Media Center

(New York, NY – May 22, 2015) According to news reports, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has rejected Texas’s assurance that it will work to comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act standards. The rejection is based on the absence of a form that Texas was supposed to submit promising that the state would dedicate at least five percent of federal grant money toward implementation of the PREA standards.  Instead Governor Abbott wrote that Texas will work to fully implement PREA “wherever feasible” – a guarantee DOJ deemed insufficient.

(Los Angeles, May 21, 2015) – Robert M. Gates, president of the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, today announced that the national organization would no longer enforce its ban on local Boy Scout councils allowing gay men to join the organization and serve in leadership positions, noting that the organization could no longer “ignore the social, political, and judicial changes taking place in our country.”

(Madison, WI, May 13, 2015) – Today Lambda Legal filed a federal lawsuit on behalf Chelsea and Jessamy Torres, a married lesbian couple, seeking a birth certificate listing both mothers as parents of their son, born in March 2015.

“The continued push for such blatantly discriminatory legislation illustrates that the Texas legislature is determined to demean LGBT people and defy the law set by the highest court in the country. Texas does not and should not get to pick and choose which parts of the U.S. Constitution it will follow.”