SGN Jan 19, 2018 - Part 1

Seattle Gay News

Department of Homeland Security asks for criminal charges against officials of sanctuary cities

by Mike Andrew SGN Staff Writer

Donald Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, told the Senate

Committee on January 16 that she has asked federal prosecutors to find ways to file criminal charges against public officials in sanctuary cities.

Lambda Legal analysis:

by Mike Andrew SGN Staff Writer

MATHILDE KRIM page 11

by Mike Andrew SGN Staff Writer

Help create a social and support network for LGBT veterans

Hello,

My name is Johnnie Hawkins, the LGBT Coordinator for the Veterans Benefits Administration. My colleague Josh Wheeldon and I are looking to connect with community providers, veterans, and LGBT allies in the Puget Sound area to discuss creating a network that helps LGBT veterans. Our goal is to increase awareness and provide education and support around issues faced by LGBT veterans in the community.

Sincerely,

If you are interested, there will be a meet and greet on Friday, February 23, from 10am-12noon at the Wounded Warrior Project, 2200 Alaskan Way, Ste 130 along the waterfront in downtown Seattle (in the Belltown neighborhood).

LETTER OF INTENT FROM DREW PARADISCO TO THE IMPERIAL SOVEREIGN COURT OF SEATTLE

Dear Monarchs and Members of the Board,

It is with great honor that I respectfully submit my official application to run for the position of Olympia 47, Empress of Seattle.

It has been my aspiration to become Empress and serve my community since I started doing drag and even more since I stepped up as Miss Gay Seattle 51 and had the pleasure to see strong community leaders who have held the prestigious title of Olympia and so many more who have put their selves in service of community and charity. I have always had a strong desire to serve my community and give back in any capacity within my power. I have had the privilege of learning from so many in our court system. The honor to wear our state crown is an epic responsibility that I have

given a great deal of thought and energy. If I should be blessed to wear the State crown I would do so with great reverence and respect for all of our great monarchs, court members and community.

I stand in front of you with a strong desire in my heart to make a difference. I bring with me a great many years of life experience, drag experience, community outreach and a connection build within my family, our court and many communities throughout Washington. I have held the titles of Miss Gay Seattle and Miss Gay Washington and believe in my heart that I am ready to represent our system and the title of Empress with courage, dignity, respect and unity.

If elected Empress, I intend to continue to support fundraising, promoting our court system and my many fundraising

events I have set in place. My personal focus would be to stay my course of uplifting and supporting our youth. Something that is near and dear to my heart. No matter where I may be in this world my heart and soul will always be in service to our youth.

I have in place our very successful Disney event, “The D.” A show we do twice a year in Seattle and Tacoma, with the potential to do it in many other communities in Washington. I also have in place my Neverland show for youth to perform and raise money for the youth, teaching them early on how to give back. With many other events on the horizon, including the potential of a once a month event to raise funds. I Promise to hold myself to the great standard of those that have come before me, to represent our city and state with style, elegance and glamour within our realm and while trav-

eling to other cities and states within the international court system.

For your consideration,

The Divine and Surreal Drew Paradisco Peters St Laurent

[NOTE: The Imperial Court of Seattle’s “Announcement of Candidates” show will be held this Sunday, January 21, doors at 6pm, show at 6:30pm at R-Place, 619 E Pine St. Voting Day will be held on Sunday, February 11, from noon to 5pm, at Bishops Barbershop Capitol Hill, 1200 E Pike St. All King County residents with valid ID are invited to cast their votes.]

LETTER OF INTENT FROM PAUL PARADISCO TO THE IMPERIAL SOVEREIGN COURT OF SEATTLE

I, The Surreal Paul Eyesli Peters Howe Paradisco respectfully submit my letter of intent and application for the position of Rainier 44 to the Imperial Sovereign Court of Seattle, the Olympic and Rainier Empire membership, the Board of Directors and the community of Seattle.

