Advocating for Better MA State Police Conduct

GLAD primarily achieves its victories through impact litigation in the courts, but we also look for other ways that we can accomplish our mission. One recent example is our participation in the Massachusetts Transgender Equal Rights Coalition that resulted in the successful passage of a law that adds protections for transgender people to the state’s anti-discrimination and hate crimes laws. Another example is our participation in meetings with police that help to educate the police about LGBT concerns and gives us a way to discuss any concerns that we hear about through our Legal InfoLine.

Over two years ago, GLAD began to receive complaints through our Legal InfoLine from gay men who reported that some Boston Police officers were acting very aggressively towards gay men who were just walking through or near the Fens. Officers would approach the men and ask very invasive questions and threaten people with arrest if they did not answer truthfully.

As a result of these complaints, representatives from the Anti-Violence Project, the Violence Recovery Program at Fenway Community Health, the Male Center of AIDS Action Committee, the LGBT liaison from the Mayor’s Office and GLAD began to meet on a regular basis with some of the Boston Police leadership, including the Superintendent, and with the officer who is the liaison to the LGBT community.

Initially there was an exchange of information and a lot of learning that took place on both sides. The police heard about our concerns and issues, and the LGBT participants learned about how and why the police work in certain ways. After a number of meetings, we were able to build a collaborative and positive working relationship that allowed us to discuss any issues or concerns that we had. Some of the accomplishments include:

• Agreement on the rights that someone has when confronted by a police officer that finally led to a wallet card being produced that could be given out by LGBT outreach workers. These cards were used by the Boston Police to educate their officers in the field about the appropriate way to interact with someone they perceive to be LGBT.
• The Boston Police run all incident reports through a computer to help identify cases where a hate crime may have occurred. We were able to assist the police in adding other key words to their search so that more incidents would be identified as potential hate crimes.
• A caller to the InfoLine had been charged with a very serious felony in a situation where only a misdemeanor charge was warranted. The police were able to intervene and get the charges dropped.
• The Fens has signs that post the closing time of the park—but they don’t list the same time. We all agreed that replacing them with signs that are consistent is necessary, but so far the resources have not been found to make it happen.

When GLAD receives calls to the InfoLine that report Boston Police misconduct, there is now a forum for discussing the incident with the Boston Police. Interestingly, we have not had a complaint on the InfoLine concerning a Boston Police officer for over a year.

Due to the success of this collaboration with the Boston Police, when the InfoLine began to receive some complaints this fall about State Police misconduct on public land, a meeting was setup with the same LGBT groups and the Executive Office of Public Safety, the State Police, the Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

In 2001, GLAD won a settlement that resulted in the State Police issuing a General Order about how State Police should treat law abiding citizens on public property. At the meeting, it was good to see that the General Order had been reissued in 2009 and so was still in effect. This meeting was the beginning of a dialogue that we hope will lead to the establishment of a positive working relationship with the State Police. There has already been a second meeting with Colonel Marian McGovern and some of her staff and we have agreed to work with the Massachusetts State Police to create a training curriculum around LGBT issues.

Anyone with concerns about the police is encouraged to contact GLAD’s Legal InfoLine. The InfoLine is a free, confidential service. Contact the InfoLine at 800-455-GLAD (4523) Monday-Friday from 1:30-4:30pm or anytime at www.glad.org/rights/infoline-contact.

Correcting the record for Jon Huntsman

The Washington Blade, an LGBT newspaper in D.C., is reporting today on comments that Republican Presidential Candidate Jon Huntsman recently made about the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Huntsman, a former governor of Utah and ex-ambassador to China, is the most moderate and LGBT-friendly of the Republican candidates but is polling at the bottom of the pack. Nonetheless, he definitely got it wrong when he suggested that “DOMA serves a useful purpose” in that it allows states to make their own decisions on marriage.

