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House Speaker Paul D. Ryan finds himself in the middle of yet another Republican civil war as the battle over LGBT rights has come to Congress, threatening to divide an already fractured GOP.

Democrats won an opening salvo late Wednesday night, when the House approved on a vote of 223 to 195, a measure by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) to deny payment to federal contractors who discriminate against LGBT employees.

Maloney’s victory does not mean that House conservatives — angry over what they view as overreaching by President Obama — will not continue to wage the fight.

South Dakota is on the cusp of becoming the first state in the nation to require public school students to use facilities like bathrooms based on their “chromosomes and anatomy” at birth.

The so-called “bathroom bill,” which passed the state House in early February and is being debated by the state Senate Tuesday, marks a revival of the charged fights that played out in states across the country in 2015.

At least five other states have considered similar “bathroom bills” this session, and scores of other measures that LGBT rights advocates consider discriminatory are pending in legislatures around the U.S.

Bangladesh LGBT editor hacked to death

Bangladesh police say a top gay rights activist and editor at the country's only LGBT magazine is one of two people who have been hacked to death.

A British photographer who knew Mr Mannan and the other victim, known as

Voters in Switzerland have backed a proposal to make discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sexual identity illegal.The result - 63.1% in favour to 36.9% against - is a huge boost for Switzerland's LGBT community.

After the clear yes, the LGBTI community will use this momentum to achieve the consistent implementation of the penal code and to enforce marriage equality

Supporters of the law argued that no-one would be prosecuted for private comments, or for religious beliefs. But, they say, the law should protect the LGBT community from public discrimination, and aggression.

Tuesday’s Morning Email: Tennessee Passes Anti-LGBT Legislation

could jeopardize access to mental health treatment for LGBT individuals

the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind

It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”

The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do

In general, Americans of all races, ages, education levels and income groups are becoming more tolerant; the same is not true of Republicans, and evangelical Christians in particular.

“A majority (53%) of Americans oppose allowing businesses that provide wedding services, such as catering, flowers, and wedding cakes, to refuse services to same-sex couples, compared to about four in ten (41%) who say they would support allowing these wedding-based businesses to refuse services to same-sex couples for religious reasons.”

 A majority (56%) of Americans oppose allowing small business owners in their state to refuse services or goods to gay and lesbian people if doing so violates their religious beliefs, while nearly four in ten (39%) favor

Three human rights activists went on trial Wednesday in Poland for alleged desecration and offending religious sentiment by adding the LGBT rights movement’s rainbow symbol to posters of a revered Roman Catholic icon and publicly displaying the altered image, including on garbage bins and mobile toilets.

The activists could face up to two years in prison if convicted on charges of offending religious sentiment and desecration of Poland’s most-revered icon, the Mother of God of Czestochowa, popularly known as the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

The three don’t deny putting the posters on walls and elsewhere around the church, but do not admit putting stickers with the image on garbage bins and toilets. They deny wrongdoing.

President Trump has announced that transgender Americans will not be allowed to serve “in any capacity” in the U.S. military, a move that could affect thousands of people serving in the armed forces and which resulted in almost immediate pushback from influential Republicans.

Trump’s announcement is the latest in a set of steps his administration has taken to walk back Obama-era policies on transgender Americans. The biggest shift is the reasoning: Rather than framing his decision in the language of rights or morality, as Obama-era officials did, Trump spoke about the new transgender policy in terms of military efficiency. The decision is likely to trigger major blowback from Democratic legislators and LGBT activists who long pushed for full acceptance of transgender service members. It will also bring gender identity back into the spotlight, reigniting a culture-war debate surrounding a president who has tried to sell himself as a friend of LGBT rights.  

While there has not been much research done on this question, according to Rand, policies welcoming lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans to serve openly in the military did not diminish units’ effectiveness. The Rand researchers expected “little or no impact on unit cohesion, operational effectiveness, or readiness” resulting from Obama’s policy.

t was a startling omission, even according to the peculiar moral norms of the Trump era. When Wendy Vitter, one of the US president’s judicial nominees, was asked whether she supported the supreme court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision to end racial segregation in schools – a near sacred pillar of progress for civil rights in the 20th century – she did not say yes.