I am here today with the strong desire to serve my community and make a difference. I have been a present member of the court since becoming Mr. Gay Seattle 39. I have been inspired by the charitable acts and the feeling of family within the court throughout the International Court System. Past monarchs of Seattle have inspired me to be a leader for the Imperial Sovereign

Court of Seattle, the Olympic and Rainier Empire. As Emperor, I will create a strong Imperial family providing an understanding of responsibility and requirements. As a board member, I am aware of the responsibilities of the position of Emperor, as well as the responsibilities and requirements of other titleholders. If elected, I will create an environment to empower and inspire our titleholders to do and to be the best they are for their community. I plan to assist them with their requirements to ensure they successfully complete their year. I will travel and respectfully represent the Court of Seattle with honesty and integrity. I will raise

funds for other 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations such as Youth Care and Lifelong AIDS Alliance. I will also focus on more direct physical involvement in our community, i.e. volunteering at soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

I promise to reign with dignity, honesty, integrity and respect. I am ready to be Rainier 44. I invite each of you to take this journey with me and vote for me, The Surreal Paul Eyesli Peters Howe Paradisco for Rainier 44. Come out and vote! Make your voice count!

Paul Paradisco

[NOTE: The Imperial Court of Seattle’s “Announcement of Candidates” show will be held this Sunday, January 21, doors at 6pm, show at 6:30pm at R-Place, 619 E Pine St. Voting Day will be held on Sunday, February 11, from noon to 5pm, at Bishops Barbershop Capitol Hill, 1200 E Pike St. All King County residents with valid ID are invited to cast their votes.]

Join Lid I-5 for a year of creativity and progress

Hello Melrose Neighbors!

Happy new year! Below is an invitation from our friends at Lid I-5 to attend a public workshop this Sunday, kicking-off a year long design program to explore possibilities for the new real estate that lid over I-5 would provide.

Hello,

You are cordially invited to participate in a yearlong design program, called the Central Hills Triangle Collaborative, which is focused on lidding more of I-5 in Seattle’s urban core. This program is made possible by a generous $48,000 Seattle Department of Neighborhoods grant and sponsorship by the Seattle Parks Foundation.

The Collaborative kicks off with a public charrette/workshop on Sunday, January 21, 9am-1pm, at the 12th Avenue Arts building (1620 12th Avenue; in the upstairs Pike-Pine room). We’ll have teams of professional designers, such as engineers and landscape architects, developing concepts for freeway lids in Downtown, First Hill, Capitol Hill, and Denny Triangle. The general public is also invited and light refreshments will be provided.

We’d be delighted to have your feedback and insight as a property stakeholder and/or resident in the study area. The study area includes the portion of I-5 directly opposite your building.

If you are interested but cannot attend the duration, we expect the team presentations to begin at noon.

We’re asking all participants to RSVP online – https://docs.google.com/forms/d/ e/1FAIpQLScQGP4gZ50Lt1nQmtsIhU3M4EGsGulX_bKpDKigDWPcw-NZQ/ viewform – https://www.lidi5.org/ Some background on Lid I-5: The Convention Center has offered

funds to the City of Seattle to conduct an engineering/feasibility study of lidding Interstate 5 in the downtown area. Lids are bridge-type structures that can support everything from parks to housing and nonresidential development while also reducing noise and air pollution. There are about a dozen lids completed or planned in King

County alone, and our website has info on many examples nationwide. Locally this community effort is endorsed by several City Councilmembers and state legislators along with many local organizations We look forward to hearing if you are interested in joining us on January 21.

Best regards, Scott Bonjukian Co-Chair, Lid I-5 Steering Committee www.lidi5.org

“My greatest AIDS hero died a few hours ago,” activist Peter Staley wrote on his Facebook page the day after her death.

“Dr. Mathilde Krim, founder of AmfAR, warrior against homophobia and AIDSrelated stigma, dedicated defender of science and public health, and mother-figure and mentor to countless activists, will leave a deep hole in the continued fight against AIDS – a fight she dedicated her life to.”

