hunter of justice

Two powerful new reports on lgbt families and youth

Two major reports came out today that have the potential to significantly influence policy debates in their respective, related areas.

A trio of organizations published All Children Matter: How Legal and Social Inequalities Hurt LGBT Families, which spells out in more than 100 pages (with more than 450 footnotes) the ways in which anti-gay policies impede three key needs of every child: stable, loving homes; economic security; and health and well-being. In each area, the report documents the problems, demonstrates the effects of discriminatory laws and policies, and provides recommendations. The Child Welfare League of America wrote the foreword and endorsed the report, which was co-authored by the Movement Advancement Project, Family Equality Council and the Center for American Progress. 

The second publication is from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights:  Peer to Peer Violence and Bullying: Examining the Federal Response. As a threshold matter, its very issuance signals that the Commission is alive again, after having been starved and sidelined by years of Republican administrations. This  report, also lengthy and well-documented, includes specific findings and recommendations:

The Commission, by majority vote, concluded  that  bullying and harassment, including bullying and harassment based on sex, race, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, or religion, are  harmful to American youth, and developed findings and recommendations to address the problem, including the following recommendations:

 The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice should track their complaints/inquiries regarding sexual harassment or gender-based harassment by creating a category that explicitly encompasses LGBT youth.

 The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice should track complaints that they receive regarding harassment based solely on sexual orientation that are closed for lack of jurisdiction.

 The U.S. Department of Education should track complaints that it receives regarding harassment based solely on religion that are closed for lack of jurisdiction.

 The U.S. Department of Education should consider issuing a new Dear Colleague Letter regarding the First Amendment implications of anti-bullying policies. The new Letter should provide concrete examples to clarify the guidance that the Department of Education previously provided [on] July 28, 2003.

Two really impressive contributions. 

Guidance available on the legal effects of same-sex marriage in New York

Last week, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York held a program on What Passage of the Marriage Equality Law Will Mean for Same-Sex Couples in New York. Speakers covered a broad range of issues affecting the everyday life of New Yorkers: employee health and retirement benefits, estate planning, tax, portability of marital status (to other states), immigration, divorce and property allocation, and parenting issues such as adoption and custody.

Now the materials that were distributed are available on the City Bar's web page. Most track the issues listed above, but there is also an important contribution by Lambda that goes beyond the typical discussions: an extensive booklet on the impact of the new marriage law on low-income lgbt couples and families in New York. Kudos to Lambda!

Abortion trends: more linked to poverty as states enact greater restrictions

Three recent reports read together drive home the point that abortion is becoming more and more a poverty issue, and choice advocates are at the same time losing ground in state legislatures around the country.

According to a Guttmacher Institute study, the concentration of abortion among poor women is not only intense, but also rising sharply. The relative abortion rate for poor women in 2008 (the most recent data available) was more than twice that for all women, and more than five times that for women at 200% or more of the federal poverty level. About 42% of women having abortions 2008 were poor, compared to 27% in 2000. By contrast, the rates for low-income (100-199% of FPL) and better off women (>200% of the FPL) decreased during that time. Among poor women, Black and Hispanic women were overrepresented.

On the legislative side, the Center for Reproductive Rights reports that "2010 has been one of the most challenging state legislative sessions for women's access to abortion in many years." Favorite anti-choice initiatives have included bans on insurance coverage for abortion and mandates that women seeking abortion must be exposed to ultrasound images of the fetus. Guttmacher also issued an analysis of state legislation as of midyear 2010, and reported that there are 49 new restrictive state laws.

Add to this the current frenzy about "anchor babies" in the Latino community. As ColorLines notes, there is a long disturbing history of paranoid delusions about allegedly excessive fertility (read sexuality) in people of color communities. University of Arizona Women's Studies Professor Nicole Guidotti-Hernández places the "anchor babies" issue as the latest episode in that history:

These ideas about Latina women’s bodies and hyper-reproduction are not new... [Such fears have been] localized in the figure of what [historian Ellen] Gutíerrez has called “the hyper-fertile baby machine.”

Beneath all this is an undercurrent of legal and political dehumanization of women of color. And one historically effective strategy for diminishing a liberty right for everyone is just that kind of racialization. If the Supreme Court continues to chip away at the woman's right, this will be part of the context and part of a new enabling discourse -- that "good" (white, middle class) women are less concerned now about abortion.

New Orleans police use "crime against nature" law to harass sex workers

Two web sources - Colorlines and Change.org - are reporting that New Orleans police are using the old Louisiana state sodomy law to increase the penalties imposed on (mostly) women convicted of prostitution from a misdemeanor to a felony, creating absurdly harsh punishments, based on the type of sexual activity involved. Wait, you may say, what about Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision that ruled such "crime against nature" laws unconstitutional? Lawrence, however, specifically excluded commercial sexual encounters from the ambit of constitutional protection that it recognized for consensual sexual acts between adults. And the Louisiana statute specifically criminalizes solicitation for sodomy for payment. As a result, the state can argue that this portion of the law is not affected by Lawrence. (Like several other states, Louisiana did not repeal its sodomy law after the Supreme Court ruling.) Or, you might have thought that sodomy laws applied only to same-sex activity. Wrong again - sodomy at common law was defined the way that Louisiana defines it: as oral or anal sex between any two persons. 

The result: sex workers in New Orleans who are arrested for soliciting johns for oral (or anal) sex are charged with felonies; those who don't mention or can't be tricked into mentioning blow jobs are charged only with misdemeanors. Ridiculous -- except if you're sent to prison for five years and then have to register as a sex offender when you are released.

This ought to be challenged as an outrageous equal protection violation - essentially imposing radically different penalties for the same behavior, for no rational reason. It's also a dramatic illustration of how local power structures can exclude the least powerful strata within a minority group from protections, such as the impact of the Lawrence decision, that protect others within the same group.

From the report in Change:

Normally, a first-time prostitution conviction is a misdemeanor leading to less than six months jail time. But Jordan Flaherty reports in Colorlines that many New Orleans sex workers are being charged for selling oral or anal sex under the crimes against nature law, which carries a first-time felony penalty of up to five years prison time and requires them to register as sex offenders.

When used against sex workers, these controversial registries, created to keep communities aware of child molesters, become a severe rights violation that endangers an already vulnerable population, and wastes resources that could be directed toward dangerous offenders. The New Orleans Police Department's own website on sex offender awareness states that only 4% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by women -- yet in New Orleans, women make up the vast majority of crimes against nature convictions, which account for a whopping 264 out of the city's 861 actively registered sex offenders, according to registry statistics provided by LA state police spokesperson Doug Cain.

Though the registry doesn't keep track of how many of these crimes against nature were for solicitation of sex, it's safe to assume that we're looking at convictions for sex workers...

Josh Perry, a former New Orleans public defender, estimates that about half of prostitution arrests get tried as crimes against nature. This is up to the discretion of the police and district attorney, and sex workers and their advocates allege the harsher law is disproportionately utilized against black and transgender women.

Flaherty reports an array of problems, such as that women registered as sex offenders are excluded from regular storm shelters... The sex offender shelters lack separate safe spaces for women... Furthermore, since a crimes against nature conviction is a felony right of the bat, unlike a normal prostitution conviction, these women -- who in many cases turned to sex work due to poverty and a lack of other options -- are unable to get public assistance such as food stamps. Many of these women are homeless, and if sympathetic non-profits did not allow them to use their locations for a permanent address, they would end up violating the terms of their sex registry.