The effort to repeal the School Success and Opportunity Act-California’s new law ensuring that all children have opportunities to do well in school- has failed to qualify for the ballot. The law-also known as Assembly Bill 1266-went into effect on January 1st, ensuring that schools have the guidance they need to make sure all students,…
Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni signed a law imposing harsh penalties for homosexuality today, defying protests from rights groups, criticism from Western donors and a U.S. warning that it will complicate relations. Reuters reported that the new bill strengthened existing punishments for anyone caught having gay sex, imposing jail terms of up to life for “aggravated…
WASHINGTON – The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), has called on U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to recall the nation’s ambassadors to Uganda and Nigeria. HRC argued that urgent consultation is required before regular diplomacy can proceed with nations that recently enacted some of the world’s most virulently anti-LGBT laws. “The Ugandan and Nigerian governments’…
Media Matters for America reports how, during discussions with Equality Matters, officials from a number of California’s largest school districts pushed back against right-wing misinformation about a new state law guaranteeing transgender students access to proper facilities and programs. Evidence continues to mount that a new California law allowing transgender public school students to use the restroom facilities…
NEW YORK–The American Jewish Committee (AJC) has publicly deplored the treatment of gays in Nigeria. The harassment, imprisonment and torture of gays, sanctioned by a Nigerian law enacted last month, was the focus of a major front-page story in yesterday’s New York Times. “Nigeria’s unforgiving attitude towards gays violates the most basic human rights of individuals,” said Eliseo Neuman,…
HRC is unveiling a new banner on its national headquarters in Washington, D.C., to highlight Russia’s anti-LGBT law as the Olympic Games are slated to begin. The banner reads: “In Russia if you support LGBT equality President Putin says you can be fined, you can be arrested, you can be deported. During the OLYMPICS, join…
WASHINGTON – Today the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights organization, announced it will monitor NBC’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games and track reporting on the anti-LGBT situation in Russia. For the full 17 day run of the Sochi Games, HRC will track the anticipated 1,500 hours of Olympic…
WASHINGTON – Today, AT&T became the first major U.S. corporation to make a public statement condemning the anti-LGBT Russian law outlawing “homosexual propaganda.” Since the passage of the law last June, the Russian LGBT community has been targeted with violence, harassment, bomb threats, and limitations on its freedom of speech and assembly. HRC called on…
Alexander Suturin, chief editor of Khabarovsk newspaper, Molodoi Dalnevostochnik,was fined yesTerday under the new Russian “Anti-gay Propaganda” laws for for printing an interview with a gay teacher who said ‘being gay is normal’. Molodoi Dalnevostochnik, the oldest publication in the region, came under fire because it bears a label warning people only above the age of 16 to visit its Web site,…
Novelist, short story writer, author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina declared his homosexuality this past week in a short story entitled I am A Homosexual, Mum to protest the passage of anti-gay laws in Nigeria. Wainaina, the founder of the Nairobi-based literary network Kwani, writes, “”I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a…