Krim was born in Como, Italy, and received her PhD in biology from the University of Geneva in 1953.

As a college student in Switzerland, Krim converted to Judaism. While there, she assisted members of the Zionist organization Irgun in obtaining weapons from former French resistance members, prior to Israel’s independence.

From 1953 to 1959, she pursued research

in cytogenetics and cancer-causing viruses at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where she was a member of the team that first developed a method for the prenatal determination of sex.

After divorcing her first husband, David Danon, Krim moved to New York and joined the research staff of Cornell University Medical School. In 1958 she married Arthur B. Krim, head of United Artists and later founder of Orion Pictures.

He was also an active member of the Democratic Party and advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter, and the couple became active supporters of the African-American civil rights movement, the movements for independence in Rhodesia and South Africa, the nascent LGBT rights movement, and many other civil liberties and human rights movements.

In 1962 Krim became a research scientist at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, and from 1981 to 1985,

she was the director of its interferon lab.

Soon after the first cases of a mysterious new disease that would later be called AIDS were reported in 1981, Krim recognized that the disease raised grave scientific and medical questions and would have important social and political consequences. As both a scientists and an activist, she dedicated herself to increasing the public’s awareness of AIDS and to a better understanding of its cause, its modes of transmission, and its epidemiologic pattern.

In 1983, Krim established the AIDS Medical Foundation. Later the foundation merged with a similar organization and became the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmfAR). Partnering with Elizabeth Taylor, Krim raised huge amounts of money to fund the organization, as well as contributing generous amounts of her own fortune.

She also used her considerable public relations skills to raise awareness about AIDS and secure public funds for AIDS research.

“As an HIV-positive man who has been living with the virus for over 13 years, I know that I would not be alive today without the efforts of Dr. Mathilde Krim,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson wrote in a statement.

“I met her during my first trip to New York City, at age 18. Little did I know the important role she would play in my life. My thoughts and prayers go to the family and friends of Dr. Krim. Her legacy will live on in the countless lives she saved.”

Krim was awarded 16 doctorates honoris causa and has received numerous other honors and distinctions. In August 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, in recognition of her “extraordinary compassion and commitment.” In 2003, Krim received the Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged, given out annually by the Jefferson Awards.

SANCTUARY

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Sanctuary cities like Seattle, Burien, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia limit the cooperation of their local police departments with federal immigration law enforcement.

Nielsen told the Judiciary Committee that sanctuary policies were “putting my [ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers at risk,” according to the Washington Times

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, who presumably would be targeted for criminal charges if Nielsen gets her way, had a curt reply for the Trump administration:

“A message for Donald Trump: Do. Your. Job. Target real threats, not those who disagree with you. Seattle is happy to see you in court… but you might want to read through the Constitution first,” she wrote in an email to the SGN

The Trump administration has promised to withhold federal money from municipalities that refuse to give immigration authorities access to jails, to identify undocumented prisoners, and to tip off federal authorities when a detained undocumented person is about to be released.

After California passed a statewide sanctuary law on January 1, Tom Homan, acting director of ICE, told Fox News that public officials should be held “personally accountable” for crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

“We’ve got to start charging some of these politicians with crimes,” Homan said in his January 2 appearance with Fox host Neil Cavuto.

Homan made similar comments to the Washington Times last July, stating that local officials were complicit in human smuggling if they shielded immigrants through sanctuary policies.

group representing employers – is pushing a new federal rule to make tips the property of restaurant owners, rather than workers.

According to one study by the Economic Policy Institute, “employers would pocket $6.1 billion of workers’ tips” under the new rule.

Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization that advocates for higher wages and better working conditions for restaurant workers, is urging all tipped workers to share their stories and opposition to the proposed rule at https:// actionnetwork.org/letters/add-your-nameto-tell-department-of-labor-we-wont-letyou-take-workers-tips.

Local ROC organizers can be contacted via their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ROCSeattle.