With just over a year in office, Donald Trump has already appointed 21 of America’s 167 current circuit judges and intends to fill an additional 20 or more vacancies by the end of the year. He is far outpacing Barack Obama, whose 21st circuit court nominee was approved 33 months into his presidency amid gridlock in Congress. Seventeen of Trump’s nominees for district courts, most of whom replaced Democratic appointees, have also been approved by the Republican-controlled Senate.

“This is stunning,” said Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to Barack Obama, who for more than four years was in charge of the selection, vetting and confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees. “Conservatives are using the courts to bring us back to a time when ‘religious liberty’ allowed discrimination. We’re seeing legal arguments we had hoped were consigned to the dustbin of history being dusted off and used again in the hope of turning back the clock on the way we treat all Americans.” Four cases relating to Trump’s ban on transgender personnel in the military are working their way through the courts. Employment and housing protections for LGBT individuals could be at risk. Battles over reproductive rights are also under way at state level. Last month a federal appeals court blocked an Ohio law that would cut taxpayer funding to 28 Planned Parenthood clinics, holding that conditions it imposed that denied funds to abortion providers were unconstitutional. But campaigners against abortion rights are unlikely to be deterred.

Turkey withdrew early Saturday from a landmark European treaty protecting women from violence that it was the first country to sign 10 years ago and that bears the name of its largest city.

Hundreds of women gathered in Istanbul to protests against the move on Saturday.

The Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Marija Pejčinović Burić, called the decision “devastating.” “This move is a huge setback to these efforts and all the more deplorable because it compromises the protection of women in Turkey, across Europe and beyond,” she said.

a radical shift with the arrival of Donald Trump in Washington; the businessman, now president-elect, has often spoken about government as a bumbling failure and an impediment to success.

“Government can be a tremendous force for good,” King said in an interview at his office recently.

“Government really sucks,” ­DeVos, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, said last year at the South by Southwest educational technology conference in Austin. “And it doesn’t matter which party is in power.”

Maddox’s confidence in Trump is rooted in a sense that finally someone is paying attention. She takes his bucking of protocol and decorum as evidence that he doesn’t play by the rules, and she likes that because so far as she concerned the rules have been fixed against people like her.

So do I think Trump’s going to do it? Probably not to accommodate everybody. Something he does to stimulate the lower class and the middle class obviously it’s going to somehow affect the upper class.”

At a different time, the Democrats might have represented the best hope of making this possible. But a good number of Porterville’s low-income voters saw a choice between two multimillionaires and decided Trump had the virtue of a plan. Maddox is not fazed by the fact that the new president has stuffed his administration with billionaires and some of those same types of big businessmen – led by a raft of former Goldman Sachs executives – responsible for some of the practices that have driven the country’s wealth in to the hands of the few.

The separate remarks, made on Sunday morning news programs, came before a video was released online showing two young men who said they were behind suicide bombings in the central Russian city Volgograd last month that claimed 34 lives. In the video, the men threaten to carry out more attacks. In a statement posted with the video on its website, the militant group Vilayat Dagestan claimed responsibility for the Volgograd bombings, The Associated Press reported.

“They’re not giving us the full story about, what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups — the terrorist groups who have had some success — are they still plotting?”

“If necessary, all those tools will be activated.” He added that if foreign athletes wanted to provide their own additional security, “there is nothing wrong with that,” as long as they coordinated with the Russian authorities.

The most dangerous uprising that's threatening America's stability isn't black protests in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. It's taking place among an aging white majority that is losing its bearing on reality and destroying the gears of government, media and public welfare. At its center is an inexplicable, illogical and dangerous fear that some sociologists are now defining as white fragility.

In her 2011 academic pedagogical analysis titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo goes into a detailed explanation of how white people in North America live in insulated social and media spaces that protect them from any race-based stress. This privileged fragility leaves them unable to tolerate any schism or challenge to a universally accepted belief system. Any shift away from that (like a biracial African-American president) triggers a deep and sustaining panic. Racial segregation, disproportionate representation in the media, and many other factors serve as the columns that support white fragility

misunderstanding was caused by misidentification of what white privilege and power means. Privilege doesn’t mean automatic wealth and health. What “white privilege” means is that society is rooting for one particular segment of the population to succeed over all others, and has installed a disproportionately high amount of institutional and psychological helpers every step of the way.