HRC Blog

In the past several weeks the media has reported on a number of tragic suicides precipitated by bullying and harassment based on actual or perceived sexual orientation. Among them are: 13-year-old Seth Walsh who after months of relentless bullying hanged himself from a tree outside his California home this week; Billy Lucas of Indiana, 15, who hanged himself after being called a "fag" over and over again; Asher Brown, 13, whose classmates teased him without mercy and acted out mock gay sex acts in class, shot himself in the head last Thursday; and Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi who killed himself by jumping off a bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him with another male student, then broadcast the video online. Additionally, a single school district in Minnesota has seen seven suicides in the last year by young victims of intolerance. Sadly, these are not isolated incidents; deaths like these continue to occur around the country, but they are preventable.

Yesterday, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) introduced the Repealing Ineffective and Incomplete Abstinence-Only Program Funding Act (the RIIAOPF Act), which would end abstinence-only-until-marriage programs once and for all. HRC has long opposed federal funding for abstinence-only programs because they exclude, or even denigrate, LGBT students.

Late last Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released two funding announcements on sexuality education that included language focused on LGBT and questioning youth. For the first time, language in the funding announcements for federal sexuality education dollars encouraged states to consider “the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth” and asked states to ensure that programs funded with these dollars are “inclusive of and nonstigmatizing toward” LGBT and questioning participants.

In the wake of a recent incident experienced by a transgender woman who faced degrading treatment at the hospital, today HRC called on Ball Memorial Hospital (BMH) in Muncie, Ind., to immediately adopt an LGBT inclusive patient nondiscrimination policy and train all hospital staff on compliance.

Last year, the Delaware legislature passed a non discrimination bill prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment. Governor Markell stepped up to protect state employees from discrimination on the basis of gender identity as well as sexual orientation. These actions guaranteed state employees could not be excluded from health coverage, but did not protect the families of LGBT employees nor did it address access to pensions for their families.