The Trump rule would overturn decades of federal and state laws and precedents safeguarding tips as the property of the workers who earn them.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was amended in 1974 to clarify that tips

HHS RULE

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of violating anti-discrimination protections healthcare workers who refuse to perform certain procedures, such as abortion, or who refuse to treat transgender patients, or to provide other services because of moral objections. Lambda Legal’s analysis shows that the rule will almost certainly result in the denial of medical care to people and cause potentially life-threatening harm, in

are to be retained by the employee, except when a valid tip-pooling arrangement is in place. In 2011, Pres. Obama’s Labor Department reinforced the FLSA and over 40 years of custom and practice by federal and state agencies, affirming that tips are always the property of the employee.

Tipped restaurant workers already have the lowest federal minimum wage in the country, at just $2.13. If it is adopted, the new Trump regulation would force a vulnerable workforce further into economic instability.

Even in progressive jurisdictions like Seattle, where the locally mandated minimum wage is much higher, workers in the hospitality and food service industries still rely on tips for a substantial part of their total income.

ROC and the National Employment Law Project (NELP) analyzed the most recent public data available on wages for two commonly tipped occupations – waiters and bartenders – to determine just how much these restaurant workers depend on earnings from tips.

The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) asks respondents to report their hourly wage, their usual hours,

violation of numerous laws and regulations that prohibit such discrimination. The analysis further shows that the creation of this unit is part of a pattern of Trump administration actions stripping LGBT people of civil rights, often in the name of religious freedom.

“It shocks the conscience that our government would invite healthcare providers to discriminate against their patients, but this is exactly what HHS’s new unit is designed to do,” said Lambda Legal CEO Rachel B. Tiven. “We know

and their weekly earnings. From these data, ROC and NELP estimated the share of total earnings that come from tips.

They found that servers and bartenders have annual median earnings of $19,990 and $20,800, respectively.

But waiters and bartenders earn more in tips than they do from what employers pay them as an hourly base wage. The median share of hourly earnings that come from tips account for 58.5% of wait staff earnings and 54% of bartender earnings.

On a monthly basis, tips add up. The median monthly tip earnings for wait staff and bartenders are $867, or $10,404 per year, suggesting that many of these workers depend on their tip earnings to pay for essential expenses such as rent and utilities.

Even with tips, workers in these occupations earn very little on an hourly and annual basis. A recent Economic Policy Institute and University of California, Berkeley study examining CPS data found that median hourly earnings for waiters and bartenders are a meager $10.11 per hour, including tips. And this average includes data from highwage cities like Seattle and SeaTac.

Workers of color make even less. Black workers in these occupations have a median

that people will be denied care as a result because discrimination against LGBT people is already widespread and LGBT people have already been turned away from hospitals and doctors’ offices. The Orwellian “Conscience and Religious Freedom” unit simply provides guidance on how they can try to get away with it.”

Read the analysis at https://www.lambdalegal.org/health-care-analysis Lambda Legal encourages anyone who experiences harassment, denial of service, or other discrimination in health care

hourly wage of $9.62, including tips, and Latino workers earn $9.93, suggesting that taking gratuities away from tipped workers will disproportionately impact workers of color and their families.

According to ROC, Washington state laws – like I-1433, passed in 2016 – may offer some protection to local workers, but “12 million workers in the US will be impacted by this in one way or another, and if the federal law is changed, it just incentivizes local interests, the Restaurant and Hospitality Association, for example, to lobby for statewide ‘reform.’”

“I think the tip language in 1433 is an excellent example of how individuals and organizations advocating for worker rights won language in 2016 through a people’s initiative that is now critical to protecting us from national shifts over a year later,” ROC organizer Elena Perez told the SGN

“We never know how federal laws and rules will change, especially in these times, but we have been successful in laying the groundwork to protect worker standards here, and we must continue to do so now and in the future!”

services on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, or HIV status to visit www.lambdalegal.org/healthcarehelp or call toll-free at 866-542-8336.

Lambda Legal is a national organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and everyone living with HIV through impact litigation, education and public policy work.

Courtesy of Lambda Legal