Here’s the full text of the exchange between Huntsman and Blade reporter Chris Johnson:

Blade: If I could just follow up on that really quickly, the Defense of Marriage Act prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriage — even in states where it’s already legalized. As a matter of states’ rights, do you think it should be repealed?

Huntsman: I think the Defense of Marriage Act serves a useful purpose. It allows states to make their own decisions, to make their own way, and the Defense of Marriage Act, I think, is a safeguard for those states to make that decision.

DOMA allows states to make their own decisions on marriage? Really? Tell that to the plaintiffs in our Gill and Pedersen DOMA challenges. The states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont decided to let them get married, yet that decision isn’t respected at the federal level because of DOMA. That’s not very useful to Gill plaintiffs like 81-year-old widower Herb Burtis, who can’t access his deceased spouse’s Social Security benefits; or federal postal worker Nancy Gill who can’t cover her wife Marcelle (the couple is pictured at left) on her family health insurance plan – which is why the federal court Judge Joseph Tauro ruled in favor of the Gill plaintiffs last year. (The case is now in the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; we are currently awaiting a Pedersen decision from the Second Circuit Court.)

And rather than be able to ensure that all residents who marry within their borders are protected at the federal level, marriage equality states are forced against their will to discriminate against their own citizens, as our Attorney General Martha Coakley successfully argued in Massachusetts v. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, the state’s lawsuit against DOMA. It’s a position that Gov. Deval Patrick – along with Connecticut’s Gov. Dannel Malloy, Vermont’s Gov. Pete Shumlin and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, where same-sex couples can also marry – reiterated in a recent letter to Congress calling for DOMA’s repeal.

As Judge Tauro noted in his Gill decision, “the historically entrenched practice of incorporating state law determinations of marital status where they are relevant to federal law reflects a long-recognized reality of the federalist system under which this country operates. The states alone have the authority to set forth eligibility requirements as to familial relationships and the federal government cannot, therefore, have a legitimate interest in disregarding those family status determinations properly made by the states.” In other words, when states decide to enact equal marriage laws, the federal government needs to respect them.

So what Mr. Huntsman really should have said was that DOMA “allows states to make their own decisions, to make their own way, and the Defense of Marriage Act, I think, is a safeguard for those states that want to continue to discriminate against same-sex couples to make that decision.”

We’re happy to set the record straight for him.

World AIDS Day: The Fight is Not Over

Post by GLAD Senior Legal Assistant Joseph Wildey

I remember Linda Ellerbee, the anchor for Nick News, addressing an audience of curious tweens. Her tone, often upbeat, was unusually serious at the start of this particular episode. As the program began, Ellerbee informed the audience of what was then an epidemic in full swing: HIV/AIDS.

The year was 1992 and I was only seven years old, but I remember this television moment with particular vividness. I can recall her interview with Magic Johnson, and the demonstration of effective condom use that followed. An already neurotic child, I catalogued this experience in the folder I kept full of things to worry about.

Some time later I remember having a conversation with my mother about the topic. My mother was never shy about educating me, and she told me that HIV/AIDS was a disease that gay men got. I do not believe—because it is not in my mother's nature—that this statement was the result of prejudice or bias; at the time, it was a disease that mostly affected gay men. However, to my young ears, what my mother said sounded like, "If you are gay, you will get AIDS."

It was an alarming moment, then, when I realized I was gay. At that time, HIV/AIDS began to fade from the public consciousness; the advent of the “cocktail therapy” had extended life expectancy and created the perception that the disease could be a chronic yet manageable condition.

HIV/AIDS slowly became just another risk associated with sexual activity, breezed over in health class among the panoply of viral and bacterial consequences drilled into the heads of hormonally-active teenagers. The privilege to avoid confronting HIV/AIDS continued into college, even when I came out to my parents and friends. Among the small group of gay friends I developed, no one had been personally impacted by the disease and it simply was not discussed.

