President Obama has announced that Megan Smith will serve as the next U.S. chief technology officer (CTO) and assistant to the president, succeeding Todd Park. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Smith, the former vice president at Google’s X lab, is the first woman, as well as openly lesbian, CTO. Previously, she was COO and CEO of…
WASHINGTON – The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation today condemned another Catholic school firing of LGBT employees and cited it as more evidence of the church’s efforts to shove these workers – and potentially thousands of others – back in the closet. “There is a sad and troubling narrative of increasing discrimination by Catholic institutions…
In an op-ed for The Advocate, Ana Ma, COO and chief of staff of HRC, and Matthew McClellan, the executive director of the National Council of La Raza Action Fund, urge President Obama to take action on immigration reform. Ma and McClellan write, “Two of the most pressing civil rights issues facing our nation today…
HRC President Chad Griffin and litigator Roberta Kaplan are featured on the annual Politico 50 list out today. Griffin and Kaplan were both major players in the fight for marriage equality at the Supreme Court last year: Kaplan was Edith Windsor’s lawyer and Griffin was one of the key architects behind the case challenging Prop…
Today U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled to uphold Louisiana’s ban on marriage equality. Until today, no state marriage ban had survived a federal court ruling since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its historic marriage decision in United States v. Windsor last summer. In response to today’s rulings, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Legal Director…
The former executive director of OutServe-SLDN, Allyson Robinson has been ordained as a minister in the Baptist Church. According to HRC longtime LGBT advocate Robinson, who attended George W. Truett Theological Seminary and previously was a pastor at a church in Central Texas, was ordained at Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Robinson became one of the…
SAN DIEGO — The Scott Peters for Congress Campaign launched its second TV ad today, called “Divisive.” The spot uses clips from DeMaio’s now-infamous speech kowtowing to a San Diego Tea Party group to make the point that DeMaio is too extreme for the CA-52 district. “Carl Demaio is hiding something, his allegiance to the Tea Party,…
SEATTLE — When Zac Baker and Sam Busch, of St. Paul, MN, got engaged last December, they didn’t expect their marriage ceremony to be hosted by a city they’d never visited, or that its openly gay mayor would officiate and its citizens would welcome them with rainbow lights, flags on buildings and decals in shop windows….
The Washington Post has announced that its editorial teams will no longer refer to to their local football team as the Redskins. In a statement posted online the editorial board stated: THIS PAGE has for many years urged the local football team to change its name. The term “Redskins,” we wrote in 1992, “is really…
SACRAMENTO – Gov. Jerry Brown signed landmark legislation today addressing the growing epidemic of smartphone theft in California. SB 962, authored by Senator Mark Leno and sponsored by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, requires all smartphones sold in California to come pre-equipped with theft-deterring technological solutions to render the devices useless if stolen. The…
