Associated Pres

The church volunteers assembled furniture and hung decorations in the newly renovated apartment building. They laid out nearly every necessity, down to the bath towels, bed linens, cooking supplies and televisions.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, the first residents of the home in Worcester, Massachusetts moved in: three gay men seeking asylum in the U.S.

“I don’t even have the words,” said Alain Spyke, 26, who fled Jamaica after being continually harassed and threatened by a local gang for being gay. “To come into this country and have a safe space to escape all the hardships and trauma? Not everyone has that opportunity.”

A Massachusetts church group that’s uniquely focused on support for immigrants fleeing their countries due to their sexual orientation has opened a new, permanent home for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender asylum seekers.

The LGBT Asylum Task Force, a ministry of Hadwen Park Congregational Church in Worcester, raised more than $500,000 to purchase and renovate a dilapidated, three-story former group home on the city’s well-heeled west side.

It’s the ministry’s biggest investment amid long-running efforts to help LGBTQ immigrants, said Al Green, the task force’s director.

The group typically houses asylum seekers in rented apartments throughout New England’s second-largest city, but as the effort has grown over the years, it’s become challenging to coordinate services and foster community among the new immigrants, he said.

The task force covers rent and provides a $500 monthly stipend for immigrants, at least until they can receive work authorization, a process that can take around two years, Green said. The group also connects asylum seekers with immigration lawyers, sets them up with bank accounts and health insurance, and helps prepare them for entering the workforce, among other things.

“We found that giving folks stability has helped them better prepare for their asylum cases,” said Green, who is also from Jamaica and participated in the program. “They know they’re in a safe place until they can get on their feet.”

The church effort is one of the few programs providing wide-ranging and long-term help to LGBTQ asylum seekers once they’re in the U.S., says Pastor Judith Hanlon of Hadwen Park Congregational Church, who co-founded the ministry.

Groups like the Rainbow Railroad in Toronto, Canada, help LGBTQ individuals escape persecution in their home countries. Temporary shelters like Casa de Luz in Tijuana, Mexico, provide safe havens for gay and transgender migrants on the perilous journey across the U.S. southern border. And groups like the LGBT Asylum Project in San Francisco focus on providing legal help while others like the Trans Queer Pueblo in Phoenix, Arizona, focus on community building and advocacy.

The church ministry started in 2008, when the United Church of Christ congregation rallied to support a single gay immigrant from Jamaica.

As the church’s reputation spread, migrants from Jamaica and the dozens of other countries where homosexuality is explicitly outlawed began arriving, oftentimes unannounced, Hanlon said. The task force is currently assisting 21 LGBTQ immigrants but has helped more than 400 over the years, with all so far winning asylum, she added.

Among the recent arrivals is a 25-year-old Muslim woman from Uganda who said her parents forced her to marry a man 30 years her senior after discovering she had a long-term girlfriend.

The woman, who asked only to be identified as Aisha, arrived last December after searching online for ways to get out of her forced marriage and learning about the church’s work.

She says she appreciates the group doesn’t impose Christianity or require her to attend church services. “They’re really accepting me as I am, and that’s been heartwarming,” she said.

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The new home’s opening comes as immigrant and gay rights activists push President Joe Biden’s administration to make good on his campaign promise to undo harmful policies enacted under former President Donald Trump.

The Biden administration has rescinded a rule that made it harder for migrants, including LGBTQ persons, to qualify for asylum because of domestic abuse or gang violence, said Ari Shaw, a director at the Williams Institute, a research center at the UCLA School of Law focused on sexual orientation and gender identities.

But other Trump-era immigration policies disproportionately impacting gay and transgender migrants also remain in effect, such as the use of Title 42 of the U.S. Code to justify denying asylum claims from migrants based on concerns about the spread of COVID-19, Shaw said.

Following a court order, the Biden administration also recently announced plans to reinstate Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims were being processed.

