HRC Blog

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation has just released Equality from State to State 2010, a comprehensive report detailing LGBT-related legislation in 2010 and what is expected for 2011. New interactive maps of current state laws accompany the release of the report. Both can be found at http://www.hrc.org/statetostate2010

The following comes from HRC Greater New York Steering Committee Diversity Co-Chair Pete Webb: I represented the Human Rights Campaign yesterday at the New York City Memorial Service to honor the Ugandan LGBT Activist, David Kato. Kato was the advocacy officer of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). Only a few short months after his picture was published in a national magazine outing LGBT Ugandans under the headline “hang them,” someone broke into Kato’s house on January 26, 2011 and beat him to death with a hammer.

The 23rd Annual Creating Change conference was held this past week in Minneapolis, MN, and we at HRC were thrilled to have been part of it. Team HRC was just but a few of the over 2,500 activists who came together for this conference, put on by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. We staffed a table at the exhibit hall, interacting with all the attendees about the breadth of our work.

The following is a guest post from HRC Religion Council member, and co-founder of Catholics for Marriage Equality, Anne Underwood: Recently, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent a letter to Congress outlining the Conference’s legislative priorities for the 112th Congress. The Archbishop begins by expressing the best of Catholic social teaching when he calls on the new Congress to “advance the common good and defend the life and dignity of all, especially vulnerable and poor persons.”

In the wake of the murder of Ugandan LGBT civil rights leader, David Kato, we are calling on U.S. fundamentalist pastors Carl Ellis Jenkins, Lou Engle and Scott Lively, to quickly abandon their hateful and dangerous anti-LGBT rhetoric and actions. David Kato, the gay Ugandan human rights defender, was brutally murdered in his home on Wednesday. David was the Advocacy Officer for Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a coalition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex human rights organizations in Uganda.