The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently issued a regulation that requires any homeless shelter that receives federal funding to treat transgender people equally. The rule expressly requires that shelters must house transgender individuals based on their gender identity. The rule is an important coda to the groundbreaking Equal Access Rule issued by the agency back in 2012, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and marital...
Our Voices
For the past two years, NCLR has partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the True Colors Fund on our #RuralPride campaign, in which we visit rural communities across the country and conduct day-long summits to identify the needs and lift up the voices of LGBTQ people living in rural America. We have visited towns across the South and Midwest, from coast to coast, working to connect federal officials and national LGBTQ organizations with rural LGBTQ advocates to increase...
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, struck down two onerous and medically unwarranted restrictions on abortion. The 5-3 ruling came in a legal challenge to the Texas legislature’s harmful anti-abortion law, House Bill 2 (HB2), passed in 2013. HB2 was enacted to make safe abortion care more difficult to provide and obtain and has resulted in the closure of nearly 75 percent of the clinics in the state of Texas, forcing some women to drive up to...
Today the nation commemorates the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Today, as this fundamental right faces unprecedented attacks, it is time that we reclaim the promise of Roefor this and future generations. Roe held that one of the most personal and intimate decisions one can make — whether and when to bear a child — belongs to the individual. While the precise contours of the right and the...
This week, NCLR and a coalition of 13 other LGBT, racial justice, and health equity organizations filed an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down draconian restrictions on abortion providers enacted by the State of Texas in 2013 which, if upheld, would lead to the closing of most abortion clinics in the state. The brief urges the Court to carefully scrutinize the state’s asserted justification for the law, just as the Court has done with other...
In September of this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through its Office for Civil Rights (OCR), issued a proposed rule implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that will prohibit discrimination in certain health programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. The new rule has the potential to eradicate numerous forms of discrimination and mistreatment that LGBTQ people often face in our health care...