The Department of Homeland Security’s guidance for resuming the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy includes a new exemption for gay and transgender individuals, although there’s concern among some advocates about how that will be implemented in practice.

A DHS spokesperson said exceptions for LGBTQ persons and other particularly vulnerable individuals will be considered case-by-case. The agency also noted that Biden issued an executive order in February committing to improving the asylum process and combatting the sexual and gender-based violence and other “root causes” of migration.

DHS doesn’t track LGBTQ asylum claims, but a study earlier this year from the Williams Institute estimated LGBTQ individuals filed at least 11,400 applications from 2012 to 2017, with more than half of those coming from Central America.

Overall, approval rates for all asylum applications haven risen since Biden took office in January. Gay and transgender individuals can seek asylum under the same legal category as those persecuted for their race, religion or political opinions.

Back at the Worcester home, Spyke says he’s still wrapping his head around the freedoms America affords.

In Jamaica, his family ostracized him after finding out he was gay and he faced harassment, even in popular tourist destinations like Montego Bay.

Now living in the U.S. for nearly two years, Spyke says he finally felt comfortable enough to kiss another man in public for the first time just this April.

“It felt really cool,” he said. “I’d never dare to do that in Jamaica.”

Allyship, an old noun made new again, is Dictionary.com’s word of the year.

The look up site with 70 million monthly users took the unusual step of anointing a word it added just last month, though “allyship” first surfaced in the mid-1800s, said one of the company’s content overseers, John Kelly.

“It might be a surprising choice for some,” he told The Associated Press ahead of Tuesday’s unveiling. “In the past few decades, the term has evolved to take on a more nuanced and specific meaning. It is continuing to evolve and we saw that in many ways.”

The site offers two definitions for allyship: The role of a person who advocates for inclusion of a “marginalized or politicized group” in solidarity but not as a member, and the more traditional relationship of “persons, groups or nations associating and cooperating with one another for a common cause or purpose.”

The word is set apart from “alliance,” which Dictionary.com defines in one sense as a “merging of efforts or interests by persons, families, states or organizations.”

It’s the first definition that took off most recently in the mid-2000s and has continued to churn. Following the summer of 2020 and the death of George Floyd, white allies — and the word allyship — proliferated as racial justice demonstrations spread. Before that, straight allies joined the causes of LGBTQ oppression, discrimination and marginalization.

“This year, we saw a lot of businesses and organizations very prominently, publicly, beginning efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Allyship is tied to that. In the classroom, there is a flashpoint around the term critical race theory. Allyship connects with this as well,” Kelly said.

In addition, teachers, frontline workers and mothers who juggled jobs, home duties and child care in lockdown gained allies as the pandemic took hold last year.

Without an entry for “allyship,” Kelly said the site saw a steep rise in lookups for “ally” in 2020 and large spikes in 2021. It was in the top 850 searches out of thousands and thousands of words this year. Dictionary.com broadened the definition of “ally” to include the more nuanced meaning. The terms “DEI” and “critical race theory” made their debuts as entries on the site with “allyship” this year.

What it means to be an authentic ally has taken on fresh significance as buzz around the word has grown louder. One of the aspects of allyship, as it has emerged, is how badly it can go.

Among the example’s of how to use the word in a sentence cited by Merriam-Webster is this one written by Native activist Hallie Sebastian: “Poor allyship is speaking over marginalized people by taking credit and receiving recognition for arguments that the unprivileged have been making for their entire lives.”

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As global diversity, equity and inclusion executive Sheree Atcheson wrote in Forbes, allyship is a “lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups of people.” It’s not, she said, “self-defined — work and efforts must be recognized by those you are seeking to ally with.”

Allyship should be an “opportunity to grow and learn about ourselves, whilst building confidence in others,” Atcheson added.

Among the earliest evidence of the word “allyship,” in its original sense of “alliance,” is the 1849, two-volume work, “The Lord of the Manor, or, Lights and Shades of Country Life” by British novelist Thomas Hall: “Under these considerations, it is possible, he might have heard of Miss Clough’s allyship with the Lady Bourgoin.”

