Monday was the deadline for Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson to veto SB 202, the anti-anti-discrimination bill that seeks to prevent cities and counties from protecting the civil rights of gay people. The bill passed the legislature 10 days ago. Hutchinson said he would allow it to become law. During the past week, pressure had been mounting on the governor to change his mind…. But none of that, not even the voice of Cher, could change the governor’s mind. Today, he allowed it to become law, albeit in a backdoor manner. Hutchinson had said earlier this month that he harbors reservations about the bill, so he has let it pass without his signature.
West Virginia sate Rep. Karen Arvon (R-Duh) has introduced a bill that is pretty much identical to the Arkansas law that forbids all municipalities from enacting LGBT rights ordinances.
The Wyoming House of Representatives has voted down a bill that would have prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The House voted 33-to-26 against the bill, which already had cleared the Wyoming Senate. Supporters have included Wyoming business groups, which have said enacting an anti-discrimination law would help the state recruit new corporations and help existing businesses attract good employees.
Transgender students would have to use separate restrooms in Kentucky’s public schools under a bill that cleared the Senate Education Committee on Monday…. The bill would not force transgender students to use the restroom of their biological birth. But it would ban them from using the restroom of their gender identity, instead requiring that the school provide them with a separate restroom. The issue has been in the public eye since Louisville’s Atherton High School changed its policy last year to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their sexual identity. Since then, 16-year-old sophomore Christina Kelty has used a private, single-stall restroom because she said she is uncomfortable using the bathroom with a student who was born male. Others, she said, have decided not to use the bathroom at all while at school.
A bill that seeks to protect the practice of gay conversion counseling passed out of an Oklahoma House committee Tuesday. House Bill 1598, which now goes to the full House, says the state will not prohibit or restrict counseling intended to rid people of attraction to those of their own gender. It also seeks to protect parents who want such counseling for their children. Nothing prevents this type of counseling now, but Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said her bill is needed because the practice is under attack legislatively in other states.
Less than two weeks after a federal judge ordered him to comply with her ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Mobile County’s probate judge has indicated he will not process a couple’s adoption petition until after the Supreme Court decides another case. That has put Cari Searcy’s second-parent adoption in legal limbo and prompted her lawyers to filed a new lawsuit Tuesday in federal court asking for an order prohibiting Probate Judge Don Davis from “directly or indirectly” enforcing the state’s same-sex marriage ban that the federal judge struck down last month. It was Searcy’s inability to adopt the boy that she and spouse Kim McKeand have raised since birth that prompted them to challenge Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriage.