal animus toward a particular group of people. […] Ms. Graham has no business serving as a columnist at a publication with a reputation as sterling like yours. Instead, lift up a Pittsburgh voice that has something meaningful to say.”

The complete letter can be found here. On the same day, HRC submitted an op-ed to the paper, seeking to rebut the claims made in Graham’s column. At the time of this writing, the organization has not yet received a response."