Local
Md. Senate hears testimony on trans bill
bill barring gender identity bias in employment, housing & public accommodations died in the Senate last year
More than a dozen witnesses testified for and against a bill to ban discrimination against transgender people in Maryland on Tuesday before the State Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee.
Supporters of SB 212, the Human Relations, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Non-Discrimination Act, said they were hopeful the committee would quickly approve the bill and send it to the full Senate for a vote.
A different version of the legislation died in the Senate last year after several senators who had promised to vote for the bill changed their position and voted to send it back to committee. The Senate action came after the House of Delegates passed the bill, but without a provision banning discrimination against transgender people in the area of public accommodations.
This year’s bill, which has been endorsed by Gov. Martin O’Malley, includes a public accommodations provision. The measure would ban anti-trans discrimination in the areas of employment, housing, public accommodation and credit.
“The general sense was we had a very professional, very organized panel that covered a lot of issues with respect to this legislation,” said Sharon Brackett, board chair of the transgender advocacy group Gender Rights Maryland.
Brackett and transgender activist Dana Beyer were among several witnesses affiliated with Gender Rights Maryland who testified in favor of the bill. They said the bill was needed to address widespread discrimination faced by the state’s transgender residents in employment and housing as well as in public accommodations.
Similar to a hearing on the bill last year, witnesses testifying against the bill, among other things, said it would endanger women by allowing male “cross dressers” to use women’s bathrooms in public places. Supporters called that claim baseless, saying no problems have surfaced concerning bathrooms in jurisdictions across the country that have passed similar non-discrimination laws, including Baltimore City and Montgomery County in Maryland.
Sen. Brian Frosh (D-Montgomery County), chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, did not say when he would schedule a committee vote on the bill this year. Under rules of the Maryland General Assembly, the full Senate must approve the bill by March 26 and send it to the House of Delegates in order to keep it alive for this year.
Many of the bill’s supporters believe Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller (D-Prince George’s and Calvert Counties), who has opposed the bill, orchestrated the effort to send it back to committee last year without an up or down vote. Miller has said he arranged for it to be returned to committee after determining it did not have the votes to pass.
“We hope that Sen. Miller will see his way to allow a vote on the bill this year,” Brackett told the Blade.
District of Columbia
Mayor Bowser signs bill requiring insurers to cover PrEP
‘This is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS’
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on March 20 signed a bill approved by the D.C. Council that requires health insurance companies to cover the costs of HIV prevention or PrEP drugs for D.C. residents at risk for HIV infection.
Like all legislation approved by the Council and signed by the mayor, the bill, called the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act, was sent to Capitol Hill for a required 30-day congressional review period before it takes effect as D.C. law.
Gay D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) last year introduced the bill.
Insurance coverage for PrEP drugs has been provided through coverage standards included in the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. But AIDS advocacy organizations have called on states and D.C. to pass their own legislation requiring insurance coverage of PrEP as a safeguard in case federal policies are weakened or removed by the Trump administration, which has already reduced federal funding for HIV/AIDS-related programs.
Like legislation passed by other states, the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act requires insurers to cover all PrEP drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Studies have shown that PrEP drugs, which can be taken as pills or by injection just twice a year, are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.
“I think this is a win for our community,” Parker said after the D.C. Council voted unanimously to approve the bill on its first vote on the measure in February. “And this is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
District of Columbia
Blade editor to be inducted into D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame
Kevin Naff marks 24 years with publication this year
Longtime Washington Blade Editor Kevin Naff will be inducted into D.C.’s Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame in June, the group announced this week.
Hall of Fame honorees are chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter. Naff and two other inductees — Seth Borenstein, a Washington-based national science writer for the AP and Cheryl W. Thompson, an award-winning correspondent for National Public Radio — will be celebrated at the chapter’s Dateline Awards dinner on Tuesday, June 9, at the National Press Club. The dinner’s emcee will be Kojo Nnamdi, host of WAMU radio’s weekly “Politics Hour.”
“I am tremendously honored by this recognition,” Naff said. “I have spent a lifetime in the D.C. area learning from so many talented journalists and am humbled to be considered in their company. Thank you to SPJ and to all the LGBTQ pioneers who came before me who made this possible.”
Naff joined the Blade in 2002 after years in print and digital journalism. He worked as a financial reporter for Reuters in New York before moving to Baltimore in 1996 to launch the Baltimore Sun’s website. He spent four years at the Sun before leaving for an internet startup and later joining the mobile data group at Verizon Wireless working on the first generation of mobile apps.
He then moved to the Blade and has served as the publication’s longest-tenured editor. In 2023, Naff published his first book, “How We Won the War for LGBTQ Equality — And How Our Enemies Could Take It All Away.”
Previous Hall of Fame inductees include luminaries in journalism like Wolf Blitzer, Benjamin Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, and Edgar Allen Poe. The Blade’s senior news reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. was inducted in 2015.
Maryland
Supreme Court ruling against conversion therapy bans could affect Md. law
Then-Gov. Larry Hogan signed statute in 2018
By PAMELA WOOD, JOHN-JOHN WILLIAMS IV, and MADELEINE O’NEILL | The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ kids in Colorado, a ruling that also could apply to Maryland’s ban on the discredited practice.
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide whether it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court’s majority, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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