Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

President’s Turnaround is Praised as Sign of Hope for Proponents of Same-Sex Marriage

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu

New York, May 9, 2012—President Barack Obama’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage today was praised by gender and sexuality law experts at Columbia Law School, who lauded the president’s shift in position on the contentious issue as a sign of hope in the battle over marriage equality in the United States.

Reversing his stated opposition to marriage equality, Obama said in an interview with ABC News today that he decided to support same-sex marriage based on his conversations with gay and lesbian service members, his wife and daughters, and his staff members.

Professors Katherine Franke and Suzanne Goldberg, directors of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, said the president’s turnaround could help inspire others to rethink their positions on same-sex marriage and provide moral weight to legislative efforts aimed at rolling back discriminatory laws and promoting marriage equality.

“The president’s remarks on the inequity of denying marriage rights to same-sex couples signal a hopeful turn in American politics: that a political leader’s views on an important social justice issue such as this can evolve, largely as he notes, through exposure to LGBT people in our families and professional lives,” said Katherine Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. “Let’s hope that the president will turn this new personal conviction about marriage equality into the political will to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Goldberg, the Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law at the Law School, said the announcement marks a “new day in America’s journey toward equality for all.”

“Although the president’s announcement alone will not eliminate the rampant marriage inequality in the United States, his words will surely spark the movement toward marriage equality, giving it even more momentum and moral force,” Goldberg said.

Florida Conference Focuses on Improving Services and Support for LGBT Seniors

New York, May 7, 2012— Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic participated in the first White House LGBT Conference on Aging in Miami, Florida.  The Conference brought together federal government officials; national and state advocates; and the public to focus on the health, housing, and economic security needs of aging members of the LGBT community.

“LGBT seniors too often face discrimination, mistreatment, and social isolation.  Moreover, programs aimed at providing resources to the senior population inadequately address the needs of the LGBT community,” said Hillary Schneller ’12, a clinic student who attended the Conference.  “The Conference provides a critical opportunity to engage the White House on these issues and to discuss changes to federal and state policies, especially in states like Florida that have a significant elder population.”

Schneller and Andrea Johnson ’12 worked with Equality Florida, the state’s largest civil rights organization dedicated to advocacy on behalf of LGBT people, to prepare for the Conference by identifying changes to laws and policies that can improve the lives of LGBT seniors.  Their recommendations focus on better access to and financial support for caregiving, health care, and housing through both state legislative and agency-level initiatives.

The White House Office of Public Engagement, in partnership with the University of Miami Center on Aging, hosted the day-long symposium, featuring keynote remarks by Kathy Greenlee, Assistant Secretary for Aging at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and Raphael Bostic, Assistant Secretary for Policy & Research Development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Equality Florida, as well as SAGE (Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Elders), the first official LGBT delegate to the White House Conference on Aging in 2005, were also among the participants.

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Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic addresses cutting-edge issues in sexuality and gender law through litigation, legislation, public policy analysis and other forms of advocacy. Under the guidance of Professor Suzanne Goldberg, clinic students have worked on a wide range of projects, from constitutional litigation to legislative advocacy to immigration cases, to serve both individual and organizational clients in cases involving issues of sexuality and gender law.

Engaging Tradition Project Director Urvashi Vaid shares her informal remarks below from the workshop on Diversity with Ira Katznelson, Fred Harris and moderator Mae Ngai, sponsored by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University on April 2, 2012.  CCASD Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations is a series inspired by the innovative interdisciplinary scholarship promoted by the Center.  The series draws participants together from a wide range of disciplinary homes in order to explore the various ways we think about fundamental critical/theoretical ideas and to generate new vocabularies and new methodologies. Crossposted from VaidBlog.

Every time I sat down to think about today’s presentation, I found myself impatient, irritated, avoiding the topic.  I realized the word diversity actually annoyed me a great deal, and even infuriated me to the point that I could not focus on this exercise. They say that if it’s hysterical, it’s historical.  So I had to ask myself why this annoyed reaction.

