HRC Blog

The Normal Heart – the story of a group of friends who refused to let doctors, politicians and the press ignore the growing AIDS epidemic of the 1980s – premiered on Broadway to stellar reviews Wednesday night, a quarter-century after it was first written.

Yesterday, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis announced that the Department of Labor’s policies on equal employment opportunity and workplace harassment had been updated to explicitly include protections for gender identity. The policy had already included sexual orientation for many years. DOL follows the lead of the Office of Personnel Management and a number of cabinet-level departments and other agencies in making it clear that discrimination based on gender identity is not permissible in the federal workforce. We applaud Secretary Solis for ensuring that her department is one that welcomes all employees, including transgender workers.

Hello Everyone, Mike here! I just got back from the campus of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) where we held our third “Coming Out for Equality” event, recruiting college students to get involved in the LGBT movement and fight for Equality. I feel that the message of EQUALITY was heard loud and clear last week in Vegas, and this is just the beginning! That message was amplified by student groups at UNLV, QVegas Magazine, and dozens of other individuals involved with the fight to bring fairness and equal treatment to the LGBT Community.

Emmy Award winning actress Julianna Margulies and her husband Keith Lieberthal have joined forces with HRC to fight for marriage equality in New York. In a new video, the couple describes the need to strengthen traditional marriage by “letting every New Yorker embrace this commitment to the person they love.” The campaign, which raises the public profile of marriage equality in the Empire State, can be viewed online at http://www.hrc.org/NY4marriage

The nominations are rolling in for HRC’s “Mother of the Year” campaign, and we’re enjoying reading the stories about all of the strong, supportive and inspirational moms out there! We’ve read about ally moms who supported their LGBT children through their coming out journeys, joined community groups to advocate for equality, and spoke out against hatred and bigotry that they’ve encountered. We’ve read about LGBT moms who stay at home to raise their wonderful children so that their partners can pursue their careers, and others who are out and proud despite living in very conservative parts of the country. Some of our nominees have worked multiple jobs to provide for their families, even as they battled through cancer and other hardships.