Joe.My.God. LGBT News

Politico reports: President Donald Trump will not release records of visitors to the White House, his administration announced Friday, breaking with President Barack Obama and raising concerns about transparency. The Obama administration had posted the visitor logs online. But White House communications director Michael Dubke said in a statement Trump had decided to withhold them because of “the grave national …

PAGING NIKKI HALEY. PAGING REX TILLERSON. The Associated Press reports: In the face of growing international concern about reported detentions and killings of homosexuals in Chechnya, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman says the Kremlin does not have confirmed information about the matter. The respected Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported this month that police in the predominantly Muslim republic rounded up …

Bloomberg reports: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a chemical-weapons attack in Syria that provoked U.S. missile strikes on the Middle Eastern country may have been orchestrated. “There’s growing evidence that this was staged,” Lavrov said at a Moscow news conference with his Iranian and Syrian counterparts on Friday. Publications including in the U.S. and the U.K. have highlighted “many …

Via press release from the ACLU: The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of North Carolina, and Lambda Legal today condemned the decision by the Department of Justice to dismiss its lawsuit challenging House Bill 2, the discriminatory North Carolina law that banned many transgender people from restrooms and other public facilities matching their gender. The law also prohibited local …

This doesn’t seem very surprising: Same-sex marriage has been the law of the land for nearly two years — and in some states for even longer — but researchers can already detect positive health outcomes among couples who have tied the knot, a University of Washington study finds. For years, studies have linked marriage with happiness among heterosexual couples. But …

CNN reports: Amid increasing tension with North Korea, Vice President Mike Pence will travel to South Korea Saturday, on a scheduled trip as part of his first official visit to the Asia-Pacific region. The trip comes at a critical moment for the Trump administration and US allies, after escalated posturing from North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un and growing concerns …

Clip recap: Gay men are being rounded up and killed in Chechnya, and US officials seem to be turning a blind eye. A European court just ruled against the mandatory sterilization of trans citizens but the practice will continue indefinitely. And same-sex couples just won new protections for adoption, and for housing in a case that could completely change how …

The Guardian reports: Few rules have been bent, manipulated and outright broken quite like the Eurovision song contest’s ban on “lyrics, speeches [or] gestures of a political or similar nature”. Over the six decades of the competition there have been peace, war and the fall of the Berlin Wall – but this year politics has gripped Eurovision in a more …

The Asbury Park Press reports: New Jersey governor hopeful Phil Murphy told LGBT leaders in Asbury Park Thursday that having a Democrat in office would help defend gains made by the community. While speaking at the headquarters of Garden State Equality, the state’s largest LGBT advocacy and education organization, Murphy said that President Donald Trump’s election had been “worse than …

The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump’s tweets are adding fuel to a “vicious cycle” of tensions on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea’s vice foreign minister told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Friday. The official added that if the U.S. shows any sign of “reckless” military aggression, Pyongyang is ready to launch a pre-emptive strike of its own. …