I came up with two reasons:  first, my experience with the deployment of diversity leaves me cynical about its function and utility.  And, second because too often the deployment of the concept serves to contain, marginalize, co-opt, or otherwise absorb the challenge being made by those outside the mainstream.

My experience with diversity comes out a range of situations — running nonprofits, building organizations, building teams of volunteers and staff in organizing projects, demonstrations, campaigns and social movements, funding initiatives on diversity, working in civil rights organizations, fundraising, engaging in the writing of public policy and legislation, media advocacy and politics.  In each of these environments I have used the “diversity” arguments to question and push for change in the dominant hierarchies of race, gender, class or sexual privilege in the environments in which I have worked.  My irritation comes out of a frustration with the concept as a mechanism of achieving structural change.

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Professor Katherine Franke, Director, Columbia Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, Joins Academic Boycott of Israeli-Government Sponsored Conference

New York, May 4, 2012—Responding to the call from a wide coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations and joining more than 700 U.S. academics who support a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, Katherine Franke will boycott the annual Global LGBT Summit, organized by the Equality Forum in Philadelphia, at which she is scheduled to speak today. Instead, she has recorded a video explaining her decision to boycott the summit, and asked that it be shown in lieu of her attendance. View her video statement below (as well as here). A transcript of her remarks are here.

“To uncritically celebrate Israel at a conference organized around notions of equality and liberty, and have Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, serve as the keynote speaker at the ‘international equality dinner,’ is taken as a slap in the face by our queer brothers and sisters in Palestine as well as by the queers within Israel who are actively seeking a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Franke. “By avoiding any programming that offered a balanced view of the human rights record of its ‘featured nation,’ the Equality Forum lost an important opportunity to be a leader in the international gay human rights movement, and instead allowed itself to be used as a part of Israel’s larger efforts to deflect criticisms of its human rights record.”

Franke, along with Columbia Professor Kendall Thomas, was a member of a first delegation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer academics—together with artists and community leaders—who traveled to Israel-Palestine this past January to learn firsthand how the struggles for sexual rights are being worked out as part of the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  “Our trip convinced us that we have a responsibility to share with our U.S.-based LGBTQ communities what we saw and heard so that we can do more together to end the occupation,” said Franke.

Rabbi Rebecca Alpert who was scheduled to speak on a panel about religion, and Pauline Park, who was also a member of the January delegation and was slated to speak on transgender rights, have also decided to boycott the Equality Forum’s global summit this year due to its selection of Israel as its “featured nation.”

Reposted from Columbia Law School’s press release: Carol Sanger Delivers Marks Lecture at University of Arizona’s Law School – Annual lecture Was Endowed by the Late Jack Marks ’35 and his Wife Selma Marks:

Carol Sanger, the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law, spoke about abortion as a medical issue, a political issue, and a legal issue in a talk titled “About Abortion: Meaning and Methodology,” for the 32nd Isaac Marks Memorial Lecture at the University of Arizona’s James F. Rogers College of Law.

“Abortion is not an easy subject to talk about,” she said. “But there must be discussion in a society that takes lawmaking and the well-being of its citizens seriously.”

The annual lecture, established in 1979, was endowed by the late Jack Marks ’35, a Superior Court Judge in Arizona, and his wife Selma Marks, in memory of his father. Speakers at recent Marks Lectures have included U.S. Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59.

Sanger, a nationally known expert on family law and women’s reproductive rights, is also a senior research fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She has written numerous articles on motherhood and reproduction and is currently working on a book titled About Abortion (Harvard University Press) that focuses on the social and legal regulation of abortion in the United States.

Abortion is first a medical procedure, which governs how it is treated under the law, Sanger told the audience of students, faculty, and members of the public. She added that it is the most regulated medical procedure in the United States. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, she noted, state legislatures have passed thousands of statutes regulating abortion, and it also has been subject to popular referenda on such issues as fetal personhood. “All this voting, by legislatures and by citizens, makes abortion an essentially political and therefore an essentially unsettled subject,” she said.

Although the basic legality of abortion appears to be firmly established, Sanger said, the ongoing debate continues in part because abortion is about so many things: states’ rights, parental authority, religion and perceptions of morality. The subject permeates matters of all sorts, she said, ranging from what health-care services available to pregnant members of the military serving overseas to whether Doonesbury should run on the funnies pages.

