Democrats: Take our wedding rings off our cold, dead hands

Bulgarian politicians may try to amend "LGBT propaganda" law

🇧🇬 Bulgaria: The “LGBT propaganda” law will be back up for debate in parliament next week, as one of the major parties is proposing… some sort of amendment to the law that was passed earlier this month. It’s not clear right now what exactly they’re planning, though the party did largely oppose the law.

In an ugly turn, the far-right/pro-Kremlin Revival party created a “black list” of teachers who publicly opposed the ban and distributed it on their social media before deleting it. It’s an obvious tactic to intimidate and threaten opponents.

🇦🇺 Australia: A federal court has handed trans women a victory in a discrimination case surrounding a trans woman who was barred from a woman-only app run by a TERF. This is apparently the first gender identity discrimination case in Australia and will set a precedent, but the TERF CEO has said she plans to appeal.

🇮🇳 India: Another report on LGBTQ activists suing to end the government’s ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men and trans people.

🇸🇽 Sint Maarten: Snap elections returned a parliament that looks largely unchanged from the previous one, although with a slightly stronger majority for the coalition that was formed and quickly fell apart last time. That coalition includes the Party for Progress, whose leader Melissa Gumbs had previously announced an intention to introduce a same-sex marriage bill. We’ll see if this makes it onto the agenda when parliament opens in September. Presumably, the case for it is stronger, after the Supreme Court found the constitution required it in Curacao and Aruba, the other two Caribbean nations in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, earlier this summer.

Meanwhile, in the States…

🪖 A federal judge has nullified the US military’s ban on enlisting HIV-positive people, declaring it to be unconstitutional.

The Democratic Party’s national platform is out and includes a lot of promises for the LGBT community, the centerpiece of which is the Equality Act, a long-stalled piece of legislation to expand civil rights protections to LGBT people. Of course, that can only happen in Democrats gain control of congress and end the Republican filibuster. It also mentions:

“Democrats will continue to fight for LGBTQI+ youth by building on President Biden’s historic actions to ban so-called “conversion therapy”; protecting LGBTQI+ children from bullying and discrimination; guaranteeing that transgender students are treated fairly and with respect at school; and ending the homeless crisis among LGBTQI+ youth.”

The Advocate wrote up a lengthier article about the platform’s promises to LGBTQ people, but, embarrassingly, they seem to have based it on the 2020 platform and no one has noticed. Oops! Seriously, did no one think it was weird the platform was promising to reverse Trump administration policies?

(To be fair, the 2020 platform is the one that’s still prominently placed on the Democrats’ web site, and you have to search for the current platform. I’m just a guy running a free newsletter, but The Advocate doesn’t pay their journalists either, so we’re basically on equal footing.)

Michigan: Speaking at the DNC, Attorney-General Dana Nessel (pictured at top) dared Republicans and the Supreme Court to try to take her wedding ring off her cold, dead hand.

Texas: A new statewide policy blocks trans people from updating the gender on their drivers’ licenses, even under a court order.

Florida: The state’s official tourism website has removed a section on LGBTQ travel, apparently the latest salvo in the Republican administration’s efforts to erase queer people from public life.

New Hampshire: A man was ordered to pay a steep civil rights fine for harassing his neighbors by stealing a rainbow flag off their property multiple times…. It’s a slow news week.

Abortion

The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the Republican Secretary of State’s decision to block an abortion question from the ballot, citing bullshit irregularities in documentation submitted by the organization behind the signature-gathering campaign.

Abortion questions have been officially certified for the ballot in Arizona and Montana in November. These questions are important not only for protecting/expanding abortion rights in both states, but hopefully in motivating Democratic-minded voters to turn up at the polls for the other elections in both states.

Arizona of course is a swing state that Biden narrowly won in 2020, and Harris is targeting it too. There’s a competitive Senate race and several competitive US House districts, and control of the state legislature is in the balance too. Voters will also be determining the fate of two state supreme court justices who put in place a total abortion ban earlier this year (the court also decided to uphold misleading and inflammatory language about abortion on the ballot information sheet).

There are also 12 (!) other ballot questions this year in Arizona, including a number of Republican power grabs and a decrease (!) to the state minimum wage.

In Montana, there’s a similar story. While Democrats are not likely to win the state’s electoral college votes, there’s a must-win US Senate race for Democrats to maintain control of the chamber, a potentially competitive US House district, and Democrats will be hoping to at least break the Republican supermajorities in the state legislature. There are two vacancies on the state supreme court up for reelection, and Democrats will be trying to maintain the state’s progressive (nonpartisan) majority.