Press Release

(NEW YORK, November 29, 2001) — In its sixth annual World AIDS Day report card Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund highlights HIV prevention efforts, and flunks the Bush Administration for its just-say-no approach to sex education for young people at risk of infection.

Surgeon General David Satcher earned an “A” for his political courage in calling for thorough and medically accurate sexual health education with his “Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior” issued earlier this year.

(NEW YORK, Monday, November 26, 2001) --In a joint letter to the United States Department of Justice, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Empire State Pride Agenda, the Human Rights Campaign, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force urged Attorney General John Ashcroft to act fairly in compensating all surviving family members of September 11th victims, including lesbian and gay survivors and their children.

(SALT LAKE CITY, November 13, 2001) — A long, expensive court battle against student-run groups intended to support gay youth and their friends has ended for the state of Utah, which spent a quarter million dollars defending a Salt Lake City school board ban, the students’ lawyers said Tuesday.

(LOS ANGELES, Thursday, November 1, 2001) -- The Washington Supreme Court has ruled that a state doctrine, which has provided protection to unmarried heterosexual partners for years, also protects lesbian and gay families, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund said Thursday.

(New York, Monday, November 25, 2002) - Saying that so-called “abstinence-only” programs are “nothing short of a public health hazard for our nation’s youth,” Lambda Legal today asked Miss America 2003, Erika Harold, to clarify her views supporting abstinence education and requested information from the Miss America Organization on three presentations about abstinence that Harold made to school students in recent days.

(NEW YORK, November 1, 2001) — In the latest phase of an ongoing campaign to undo the Americans with Disabilities Act, hearings begin next week at the U.S. Supreme Court in a new round of legal attacks spearheaded by corporate employers, said Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a participant in the three upcoming cases. The corporate campaign against civil rights protections for people with disabilities has a new ally - the Bush Administration.

(New York, Monday, December 2, 2002) - The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will hear Lambda Legal's case challenging the constitutionality of Texas's "Homosexual Conduct” law, which criminalizes oral and anal sex by consenting gay couples and is used widely to justify discrimination against lesbians and gay men.

(Atlanta, Friday, December 20, 2002) - A state commission on judicial conduct today recommended that the Mississippi Supreme Court penalize a local judge who publicly advocated that gays and lesbians should be institutionalized. The recommendation is in response to an ethics complaint Lambda Legal filed with the commission earlier this year, saying that the judge’s comments clearly violated the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct and indicated that he would not decide cases involving gays and lesbians fairly and impartially.

(NEW YORK, October 30, 2001) — Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, on behalf of seven Arkansas lesbians and gay men, is urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to strike down the state’s archaic ban on intimate relations between consenting adults of the same sex.

In its legal brief filed Monday, Lambda argues that it is wrong for the government to single out gay people with a criminal law it does not apply to non-gay people and to try to dictate highly intimate, personal relationships.