5 THINGS TO KNOW

I’m a Congressman and a veteran. Trump’s transgender military ban isn’t just unconstitutional—it’s stupid.

I initially viewed President Donald Trump’s July tweet suggesting we ban transgender military personnel as unimaginably idiotic. I figured there was no way it would be executed. In the face of numerous global threats, why would we kneecap our military by prohibiting willing and able people from serving in our volunteer armed forces?

Cell phone with data mining sources
5 THINGS TO KNOW

The dire consequences of data mining to the LGBT community.

Will data mining be harmful to the LGBT community? By Patrick Rylee – Thursday, March 29, 2018 I don’t think anyone is surprised about the revelation that Facebook and Google are mining data from our accounts. It has always been easy to use social media and forget this little downside to this technology. It wasn’t until articles started coming out about Cambridge Analytica and how much information they were able to secure from Facebook that people started to look closer at data mining by the tech giants. If you are trying to come to terms with being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender and have been looking for answers online, that information in the wrong hands could definitely be used against […]

5 THINGS TO KNOW

The latest ‘cure’ for being gay is fermented cabbage juice. It doesn’t work.

There’s never been a shortage of crazy “cures” floating around the internet. Most recently, one woman claimed that veganism had cured her late-stage breast cancer,while God had also cured her of her lesbianism. She’s dead, of course. But for sheer nuttiness, Jillian Mai Thi Epperly’s “cure” deserves special attention. Epperly believes that her special brew of fermented cabbage juice can solve practically any health problem, from cancer to aging.

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As Craigslist ends personal ads, the LGBT community is losing an important space.

When Chelsea Reynolds was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, she and her friends would read Craigslist personal ads together, specifically the casual encounters section. They’d scroll through explicit posts submitted by anonymous users, many of whom were displaying grainy nude photos and soliciting no-strings-attached sex.

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Is Trump’s new transgender troop ban already dead on arrival?

In another end-of-week news dump, the White House on Friday night released a memorandum effectively banning transgender people from serving in the military, following through on orders Donald Trump issued on Twitter last summer. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory,” Trump wrote at the time, “and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

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Is queer still an offensive slur?

Queer: a derogatory term used to attack gay people or an empowering, catch-all word fully reclaimed by the LGBTQ community? That’s the question that Twitter was faced with recently after a user accused the platform of suspending her account for tweeting the term.  

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The Episcopal Church changed course for our LGBT members.

For more than 40 years the Episcopal Church has stood in support of the rights of gay and lesbian people and in more recent years has expanded that to include transgender people. This support for LGBT rights isn’t a political stance but a theological one, based in the knowledge that people are beloved children of God and worthy of respect.