ANNAPOLIS, Md. – The Maryland Department of Education says it is looking to add curriculum that explores the history of the LGBTQ rights and disability rights movements.

The move comes after a push by lawmakers earlier this month to expand the state's history studies to include lessons focused on LGBTQ Americans and other groups that have been historically underrepresented in the classroom.

State Delegate Eric Luedtke, a Democrat, organized a letter to the school system, which was signed by 34 other delegates and 13 state senators.

Luedtke says the Education Department told him on Friday it was committed to making the change.

"We're talking about the struggle for civil rights in the 20th century,” he states. “And we do a very good job in our classrooms of teaching that struggle in the context of civil rights for black and Latino Americans and for women. But we just happen to have left out these groups, as have many states."

Over the past eight years, California, New Jersey, Colorado and Oregon have expanded their education guidelines to include the history of the LGBTQ rights movement. Many other states are also considering including these lessons into their classrooms.

Maryland's Department of Education says it expects a draft framework for the expanded curriculum to be available in 2020.

California was the first state to include gay history lessons in its schools in 2011. Many critics at the time said the state's new guidelines were a way to indoctrinate students into gay culture. But Luedtke disagrees.

"Telling the truth isn't indoctrination,” he states. “It's telling the truth. You know, this is history, history is the story of the past and these are events from our past that are important to our history.

“I think people who believe it's indoctrination are coming from a place where they don't want these stories told for their own political reasons."

Luedtke says teaching LGBTQ rights history will help students become more accepting of gay classmates.

The Human Rights Campaign's 2018 LGBTQ Youth Report found that only 26% of gay youths surveyed around the country feel safe in their classrooms.


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June is Pride Month, and businesses are showing their support for the LGBTQ community in a number of ways. But some corporations are being called out for also supporting anti-LGBTQ candidates for office.

Ian Morton is the executive director of the Q Center in Portland. He said his community has come a long way from the days when participants in Pride parades couldn't show their faces for fear of retaliation from their employers.

But he added that the hypocrisy of some companies' support this month is disappointing.

"Seeing organizations who are willing to stand against the community that they would purport to serve or to celebrate," said Morton, "makes the LGBTQ+ community very wary of where they put their support, and whether that rainbow flag that goes up for the 30 days - if that's actually meaningful, or if it's just performative."

A report from last year found 25 major corporations that showed support during pride had also given a total of $10 million in donations to support members of Congress who earned a 'zero' rating on the Human Rights Campaign scorecard.

Craig Hill is the client and treasury manager with Beneficial State Bank, which works with the Q Center. He said his bank strives to work in service of social equity and environmental sustainability.

Hill said he thinks it's misleading for companies to hoist rainbow flags and, at the same time, support discriminatory policies at the legislative level.

"Some of the nation's biggest banks, for example, fund anti-LGBTQ+ policies with their political donations," said Hill, "despite publicly supporting those agendas and sponsoring Pride Month events. It's really a form of 'rainbow washing,' if we're being honest."

Hill said people can use websites like Mighty Deposit to find out how their financial institutions are using their money.

Morton said it's helpful to know he's working with companies that align with his own values.

"Having those moments whenever you recognize that the folks you're doing business with actually have concern about your community's wellbeing and want to show up in meaningful ways," said Morton, "that helps folks, especially in the nonprofit sector and in the advocacy sector, to give them the energy to soldier on."

Oral arguments were held this week on an appeal blocking an Arkansas law from going into effect. The law would prevent young people from getting gender-affirming health care.

Act 626 of 2021 banned health care professionals from providing or referring transgender youth for medical care.

The ACLU of Arkansas filed suit against the state, and a federal judge in the Eastern District of Arkansas granted a preliminary injunction last July.

Now, the state is appealing the decision, saying gender-affirming care is experimental and potentially harmful to youth.

Sarah Everett, policy director for the ACLU of Arkansas, said the clients they represent in the case believe this kind of care has been lifesaving.

"Gender dysphoria is a difficult problem to live with as a young person, especially when you add the kind of bullying and discrimination they face on top of that," Everett observed. "Gender-affirming care helps to bring their physical appearance into alignment with their gender identity."

The Arkansas Legislature overrode a veto of the act last year by Gov. Asa Hutchinson. The act would also permit private insurers to refuse to cover gender-affirming care for transgender people of any age.

Arkansas was the first state to pass a ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. Since then, an Alabama law has gone into effect and lawmakers in other states have introduced similar legislation. Everett sees the case as a possible litmus test for health care access for transgender youth on a national level.

"We hope that our District Court decision would deter other states from doing the same," Everett stressed. "And we hope that a good decision from the Eighth Circuit will cement the fact that kids have a right to receive this care, not to be discriminated against simply because they're transgender."

U.S. District Court Judge James M. Moody, Jr., who temporarily blocked Act 626 from going into effect, is scheduled to hear the case, Brandt v. Rutledge, this October.

A leading LGBTQ organization in Iowa said community members won't back down after authorities in Idaho blocked a planned riot at a Pride event there. Thirty-one members of a white nationalist group were arrested Saturday after law-enforcement officials got word of the plans.

Keenan Crow, director of policy and advocacy for One Iowa Action, said it follows more heated rhetoric in the past year amid a push by some conservatives to adopt policies deemed hostile toward those who identify as LGBTQ. They feel politicians on the right are fostering a more toxic environment.

"Painting the LGBTQ community with this kind of defamatory brush, it's not a surprise they would then gear up and try to disrupt an event in this way," Crow asserted.

But Crow noted LGBTQ people are used to hostilities and won't be intimidated from celebrating their sexual identity during Pride festivals in Iowa and elsewhere. In a number of cases, elected officials behind policies in question will cite reasons such as religious beliefs, and Iowa recently joined the group of states to approve a so-called "transgender sports" law.

Among Iowa leaders, the group pointed out recent comments by Gov. Kim Reynolds do not help the situation. At the GOP State Convention, Reynolds suggested "elementary school lessons on pronouns" are hurting public education. But Crow countered it is a great place to start in teaching people how to treat LGBTQ people as equals.

"One of those basic elements of respect is getting somebody's name right, their pronouns right," Crow explained. "But if they're being demonized by the top government official in the state as somehow harmful, yeah, that's going to put a damper on our ability to make sure that people are treated with basic decency and respect."

And while Reynolds' comments might not be as extreme as other conservative politicians, Crow added it appears she is trying to ramp up the rhetoric in the current environment. This spring, a Des Moines-area school district issued a diversity audit, which found racial and anti-LGBTQ slurs were a "pressing concern."