Kelly did some additional digging into the history of allyship in its social justice sense. While the Oxford English Dictionary dates that use of the word to the 1970s, Kelly found a text, “The Allies of the Negro” by Albert W. Hamilton, published in 1943. It discusses extensively the potential allies of Black people in the struggle for racial equality:

“What some white liberals are beginning to realize is that they better begin to seek the Negro as an ally,” he wrote. “The new way of life sought by the liberal will be a sham without the racial equality the Negro seeks. And the inclusion of the Negro in the day-to-day work, in the organization, the leadership and the rallying of the support necessary to win a better world, can only be done on the basis of equality.”

On the other side of allyship, Kelly said, “is a feeling of division, of polarization. That was Jan. 6.” Allyship, he said, became a powerful prism in terms of the dichotomy at a chaotic cultural time during the last two years.

Other dictionary companies in the word of the year game focused on the pandemic and its fallout for their picks. Oxford Languages, which oversees the Oxford English Dictionary, went for “vax” and Merriam-Webster chose “vaccine.” The Glasgow, Scotland-based Collins Dictionary, meanwhile, plucked “NFT,” the digital tokens that sell for millions.

While Merriam-Webster relies solely on site search data to choose a word of the year, Dictionary.com takes a broader approach. It scours search engines, a broad range of text and taps into cultural influences to choose its word of the year.

A South Florida police chief has announced his retirement months after an investigation into alleged remarks he made about the coronavirus death of an openly gay Broward Sheriff’s deputy.

Davie Police Chief Dale Engle told town officials last week that he plans to retire on Sept. 3, the South Florida SunSentinel reported. He has been on paid leave for three months and will continue to be paid until he retires.

Engle was accused of saying Broward Sheriff’s school resource officer Shannon Bennett died because of his lifestyle. On Monday night, Engle told the SunSentinel he didn’t make the remark.

“I maintain my innocence,” he said.

Engle was placed on leave shortly after the state’s Fraternal Order of Police filed a complaint against him.

He said Davie officials didn’t pressure him to retire. Engle said he is leaving on his own with no pressure from the city. His decision to retire was fueled by a toxic backlash his teenage children received on social media after the allegations surfaced, he told the newspaper.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued Thursday for a more limited U.S. view of global human rights advocacy based on the principals laid out by America’s Founding Fathers, a suggestion critics assumed meant stepping away from more modern concepts such as support for women and the LGBTQ communities around the world.

Pompeo, speaking in Philadelphia, singled out property rights and religious freedom as “foremost” principals in a speech that elsewhere complained about the “proliferation” of protections in international agreements related to human rights.

“As was clear from the start, Secretary Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights was designed to challenge the international consensus with a narrow view of human rights, that among other things would leave LGBTQ people even more vulnerable to violence and discrimination.”

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“We are forced to grapple with tough choices about which rights to promote and how to think about this,” he said. “Americans have not only unalienable rights, but also positive rights granted by governments, courts and multilateral bodies. Many are worth defending in light of our founding; others aren’t.”

Pompeo on Thursday released a report produced by the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which he tasked last year with conducting a broad review of U.S. human rights policy, arguing at the time that it had “lost its bearings.”

Before its release, many human rights groups were skeptical of the commission, whose chairwoman was conservative legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.

Pompeo noted that the report emphasizes property rights and religious liberty. “No one can enjoy the pursuit of happiness if you cannot own the fruits of your own labor. And no society can retain its legitimacy or a virtuous character without religious freedom,” he said.

The report did not produce any specific recommendations and steered clear of endorsing policy proposals. But experts who parsed it for direction noted, for example, that it referred to abortion and same-sex marriage not as rights but “divisive social and political controversies.”

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Critics such as Sen. Bob Menendez, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the report would damage the United States’ reputation as a champion of human rights around the world by narrowing the scope of who deserves protection.

