American Purpose | April 1, 2022 MY friend Giselle Donnelly is the kind of person whose views, these days, are routinely denounced in elite circles as transphobic. She favors reasonable accommodations for trans people in areas like sports and bathrooms, but she rejects what she calls the “biological silliness” of denying the gender binary. She thinks trans…
Deseret News Magazine | May 2021 IT’S not every day that an atheist witnesses a miracle, but I saw one more than five years ago in Salt Lake City. On March 4, 2015, at a downtown press conference, a group including LGBTQ leaders, representatives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and mostly conservative legislators announced…
The Atlantic | January-February 2018 FRANK Kameny, the last century’s greatest gay-rights activist, filed the first-ever Supreme Court petition challenging discrimination against homosexuals. He led some of the first gay-rights demonstrations. He was the first openly gay congressional candidate. He spearheaded the challenge to the psychiatric establishment’s categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness. He fought tirelessly…
The Advocate | December, 2010 IT SOUNDS like a joke, but it isn’t, and you get your choice of punch lines. So…these college students walk into a mom-and-pop bakery in Indianapolis with an order for rainbow-colored cupcakes and cookies. Seems they’re celebrating National Coming Out Day. The bakery owners turn down the job, saying it violates their…
Journal of Law and Inequality | Summer, 2010 IT IS an honor to be with you today, and there could not be a better moment to talk about law, values, and the meaning of family in a time of tumultuous change. I should begin with a caveat: I am neither a lawyer nor any kind of expert on…
Newsweek International | December 2007 (year-end special issue) MY grandmother, then a 16-year-old Polish Jew, came to America in 1910 and never looked back. Neither did her son, despite vestigial anti-Semitism early in what became a flourishing legal career. Nor did I, her grandson—not, at least, on account of being Jewish. The experience of anti-Semitism…
Salon.com | March 13, 2000 [Pink Pistols, a grass roots movement founded after this article was published, now has (according to its website) 47 Chapters in 30 States and two countries.] ONE NIGHT in the autumn of 1987, in Little Rock, Ark., a boy named Austin Fulk smelled his own death. He was 17, too young to…
Los Angeles Times Book Review | October 31, 1999 TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL in 1999 is to stand on the curb during the New York gay pride parade and feel your eyes water, faster than you can stop them, as row after row of openly homosexual police officers march by, in full uniform. Behind them, supporting…