Stand up for LGBTQ2 Alaskan Rights
Take Action this Week on
TWO House Bills in the Alaska Legislature
Updated Monday March 13
When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020 – which found that “sex” as described under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Right Act included sexual orientation and gender identity, and thus protected LGBTQ2 Americans from discrimination–the Alaska State Commission on Human Rights (ASCHR) followed suit, and in 2021, updated their guidelines to institute expanded civil rights protections for, and allow them to field complaints from LGBTQ2 Alaskans in the categories of: employment, housing, credit, government services, and public accommodations.
But recently, under the advice of Alaska’s current attorney general, ASCHR has quietly deleted this expanded set of protections – the reasoning being that ASCHR should only take up employment discrimination claims on the basis of “sex,” since Bostock v. Clayton County was a case about employment discrimination.
Almost immediately, ASCHR has dropped investigations-in-progress, and are no longer fielding complaints pertaining to anything other than workplace discrimination. Because Alaska is one of many states that has yet to enshrine equal protections under statutes, Bostock v. Clayton County once signified a hopeful path forward for marginalized LGBTQ2 Alaskans seeking to live authentically without fear of discrimination.
To quietly strip most of these protections away–as well as options for recourse–is undemocratic, sinister, and hateful. We cannot allow the rights of the LGBTQ2 community to continue to be at the receiving end of a pointless and hateful culture war. We must continue to demand and fight for equal protections under the law that cannot be stripped by the whim of the few.