It wasn't until I was twenty-three that I befriended someone who identified as HIV-positive. I was introduced to this person by an acquaintance who informed me of his status prior to our meeting. Being uncomfortable with the topic, I feigned ignorance when he disclosed his status to me one night over dinner. But I listened with rapt attention as he told me about being diagnosed in 1986 and not having any idea what came next, or even whether he would be alive to experience a next anything.

I learned that my friend’s partner at the time also tested positive and passed away several years after his diagnosis. My friend showed me an address book that he used that contained hundreds of names, the majority of which were crossed out, indicating that the person died from the disease. It's hard to explain the emotions that this interaction evoked, because there were many, but one of the most prominent was a sense of guilt: I felt guilty for not taking the steps necessary to fully understand the epidemic and its history.

While I lived through the earliest years of the epidemic, my age effectively shielded me from what many painfully endured. My own awareness was raised slowly over time, and I am now in a position to effect changes in the attitudes and perceptions of others through my work at GLAD. It has been an eye-opening personal journey.

In my two years here, I have assisted Bennett Klein, our AIDS Law Project Director, with cases that would boggle the mind of anyone convinced that the stigma and discrimination tied to HIV/AIDS are concerns relegated to the past. Insurers still routinely deny coverage for necessary treatments related to HIV/AIDS, communities still discriminate against HIV-positive individuals, and HIV-positive individuals are still viewed by many as dangerous and distinctly “other.” HIV/AIDS has not gone away; it has just faded into the background.

In November, Magic Johnson renewed the focus on the epidemic when he reminded the world that he is still HIV-positive, twenty years after he first made his announcement. During his interview, he reflected on those first moments after receiving his diagnosis, and the considerations that influenced his disclosure. For me, his interview was a timely reminder that the enormous progress made during the past twenty years is contingent upon a continued campaign of consciousness-raising and education.

It is my hope that members of my own generation—those who grew up amid pervasive fear but came of age amid rising hope—remember the life or death struggle and reignite in themselves that sense of urgency and passion that existed in the earliest years of the epidemic. The fight is not over, but with every passing day it looks more and more winnable.

Justice, Justice, We Shall Pursue

Some of the many who fought hard for passage of the MA Transgender Rights Bill:
Arline Isaacson, Jennifer Levi, Carly Burton, Gavi Wolfe, Rep. Carl Sciortino, Gunner Scott and Kara Suffredini. Photo by Chris Riley.

Jennifer L. Levi, GLAD's Transgender Rights Project Director,
on passage of the Transgender Equal Rights Bill in Massachusetts:

I am new to tweeting as anyone can tell. Technological neophyte that I am, I committed to learning it, though, because of several recent chances I’ve had to be on the front lines of civil rights advances. I want to be sure that members of our community who can’t leave their obligations to rush to our state capitals get the minute-to-minute updates and details of how the hard work of social justice is unfolding.

So when I got the call on Monday afternoon at my office in Easthampton that the bill our coalition had worked on for nearly a decade (if you count the early work on the Boston ordinance as the foundation), I knew I’d have to tweet the progress and developments around the bill. After a long day of legislative developments, I sent out a tweet last night at close to 6 p.m. about the mackerel that sits atop the huge chandelier above the Senate Gallery. I knew my colleague Laura Kiritsy was right when she texted me, “it’s time for you to go home.”

Still, it had been a wild ride of a day. I defied her suggestion, staying just a few minutes more for final enactment by the Senate. I was sitting with Gavi Wolfe, legal counsel for the ACLU and just behind Ken and Marcia Gerber as well as Liz Monnin-Browder’s mom, when it happened. It was all over - the Transgender Equal Rights Bill had passed. It was headed to the governor’s desk where we know he will enthusiastically sign it.