Sanger observed that in addition to abortion being a medical, a legal, and a political issue, “it is also a deeply personal decision that over a million women in the United States make each year.” In this way, abortion is also about all the things women consider when they assess the place of a child and the meaning of motherhood in their lives at a particular point in time. She noted that almost a third of all women will have an abortion at some point in their reproductive lives.

“There is always going to be abortion, the question is whether it is going to be legal and regulated or not,” Sanger said, urging each side in the debate to consider the concerns of the other.

Devi Rao, CLS ’10, is a Skadden Fellow for Educational and Employment Opportunities at the National Women’s Law Center, where she focuses on using Title IX to promote safe school environments, including preventing gender-based bullying. Devi is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. She discusses pregnancy discrimination below, cross posted from the National Law Women’s Center blog:

On Friday, President Obama officially endorsed two crucial pieces of legislation currently pending in Congress — the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA) and the Safe Schools Improvement Act (SSIA). The bills are aimed at improving the climate in our nation’s schools, especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students.

SNDA would outlaw discrimination in K-12 public schools on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. And the bipartisan SSIA would require schools to undertake affirmative efforts to prevent bullying and harassment in schools, including conduct based on a victim’s sexual orientation and gender identity. These bills are essential — a 2009 study by GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) found that nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment in schools.

Here at the National Women’s Law Center, we have been working actively with our coalition partners to advance SNDA and SSIA. Just last month, NWLC was among a group of seventy LGBT, civil rights, education, labor, and faith groups that sent a letter to President Obama urging him to publicly support and endorse SNDA. And he did!

The Administration’s announcement of its support of SDNA and SSIA was timed to coincide with a screening of the new documentary film “Bully” at the White House. I was lucky enough to attend the screening, where Lee Hirsch, the director, and many of the students and families featured in the film spoke poignantly about bullying and harassment in schools, and urged audience members to work to eradicate it.

Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also addressed the crowd. Jarrett described her experience watching the film with her mother, and provided an overview of the ways in which the Obama Administration has been working to end bullying and harassment in our nation’s schools — for instance, the Departments of Justice and Education reaching a landmark settlement with the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota under Title IX regarding pervasive bullying and harassment of students who failed to conform to gender stereotypes. (A version of Jarrett’s remarks can be found on the White House blog.) And Secretary Duncan — who has been vocal in his opposition to bullying — referenced the Department of Education’s 2010 guidance on bullying and harassment in schools, which helps clarify schools’ legal obligations to respond to and prevent bullying and harassment.

SDNA and SSIA are necessary to ensure that all students are able to learn in an environment free from harassment, bullying, and fear. I applaud the Obama Administration for using its — pardon the expression — bully pulpit to bring attention to the issue and its support to these bills.

Miss out on the The Ethics of Pinkwashing: LGBT Rights in Israel/Palestine” Panel? Click below to watch the video featuring Professors Katherine Franke, Kendall Thomas, and Vani Natarajan, Humanities and Area Studies Librarian, Barnard College. They visited Israel and Palestine in January, 2012 as part of the first LGBTQ delegation to the West Bank, and offered a “queer take” on Israel/Palestine on Wednesday, April 4, 2012. Moderated by Neta Patrick, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School. Cosponsored with the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

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Tuesday, April 17 – Victor Bolden – “Ricci, Race and the Contested Space of the Workplace”
12:10-1:10pm, JG 102
Join Victor Bolden, Corporation Counsel of the City of New Haven and former General Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for a presentation and discussion on Ricci, Race and the Contested Space of the Workplace: An Inside Perspective on Landmark Title VII Litigation today at 12:10 PM in JG 102.   Pizza will be served. Sponsored by the Center for Institutional and Social Change, cosponsored by the  Diversity and Innovation Seminar and Practicum, Professor Emens’ Employment Discrimination class, and the Center for the Study of Law and Culture.