“As feared, Secretary Pompeo used his speech to insinuate a hierarchy of rights where property rights and religious liberty are ‘foremost’ rights and some rights are not ‘worth defending,’” said the New Jersey Democrat.

Critics also faulted the makeup of the commission, saying it was weighted with conservatives, and the public did not have sufficient opportunity to weigh in on its findings before the report’s release.

“As was clear from the start, Secretary Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights was designed to challenge the international consensus with a narrow view of human rights, that among other things would leave LGBTQ people even more vulnerable to violence and discrimination,” said David Stacy, government affairs director of Human Rights Campaign.

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Pompeo also took aim in his speech at demonstrators “pulling down statues” and “desecrating monuments,” in echoes of President Donald Trump’s recent speech at Mount Rushmore. The secretary of state said it was an attack on the people who fought for the rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

He also criticized The New York Times for its 1619 Project, an award-winning explanation of the persistent legacy of slavery in the United States.

“America is fundamentally good and has much to offer the world because our founders recognized the existence of God-given unalienable rights and designed a durable system to protect them,” he said. “But these days I must say even saying America is fundamentally good has become controversial.”

Even with this week’s Supreme Court ruling, the workplace will be far from equal for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

While the nation’s highest court says you can’t be fired for your sexual orientation or gender identity under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there are still gaps. For instance, the federal law doesn’t protect those who work at businesses with fewer than 15 workers. It doesn’t address bathrooms for transgender people. And it’s still an open question whether employers can fire an LGBTQ person for religious reasons.

Then there are gaps in employee benefits. Some employers may not pay for medical care for transgender people, or could leave out LGBTQ families.

That’s not to diminish the significance of the Supreme Court ruling, which some advocates say was an even bigger deal for LGBTQ Americans than marriage equality.

The “decision was a watershed,” said Kasey Suffredini, CEO of Freedom for All Americans, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “But at the same time it’s so basic and entry level. Now we actually get into the details into how that discrimination plays out in everyday lives.”

Health care benefits

Transgender workers and people in same-sex relationships often face disparities in access to health care. Employers play a role because they work with insurance companies to decide which treatments should be covered under their employees’ health insurance plans.

For example, an insurance plan that a company crafts for employees may cover hormone treatments for a woman undergoing menopause, but it might not cover hormone treatments that a doctor prescribes for a transgender patient. And same-sex couples sometimes are shut out of benefits such as access to fertility treatments, which are in some states only offered to couples that are not the same gender.

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Treatments for HIV, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men, are sometimes shortchanged by insurance plans.

“Some HIV drugs may be outright not covered by insurance at all, or may be covered with copays or deductibles that make the drug essentially inaccessible,” Suffredini said. “It’s like the functional equivalent of denying coverage altogether.”

Small business

Not all workers are protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which only applies to business with 15 employees or more. But some states have laws that do cover those workers.

Fifteen states have nondiscrimination laws that cover all employers, regardless of size, according to Freedom for All Americans. Another 22 states have laws that cover workers at employers with at least two employees or more.

Connecticut, for example, extends the protections to workplaces with at least three employees, and Arkansas extends it to employers with nine, Freedom for All Americans said.

Uniforms

Dress codes and uniforms can present challenges for transgender employees. Rachel Mosby, who was the fire chief in Byron, Georgia, says she was fired from her job after she began showing up to work in feminine dress suits and skirts instead of one of the masculine suits she had been wearing for the last decade. Mosby spent more than $500 of fire department money on the suits, but was issued a written reprimand and required to pay the department back. When she bought herself male suits a decade earlier, there had been no issue.

“These implicit biases and systemic discrimination against people that are others, none of that has gone away,” Mosby said. “It’s still there, and that’s what we have to fight against. That’s what we have to work to remove from our system.”

Mosby filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the city for her termination.

Religious reasons

In their ruling, the Supreme Court judges made clear that they weren’t going to make a call on whether a business can fire an employee for religious reasons, leaving that an open question.

“It kind of punted on those issues and said we can address these at a later date,” said Todd Anten, a lawyer at Quinn Emanuel.

Employers that have religious objections to employing LGBTQ people might be able to raise those claims in a different case, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court.

Bathrooms

Another issue the Supreme Court said it wouldn’t decide this week: same-sex bathrooms and locker rooms.

Jerame Davis, executive director of LGBTQ workplace advocacy group Pride at Work, said employers right now have a lot of leeway in how they respond if a colleague doesn’t want a transgender person to use the same restroom or locker room as them. Often times, the transgender person is singled out and asked to use a different facility, which isn’t ideal, Davis said.

“We shouldn’t be singling out individuals,” he said.

Parental leave

Most workers in the U.S. do not have access to paid family leave to care for a newborn. But among those that have access to family leave, the policies often favor birth mothers, said Gabriel Dobson, 34, a gay man who is married to another man.

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Dobson left his last job because he felt his employer was not promoting him because he is black and gay. Now, at a company that’s more culturally inclusive, Dobson is facing subtler challenges. His new company offers 16 weeks of family leave to a mother who gives birth to a child, but only four weeks to a parent who did not give birth. That’s making him wonder how he and his husband would manage if they adopt a child.

“When you are both non-birth parents and you have a child, who is going to get that time off to take care of the child?” Dobson asked. “It makes you feel like your situation is odd, when that’s not typically how I feel about my situation.”

Recognizing LGBTQ workers

Many employers may not know how many LGBTQ people it employs, which makes it hard to make sure they’re invited or included in particular programs.

Some big employers do allow employees to indicate on their human resources forms that they are LGBTQ, like they do for gender and race, said M.V. Lee Badgett, an economics professor and co-director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“I think employers that are trying to be proactive and are looking at gender gaps or maybe racial wage gaps, they should try to think about ways that they could do the same for LGBT people,” Badgett said.

On May 6, 2012, Vice President Joe Biden declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he supported the legalization of same-sex marriage — getting out ahead of his boss, Barack Obama, on one of the most volatile political issues of the day.

The largest national LGBTQ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, formally endorsed Biden for president on Wednesday, the eighth anniversary of that event.

“Joe Biden is the leader our community and our country need at this moment,” HRC President Alphonso David said in a statement. “His dedication to advancing LGBTQ equality, even when it was unpopular to do so, has pushed our country and our movement forward.”

Human Rights Campaign announces Biden endorsement

MAY 6, 202006:49

The endorsement itself is no surprise, given the antipathy that most LGBTQ activists have toward Biden’s rival, President Donald Trump. But the timing is a way of highlighting Biden’s bona fides among activists who gratefully remember his 2012 role.

Obama had taken office in 2009 as a self-described fierce advocate for gay rights, yet for much of his first term, he drew flak from activists who viewed him as too cautious and politically expedient. They were frustrated he wouldn’t endorse same-sex marriage — Obama cagily said he was “evolving” on the issue.

That changed swiftly after Biden told “Meet the Press” that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. Three days later, in a White House interview with ABC News, Obama followed suit.

Flashback: Biden’s 2012 Endorsement of Same-Sex Marriage

JUNE 26, 201500:55

Biden, a Democrat, subsequently has entrenched himself as a stalwart ally of the LGBTQ rights movement, including periodic appearances at Human Rights Campaign fundraising dinners. He is scheduled to participate in a livestreamed conversation with the organization’s president on Wednesday evening.

Since Trump succeeded Obama in 2017, his Republican administration has taken multiple steps to slow or reverse gains by LGBTQ Americans. For example, it has restricted military service by transgender people and argued in a Supreme Court case that the federal civil rights law doesn’t protect LGBTQ people from discrimination at work.

Along with its endorsement of Biden, the Human Rights Campaign is releasing new details about its 2020 election strategy — identifying voters who support LGBTQ rights, then working to maximize their turnout. Texas is a new addition to the list of targeted states, along with Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

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