We all left the Senate gallery and walked downstairs to welcome and thank our champions. Senator Chang-Diaz walked out first. She hugged Ken and Marcia Garber and invited all of the supporters to come onto the floor of the Senate to hear some final remarks. Senator Chang Diaz poignantly talked about Ken and Marcia’s son CJ who was transgender and whose life succumbed to the bigotry and hatred of a society that does not yet fully and completely respect the dignity and sanctity of transgender people’s lives. Everyone in the chamber – senators, aides, staff, and clerks – then rose to applaud Ken and Marcia and all the activists and advocates who had put in thousands of hours at the statehouse and beyond to educate legislators and the community, necessary work to get to where we did in final passage of the bill. It was an amazing day. I knew it and could feel it in my heart and exhausted body.

Still the victory was bittersweet. The bill we got passed includes essential protections for the community. It includes the hate crimes protections we need to combat violence. It rewrites the laws in the Commonwealth to prohibit discrimination in employment, housing, credit, lending, and in our k-12 public schools to protect our youth. It admits of no exceptions in these areas. Employees are fully protected; students are fully protected; tenants and credit applicants are fully protected. We’d not allowed our opponents to cut out protections for anyone in our community. The bill does NOT require that you meet any particular definition of what it means to be transgender to be protected nor does it exclude any particular spaces within those areas of protection. I feel proud of that.

And yet, and yet, the bill is not complete. It is not perfect. It passed without important protections for transgender people in the public sphere. Because too many legislators were not yet ready to deal with the full reality of our lives, the bill came out of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary without public accommodations protections.

Contrary to popular belief, public accommodations protections are not solely about bathrooms and locker rooms (which are important, to be sure). Public accommodations refers to any facility – stores, restaurants, movie theatres, malls, for example – that opens itself up to the public for the purpose of providing goods or services. And, like the employment, education, housing, credit, lending, and anti-violence provisions of the bill that passed, the public accommodations provisions are also essential to the community. We fought like hell to keep them in, then hoped against hope that our legislative champions could get them put back in as the bill progressed from House to Senate. They could not.

As I made the 2 hour trip west to my home last night in the pouring rain, I kept hearing the refrain from Deuteronomy in my mind over and over and over again. Justice, justice, you must pursue. Justice, justice, you must pursue. Yesterday was a huge victory at the statehouse. It came after years of hard work by many, many, many people and many, many, many organizations. Those of us working together on this issue have become like a family. Sometimes we get along, sometimes we don’t. We agree on a lot of things, and disagree on some. We banded together and forged a strong community to get more rights for the transgender community than we had before yesterday’s historic votes. There is more work to do. I know we are all committed not to rest until that work is complete.

Justice, justice, we shall pursue.

Discrimination on the basis of HIV status persists

Post by GLAD Senior Legal Assistant Joseph Wildey

GLAD recently provided assistance to a man charged with a serious crime—who spent over a month in jail as a result—simply because he is HIV-positive. Since then, I have been thinking about the necessity of education, particularly when it aims to dispel wholly unfounded beliefs.

In fifth grade, my teacher integrated health, fitness, and disease, including the sexually transmitted variety, into the curriculum. Classroom giggles aside, the lessons were informative; they taught me to maintain a cautious yet balanced perspective on prevention.

I remember learning that certain diseases were contagious, but not contagious like the common cold. A person needed to engage in more than just casual contact in order to transmit HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

And what about shaking hands, or sharing a drinking glass with someone who is HIV-positive? Those are both perfectly safe activities with no risk of transmission, I learned. I could even hug someone who was HIV-positive, and express affection through kissing, without fear of becoming infected.

Such instruction prepared me for a world outside of school where I would undoubtedly meet and interact with people who were HIV-positive. Rather than experiencing fear in such an instance, and expressing that fear through bias or discrimination, I would be informed and open-minded.

Unfortunately, when asked to agree or disagree with the statement, “HIV can be transmitted through saliva as a result of sharing a drinking glass with someone who is HIV-positive,” sixteen percent of Americans agreed, as shown in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

Another thirty percent of those surveyed believed that kissing someone who is HIV-positive can also lead to infection.