Tuesday, April 17 -Critical Race Theory Workshop: Race, Class and Critical Race w/Khiara Bridges – “Towards a Theory of State Visibility: Race, Poverty, and Equal Protection”
4:20-6:15pm, JG 546
This week’s speaker is Prof. Khiara Bridges, Boston University School of Law, who will present on “Towards a Theory of State Visibility: Race, Poverty, and Equal Protection”

Wednesday, April 18 – Screening of I Came to Testify (part of the Women, War, and Peace series) and Q&A with director Pamela Hogan
7-9pm, Case Lounge, JG 701
The event will include a screening of I Came to Testify, one of the five episodes in the Women, War & Peace series. I Came to Testify is the moving story of how a group of women imprisoned in the Bosnian town Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. After the screening, there will be commentary and conversation with the filmmaker and Co-creator of Women, War & Peace, Pamela Hogan, and Refik Hodzic of the International Center for Transitional Justice. Discussion will explore the potential and the limitations of the law to transform the gender dynamic of war, and the ways in which a groundbreaking decision at the Hague – while a start – is only one step towards justice and reconciliation. Cosponsored event with the Center for Institutional and Social Change, the Human Rights Institute, the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, the Center for the Study of Law and Culture, and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.

Thursday, April 19 – Deconstructing and Reconstructing Mother: Regulating Motherhood in International and Comparative Perspective Workshop
9am-6pm, Maison Francaise
The Workshop on Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Mother’ explores ways in which, in different political and cultural contexts, definitions of motherhood are being challenged by the concomitant development of assisted reproductive technologies, globalized markets in reproductive services, gender neutralizing norms regarding parenthood, and the transnationalization of everyday life. The Workshop will consist of two one-day meetings (Spring and Fall 2012) and will provide a forum for interdisciplinary and comparative analysis. Participants include: Yasmine Ergas, Institute for the Study of Human Rights & SIPA, Columbia University; Jennifer Hirsch, Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; Claire Achmad, Faculty of Law, Leiden University, The Netherlands, Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand; Wendy Chavkin, Population & Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; Martha Fineman, Emory Law School, Emory University; Suzanne Goldberg, Columbia Law School, Columbia University, Anne Higonnet, Dept. of Art History & Archaeology, Barnard College, Columbia University, Jane Jenson, Dept. of Political Science, University of Montreal; Jenny McGill, Economic and Political Development, School of International & Public Affairs, Columbia University; Sonya Michel, Dept. of History, University of Maryland; Darren Rosenblum, Pace Law School, Pace University; Debora Spar, President, Barnard College, Columbia University; Barbara Stark, School of Law, Hofstra University; Maxine Weisgrau, Economic and Political Development, SIPA, Columbia University; and Viviana Zelizer, Dept. of Sociology, Princeton University. Ccosponsored with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy.
Monday, April 23 and Wednesday, April 25 – BOMBAY/MUMBAI STORIES: Films about Gender, Labor, and the Politics of Visibility
Two film screenings, followed by a discussion with the directors
6pm, Maison Francaise
The Barnard Center for Research on Women presents BOMBAY/MUMBAI STORIES: Films about Gender, Labor, and the Politics of Visibility, exploring questions of gender, labor, the politics of visibility, and subaltern public culture with Mumbai-based documentary film-makers Surabhi Sharma and Paromita Vohra.  This event is part of BCRW’s Transnational Feminisms Initiative. We are grateful for additional support from the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, The Forum on Migration, MESAAS, The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia. These screenings are in conjunction with the seminar “Bombay/Mumbai and Its Urban Imaginaries.”

Q2P
screening & discussion with director Paromita Vohra
Date:  Apr 23, 2012 | 6:00PM
Location:  Maison Francaise, Columbia University
Paromita Vohra will explore gender, the city, and vulnerability with clips from select films, accompanied by a screening of her award-winning documentary Q2P. Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It sifts through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets, watching who has to queue to pee. As the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, we begin to also see the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; we learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions—about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer. Her films as director include Partners in Crime (2011), Morality TV and the Loving Jehad (2007), Where’s Sandra (2005), Work In Progress (2004), Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City (2004), Unlimited Girls (2001), (Women’s News Award, Women’s International Film Festival, Seoul), A Woman’s Place (1998), and Annapurna: Goddess of Food (1995). Her films as writer include the feature Khamosh Pani (Best Film, Locarno Film Festival; Best Screenplay, Kara Film Festival); and the documentaries A Few Things I Know About Her (Silver Conch, MIFF and National Award, Best Film), If You Pause: In A Museum of Craft and Skin Deep. She teaches writing for film at various universities and writes a popular newspaper column in the Sunday Midday.

Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories
screening and discussion with director Surabhi Sharma
Date:  Apr 25, 2012 | 6:00PM
Location:  Event Oval, The Diana Center
Co-Sponsors: The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, The Forum on Migration, MESAAS, The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbiascreening & discussion
Surabhi Sharma will share her debut film, Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories, which documents narratives of gender and informal labor as these relate to the broader processes of deindustrialization.  Sharma will also share scenes from her latest work, Bidesia in Bombayya, a story of Bhojpuri music, migration and mobile phones. Migration is the predominant theme in the music, and the phone is a recurring motif. Mobile phones are also used to circulate the music. And it’s the only way to stay connected to the mothers and wives back home in the village. This film follows two singers in Mumbai who occupy extreme ends of the migrant worker’s vibrant music scene, a taxi-driver chasing his first record deal and Kalpana, the star of the industry.
Surabhi Sharma is an independent film maker. She studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, and made her first film in 2001. She has since produced six films including Aamkar [Turtle People] and Jahaji Music, which explores race, identity and Indian indenture as these are reflected in Caribbean music, as well as three video installations including, most recently, an installation for the Hongkong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.
Surabhi’s films explore a range of subjects, including music and identity, labour and globalization and women’s health. Her films have been screened at various international festivals, and have been awarded at Film South Asia, Nepal; Karachi Film Festival, Pakistan; The Festival of Three Continents, Argentina; Indian Documentary Producers’ Association and Eco-cinema, Greece. Surabhi has written scripts and directed for telefilms and educational films. She has also taught as Visiting Faculty at a range of Institutes and film schools in India.

Thursday, April 26 – Screening of Girlfriend followed by a Q&A with actor Evan Sneider and director Justin Lerner moderated by Elizabeth Emens and Maura Spiegel
6-8:30pm, JG 104
The Future of Disability Studies, a project of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University presents a special film screening of *Girlfriend* (Justin Lerner, 2010) followed by a Q&A with actor Evan Sneider and director Justin Lerner moderated by Elizabeth Emens and Maura Spiegel. Seating is limited. Please arrive early to ensure a seat. Evan is a young man with Down Syndrome who lives with his mother in a poor, working-class town hit hard by the recent economic recession.  When he unexpectedly comes into a large amount of money, Evan uses it to romantically pursue Candy, a girl from town whom he has loved since high school.  Candy, now a barely-employed single mom, is facing financial debt, possible eviction, and the inability to rid herself of Russ, her abusive and volatile ex-boyfriend.  In no position to turn down Evan’s offers of financial support, Candy hesitantly accepts his gifts, which causes the pair to enter a complicated emotional entanglement.  When Russ catches on to Candy and Evan’s relationship, all three of them become intertwined in a complex triangle of secrets, jealousy and revenge.  Despite his many hardships and the seeming impossibility of Candy being able to return his love, Evan struggles to remain a resilient, pure embodiment of human compassion. Sponsored by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, the Willen Seminar of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Columbia Law School, and the Center for American Studies. Accommodations: Columbia University makes every effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. Open captioning, audio description, and a sign language interpreter will be provided at this event. If you require additional disability accommodations, please contact Disability Services at (212) 854-2388 at least five days in advance of the event. Campus access maps are available online here. If you have questions about campus accessibility, please contact Disability Services.

Couldn’t make our our event with Professor Katherine Franke, who returned from a week of working with women lawyers in the West Bank, helping them build a Women’s Committee within the Palestinian Bar Association? Listen to her talk below about what women in Palestine feel are the most pressing Gender Justice issues, how they plan to go about addressing them, and what it means to be a feminist in the West Bank: