Written By: Scott Powers
This may be the year that gay political clout comes out of the closet in a Florida governor's race.
Gay activists and others sympathetic to their causes are eyeing the 2014 governor's race as an opening, with a Democratic candidate, Charlie Crist, who professes to support the call for equal rights for marriage and workplace anti-discrimination.
Written By: Steve Rothaus
In a heartening show of unity and economic good sense, 11 major employers in Florida have joined with Equality Florida, the state's leading gay rights group, to push for a state law banning workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Written By: Michael E. Miller
1. Tell us a little about yourself...
Written By: Steve Rothaus
Equality Florida on Monday announced the launch of Florida Business Coalition for a Competitive Workforce, a group of businesses “aimed at passing a bipartisan bill that would ban anti-gay and gender-based discrimination.”
Among the coalition members are Walt Disney World, Darden and Wells Fargo.
Written by John McDonald
Equality Florida CEO Nadine Smith said the State’s largest civil rights organization would be in court next year as they seek to achieve ambitious goals for the future.
Smith, a longtime human rights activist from Panama City, said the way to bring about same-sex marriage in Florida was through the judicial branch of the State’s government.
Written by John Kennedy
More than a year after the election of Florida’s first openly gay legislators, advocates for the state’s gay and lesbian community are stepping up their focus on the Capitol, advancing a compact but potentially groundbreaking agenda.
The movement had its origins in October, when the advocacy group, Equality Florida, began exchanging ideas with voters, holding its first legislative town hall in the Broward County city of Wilton Manors.
Gay marriage supporters say Floridians’ perception of the practice has changed so much in the past five years that they predict marriage equality will come to the state by 2016. Advocacy group Equality Florida is planning a legal strategy at the same time it continues a public opinion campaign and pushes new protections for LGBT people in the statehouse.
Emily Kaiser is a South Florida native, and she’s about to graduate from Florida State University in May. But when she thinks about her dream job, she says, she doesn’t see it being in the Sunshine State.
Written By: Mitch Perry
Although significant strides have been made in the professional sports world in recent years regarding gay rights (think of how many players and teams got behind the "It Gets Better" campaign created by Dan Savage), it's still not exactly an arena of progressive thoughts on such issues.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in June, that didn't mean that same-sex marriage was suddenly the law in Florida or the rest of the other states that haven't passed marriage equality legislation. Nor did it make same-sex couples automatically eligible for marriage-based federal benefits.