June 2009

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle signed the state’s comprehensive budget bill on Monday – a bill that includes limited domestic partnership protections for citizens as well as insurance and pension rights for domestic partners of state employees.

Wisconsin becomes the first state in the Midwest that has legislatively enacted protections for same-sex couples, although Iowa recognized full marriage equality last year for gay and lesbian couples as a result of a court order.

A measure similar to Wisconsin’s is pending in the Illinois legislature.

One provision of the Wisconsin bill – one that workers have sought for years – allows state government workers, including University of Wisconsin faculty and staff, to add domestic partners to health insurance coverage and retirement survivor benefits.

The bill also “recommends” that counties establish domestic partnership registries. It states: “Registered domestic partners would be extended certain dependent or survivor benefits for employee benefits, health and mental health and after-death decision making, probate matters, property matters, and motor vehicle titles.”

In other words, registered partners would be entitled to hospital visitation rights, health-care decision making,  and would gain inheritance rights when a partner dies without a will, Chicago Now blog reports. The blog reports that registered partners would also be entitled to family medical leave to care for a sick or injured partner or child.

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The US Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear a case brought by a right wing legal group on behalf of two students at a suburban Seattle-area high school who sued after the school refused to let them set up a group that would have accepted only openly declared Christians as voting members.

A appeals court said the school’s student council was justified in denying a charter to the proposed group that would have been open only to students who signed a “statement of faith”. Because the high court will not hear the case, the appellate ruling stands.

The case started in September, 2001 when Sarice Undis, then a junior at Kentridge High School in Kent, Wash., and Julianne Stewart, then a sophomore, asked school's student council to charter a group a student group called “Truth Bible Club”. Truth members, who originally could be students of any faith, would read a Bible verse over the school's intercom system once a week and decorate the school once a month, Seattle Times reports.

After a ruling in a separate Washington court case said that schools could recognize faith-based student groups, Undis and Stewart applied for formal recognition of their group which, according to its proposed charter, would have required voting members to sign sign a “statement of faith” accepting Jesus Christ as their “personal savior” and the Bible as “the only infallible, authoritative Word of God”, according to the Times.

That charter was unanimously denied by the student council – the Associated Student Body, or ASB, which said the membership rule was discriminatory, KPLU reports.

“This group wanted to receive public funds, wanted to be an ASB club. To be an ASB club, your membership must be open to all students,” said Kent Schools general counsel Chuck Lind.

Backed by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), Undis and Stewart sued the school district, but lost in both the trial court and in a subsequent appeal.

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For the second time in less that six months the Kalamazoo, Mich. city commission voted Monday to adopt a measure that would make it a city infraction -- punishable by up to a $500 fine -- to discriminate against people because of their sexual preferences or gender identification in housing, employment, or access to public accommodations, Kalamazoo Gazette reports.

The vote for the measure was unanimous at the seven-member commission’s Monday meeting just as it was in December when the commission adopted a similar measure. City Clerk Scott Borling said the new ordinance becomes effective July 9, according to the Gazette.

During two hours of discussion at a public hearing before the vote, several gay and lesbian Western Michigan University students said the ordinance augments campus anti-discrimination and inclusion statements.

“I don’t want to think that something I can’t control will keep me from getting a job,” said Alexis Everson, a WMU art student

But for the second time in six months, fans of discrimination have vowed to mount a petition campaign to have the ordinance rescinded or to send it to a public vote.

After a similar measure was adopted unanimously in December with little public opposition, critics of the ordinance  gathered more than 1,400 signatures in the 20 days after the measure's adoption, forcing the commission to revisit the issue.

The commission decided in January to rescind the original ordinance. A three-member committee was named to gather public responses and to craft a compromise measure to bring back to the commission.

Opponents of the anti-discrimination measure were aided in December by the right wing group American Family Association of Michigan. This time around, fans of discrimination have organized together under the awkward name Kalamazoo Citizens Voting No to Special Rights Discrimination (which would seem to be KCVNSRD).

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“It’s not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago,” President Obama told a group of almost 300 LGBT activists, community leaders, federal employees, state and local lawmakers, and others at a White House reception Monday afternoon.

With the first lady seated by his side in the East Room, Obama acknowledged that many in the room had expressed frustration with his administration, but tried to assure them that progress had been made and predicted that by the time he leaves office everyone in the room would be happy with his accomplishments.

“I want you to know that I expect and hope to be judged not by words, not by promises I’ve made, but by the promises that my administration keeps,” he said.

Obama said during his 20 minute speech that he recognizes “deep disappointment” caused by continued dismissals of openly gay servicemen and women, but – as Newsweek’s Katie Collolly reports – he said the country’s active military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan make this a sensitive time to change the policy.

“Someday, I'm confident, we'll look back at this transition and ask why it generated such angst,” he said. “But as commander in chief, in a time of war, I do have a responsibility to see that this change is administered in a practical way and a way that takes over the long term.”

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Members of Congress and LGBT mainstream activists touted a law that was passed last year by Congress as signaling a long overdue repeal of a rule that prohibits HIV-positive foreign nationals from entering the US unless they obtain a special waiver.

President George W. Bush signed the law in July, 2008 that authorized removal of the travel ban.

Despite the change, nothing has happened in the year since then. The ban remains in effect. The US, along with Yemen and Saudi Arabia, is still among the few countries in the world with such a draconian ban.

The authorization signed by Bush last year was part of bill that renewed the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The bill removed the ban from statute and returned regulatory authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to determine whether HIV should remain on a list of communicable diseases that bar foreign nationals from entering the United States.

But the travel ban hasn’t changed. Current policy still requires the waiver for visitors and also prevents the vast majority of foreign nationals with HIV from obtaining legal permanent residency in the United States. 

Because of the ban, the US has been unable to host major AIDS and HIV research conferences, since HIV-positive researchers and activists from other countries find the waiver process to be long and frustrating.

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