Yet while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has said conclusively that HIV cannot be transmitted via saliva, the public misconceptions surrounding HIV persist in the third decade of the epidemic.

These unfounded beliefs fuel pervasive stigma and discrimination in society, as demonstrated by continued criminal prosecutions of HIV-positive individuals.

This past summer, I provided assistance as GLAD successfully interceded in an HIV-related criminal prosecution in Connecticut. The incident involved a person from Massachusetts who was charged with serious felonies as a result of spitting on a law enforcement official during an arrest.

The inflated charges, which included assault on a police officer, assault with a deadly weapon, and criminal mischief, were solely based on the fact that the individual who spit on the official identified himself as being HIV-positive during the incident.

In this scenario, HIV transmission could not have occurred, as anyone privy to the lessons taught in my fifth grade classroom would have known.

The prosecutors viewed this person’s HIV, and the fact that he had spit on the officer, as assault with a deadly weapon, despite clear scientific evidence that saliva is not a mode of HIV transmission.

Fortunately, the charges were eventually reduced, but only after GLAD, while working with the person’s public defender, marshaled an array of medical experts and advocated with public officials in order to refute the charges and secure this person’s release.

Other HIV-positive individuals have not been as fortunate. Nationwide, criminal prosecutions for similar incidents where the risk of transmission is zero are astoundingly common.

In the United States, groups like The Center for HIV Law & Policy have compiled non-exhaustive lists of at least 118 prosecutions and arrests for HIV exposure between 2008 and 2011. Many of the cases listed involve nondisclosure of a person’s HIV-positive status during a sexual encounter; however, a sizeable number of prosecutions and arrests were the result of spitting or biting.

One of the more egregious prosecutions occurred in Texas in 2008, when an HIV-positive homeless man was sentenced to 35 years in prison as a result of spitting; his saliva was viewed as a deadly weapon in that case.

The continued prosecution of HIV-positive individuals can be linked to the fear and outright hostility that characterized the beginning of the epidemic. The residual effects of this stigma and discrimination still affect HIV-positive individuals, especially those interacting with the criminal justice system.

GLAD’s AIDS Law Project was founded in 1984, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and more than ten years before I learned the importance of choosing facts over fear. GLAD continues to educate people about misconceptions surrounding HIV-positive individuals and to ensure that policies are based on science.

However, as this experience in Connecticut illustrates, there is still much work to be done.

In case you missed it: Bay Windows coverage of Spirit of Justice

This week's Bay Windows has a great front page story on our wonderful Governor Deval Patrick and his family, who will accept GLAD's Spirit of Justice Award at our annual Spirit of Justice Award Dinner in exactly one week! There is not a family who is more deserving of this honor. They're the real deal when it comes to working toward full equality for the LGBT community.

Full disclosure: I wrote the story, so of course I think it's great, but I hope you will, too. It's a longer version of a story that originally ran in our Summer Briefs back in June, so if you think you've already it, there's more to the story. Go read it and let me know what you think.

'We’re all in this together'
GLAD to honor Mass. First Family with Spirit of Justice Award
http://www.baywindows.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=massachusetts&sc2=news&sc3=&id=125710

Parents: Pledge to Protect LGBT Families

Join parents across the country in taking the pledge to support the standards for LGBT families:

1) Support the Rights of LGBT Parents.
2) Honor Existing Relationships Regardless of Legal Labels.
3) Honor the Children’s Existing Parental Relationships After a Break-Up.
4) Maintain Continuity For the Children.
5) Seek a Voluntary Resolution.
6) Remember That Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.
7) Investigate Allegations Of Abuse.
8) The Absence of Agreements or Legal Relationships Should Not Determine Outcome.
9) Treat Litigation as a Last Resort.
10) Refuse to Resort to Homophobic/Transphobic Laws and Sentiments.