Hands on Originals, a Lexington, Kentucky-based printer, has lost a two-year legal battle for now after the Christian-oriented print shop refused to create T-shirts for a gay pride parade. Reporting for TheBlaze.com, Billy Hallowell notes that, “Greg Munson of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission announced last Tuesday that Hands on Originals, a T-shirt…
The Human Rights Commission in Lexington, Kentucky dismissed the argument that a business could refuse to serve gay customers on First Amendment grounds, ending a years-long conservative campaign to disguise anti-gay discrimination as free speech, reports Media Matters for America. In March of 2012, the Gay and Lesbian Services Organization of Lexington (GLSO) filed a complaint against Hands-On Originals,…
I wish we in the LGBT community were better at speaking to Christian conservatives in language that they could relate and connect to. When the “tenants of Christian faith” card is played with regards to the lives of LGBT Americans, we in the community generally don’t respond to these charges in a way that religious…
MOSCOW (CNN) – The appeal hearing for three members of the LGBT-supporting punk rock band Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years for performing a song critical of President Vladimir Putin, will continue next week. One of the band members Yekaterina Samutsevich said Monday that she no longer wants to work with an attorney…
MOSCOW (CNN) – Three members of Russian LGBT-supporting feminist punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison Friday after they were found guilty of hooliganism for performing a song critical of President Vladimir Putin in a church. The five months they have spent in detention since their arrests in March count toward…
A gay high school student in southwest Ohio is suing his school district over the ban of a t-shirt that read, “Jesus is Not Homophobe.” Maverick Couch, 16, says Tuesday’s lawsuit stems from the district’s false claim that the t-shirt was “sexual in nature and therefore indecent and inappropriate in a school setting” and prohibited…
Susana Martinez, the Latina Republican governor of New Mexico, needed a new do. Her stylist, a gay man upset by her support of laws against same-sex marriage, refused her service. Is he an activist? Or is he simply as intolerant as she? This was the conundrum posed by a talk-radio host who subscribed affirmatively to…
STRASBOURG, France – The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled Sweden’s Supreme Court was right to convict four men of hate crimes for distributing homophobic flyers at a school. According to the ECHR finding, the leaflets were “unnecessarily offensive” to be protected by free speech laws. According to Swedish news source The Local,…
In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that associations of people are entitled to the same free speech rights as individuals themselves. A few months ago, Mitt Romney summarized the issue more broadly and succinctly, “Corporations are people, my friend.” I’ve been in a difficult relationship with one corporate “person,”…
