By Ian S. Thompson, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:50pm
Sen. Al Franken's new video supports passage of the Student Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect LGBT students from discrimination and harassment in public schools.
Want to help youth sustain their mental health, stay in school, and go to college? According to a new study by the Family Acceptance Project, you can do all of those things by starting a Gay-Straight Alliance at your high school! And here at the ACLU, we’ve prepared a guide to help you do it.
Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) are school clubs that work to create safe spaces for students to learn about and respond to homophobia, transphobia, and other types of oppression. They also promote camaraderie and understanding between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and straight students. After surveying over 200 young adults, the Family Acceptance Project concluded that GSAs, and the solidarity they encourage, can provide mental health and educational benefits for the LGBT students involved. For a group with a high risk of bullying, depression, and suicide, those sorts of benefits are huge.
By Ian S. Thompson, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:08pm
This Monday marks an historic first for the federal government. The Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Justice are hosting a two-day federal summit to focus specifically on the unique needs and challenges facing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth. This is the first-ever federal summit to focus specifically on LGBT youth. In announcing the summit, the Department of Education wrote:
Yesterday, World Series champions the San Francisco Giants became the first professional sports team to contribute to the "It Gets Better" video project.
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By Ian S. Thompson, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:35pm
Many people may have been too preoccupied with holiday travel and tasty food to notice, but last week Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Players’ Association reached a new, five-year collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which ensures that America’s pastime will continue uninterrupted through the 2016 season. So what, you ask? What has this got to do with civil liberties? Well, included in the new CBA are important sexual orientation nondiscrimination protections.
By Ian S. Thompson, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:44pm
And here football fans thought, at least from our perspective, that one of the most important things the new NFL collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between team owners and players did was end the lockout and remove the ominous cloud of a possible lost season. It turns out, the agreement included an important civil rights advancement.
Over the weekend, it was reported that the new CBA that was finalized this summer includes non-discrimination language that protects on the basis of sexual orientation. As first reported by Pete Olson at Wide Rights, the language (found in Article 49) reads as follows:
By Elizabeth Gill, ACLU of Northern California at 1:45pm
Seth Walsh was a sweet, intelligent boy who loved his family and did well in school. He was also gay. And for this, he endured years of relentless bullying and verbal abuse at his Tehachapi, California, school. On September 19, 2010, Seth Walsh hanged himself from a plum tree in the family's backyard. He was on life support for nine days before he died on September 28. He was only 13 years old.
Wendy Walsh, Seth's mother, teamed up with the ACLU to help make a difference in the lives of LGBT youth facing harassment. "Schools need to take harassment and bullying seriously when parents or students tell them about it, and when they see it in the halls," she told the ACLU.
With so much recent news coverage on suicides of LGBT youth, those of us who work on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender safe schools issues have a lot on our plate. We're trying to figure out how best to respond to the needs of LGBT youth, as always. But we're also thinking about how to use the current media attention to these issues as a teachable moment to get the public to understand the importance of school anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies and laws that include gender identity and sexual orientation. Those topics and more were part of the discussion at last week's convening of the National Safe Schools Roundtable, a coalition of organizations that work to make schools safer for LGBT students, which I attended in Minneapolis on behalf of the ACLU LGBT Project.
