Liam Stack

His death was announced by the Utah Department of Corrections, which did not give the specific cause. In a statement, the department said he died at the Utah State Prison in Draper, roughly 20 miles south of Salt Lake City.

The case against Lafferty, who was convicted of two counts of murder, became widely known after it was featured in the 2003 book “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith” by Jon Krakauer.

The book, which detailed Lafferty’s brutal crime, messianic delusions and decades of appeals, was criticized as anti-religion by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Therese Michelle Day, a federal public defender representing Lafferty, said his legal team was preparing to appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court at the time of his death. Day said no execution date had been set, but Richard Piatt, a spokesman for the Utah attorney general’s office, said his execution most likely would have happened next year.

Lafferty had chosen to die by firing squad, but Day said he had not been mentally fit to stand trial.

“Mr. Lafferty believed his incarceration and conviction were the result of a conspiracy between the state, the church, and unseen spiritual forces, including the spirit of the trial judge’s deceased father, among others,” Day said. “He believed that all of his attorneys were working against him, and that one attorney was his reincarnated sister who later became possessed by an evil spirit.”

“A person suffering from this level of mental illness and delusional thinking is not competent to assist his counsel throughout his legal proceedings,” she added.

Sean D. Reyes, the attorney general of Utah, said in a statement that the state had “labored for decades to provide justice” for Lafferty’s victims.

“That the wheels of justice turn so slowly in cases like this is cruel and tragic,” Reyes said. “Now that Mr. Lafferty is facing his Maker, perhaps ultimate justice will be realized and there will finally be some closure for the family of the victims.”

The events leading to the killings began in 1983, when Lafferty was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for his increasingly extreme religious views, according to court records. Those views included an embrace of polygamy, which the church banned in 1890.

Angered over his excommunication and the collapse of his marriage, Lafferty formed a breakaway polygamous sect with his brothers called the School of the Prophets in 1984. The brothers claimed they received messages from God.

Lafferty said one of those messages told him his ex-wife, who left him and took their six children to Florida, had been the bride of Satan in a previous life.

In another message, he said, he was told that four people caused his excommunication and divorce, including his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, “who he believed would grow up to be just as despicable as her mother,” according to court documents.

God told him to kill all four of them, Lafferty said. So on July 24, 1984 — a state holiday that commemorates the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley — Lafferty and a group of followers, including his brother Daniel, went to Brenda’s house in American Fork, Utah.

They beat her, strangled her with a vacuum cord and slit her throat. Then they slit her baby’s throat, court records said.

But after killing Brenda and her child, they decided not to kill the other two people named in Lafferty’s vision. Instead, the group fled the Salt Lake City area for Nevada, where Lafferty and Daniel were arrested the following month.

(Daniel Charles Lafferty, 71, is serving a life sentence at Utah State Prison for his role in the killings, according to the Department of Corrections.)

Ronald Lafferty’s mental competence to stand trial quickly became an issue in the case and would be the focus of his subsequent appeal efforts.

He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 1985. But in 1991, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Lafferty’s convictions and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong legal standard had been used to determine his mental competence.

Prosecutors again charged Lafferty with the killings, but a competency hearing in November 1992 found him to be mentally unfit to stand trial owing to mental illness. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital until a new competency hearing was held in February 1994 and he was found competent to stand trial.

In April 1996, he was again convicted of the killings, and again sentenced to death.

At Lafferty’s second trial, his brother Daniel claimed to have killed both victims, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. But another member of the group, Charles Carnes, told the court that as the group drove to Nevada, Ronald Lafferty confessed to killing Brenda and thanked Daniel for killing Erica.

“‘I can’t believe I killed her,’” Carnes quoted Ronald Lafferty as saying, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. “‘Thank you, brother, for doing the baby because I don’t think I had it in me.’”

Lafferty filed several appeals at the state and federal levels, the most recent of which was denied in August. His lawyer, Day, said in a statement on Monday that he had never received proper treatment for what she described as a severe mental illness.

“Through it all Mr. Lafferty, himself, never believed that he was mentally ill or incompetent,” she said. “One expert said that if he was guilty of faking anything, he was guilty of pretending to be normal when he was not.”

This article originally appeared in

Ronald Lafferty, Mormon Cult Leader on Death Row for Murder, Dies of Natural Causes

Ronald Lafferty, a Mormon fundamentalist on death row for what he claimed were the divinely inspired murders of his sister-in-law and baby niece in 1984, died of natural causes in prison on Monday. He was 78.

“Like that Old Testament prophet, he stood against the corrupt leadership of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,” Clinton said, to a roar of applause from the congregation. “And he looked out for the vulnerable among us. He lifted up the next generation of leaders. And he even worked a few miracles.”

Cummings, D-Md., who was serving his 13th term in the House of Representatives, died last week in Baltimore at 68. As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he was a powerful figure in Washington and earned the ire of Trump for his role in the impeachment inquiry. The president did not attend the funeral.

Even from his hospital bed, Cummings was said to be joining strategy discussions with colleagues. Clinton, the former secretary of state, alluded to that determination, even in his final days, in her remarks Friday.

“Toward the end of his life, he said, ‘I am begging the American people to pay attention to what is going on, because if you want to have a democracy intact for your children, and your children’s children, and generations yet unborn, we have got to guard this moment,’” she said. “‘This is our watch.’”

She added: “‘When we are dancing with the angels, the question will be asked,’ he said, ‘In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?’”

Cummings’ body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, where he was praised by lawmakers from both parties. He was the first African American lawmaker to receive such an honor.

“Elijah wrote his funeral program and decided who he wanted to do what,” Bishop Walter Scott Thomas, the pastor, said after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, read from the Bible. “Some of you may be wondering why you are not doing anything, so I wanted to give you clarity.”

The funeral was held at New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, where Cummings could usually be seen seated in the front row on Sundays. The church seats 4,000 people but was expected to draw far more for the funeral Friday.

Cummings was raised in Baltimore by parents who were former sharecroppers in South Carolina. He graduated from Howard University in Washington, earned a law degree at the University of Maryland and was first elected to Congress in 1996. After his first election, he never faced a serious primary or general election challenge.

Cummings was revered in his district, and widely respected on Capitol Hill, for his integrity and moral vision, which Clinton alluded to in her remarks. She called him “a fierce champion for truth, justice and kindness in every part of his life.”

“His integrity and character, his can-do spirit, made him a guiding light in the Congress,” she said. “He pushed back against the abuse of power. He was unwavering in his defense of our democracy. He had little tolerance for those who put party ahead of country or partisanship above truth.”

Hillary Clinton Urges Defense of Democracy at Cummings' Funeral

Speaking at the funeral of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Hillary Clinton offered a forceful defense of democracy and compared the late congressman, a leader in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, to the prophet Elijah.

“Like that Old Testament prophet, he stood against the corrupt leadership of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,” Hillary Clinton said, to a roar of applause from the congregation. “And he looked out for the vulnerable among us. He lifted up the next generation of leaders. And he even worked a few miracles.”

Cummings, D-Md., who was serving his 13th term in the House of Representatives, died last week in Baltimore at 68. As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he earned the ire of Trump for his support of impeachment and investigations into the president’s finances.

Even from his hospital bed, Cummings was said to be joining impeachment strategy discussions with colleagues. Hillary Clinton alluded to that determination, even in his final days, in her remarks Friday.

“Toward the end of his life, he said, ‘I am begging the American people to pay attention to what is going on, because if you want to have a democracy intact for your children, and your children’s children, and generations yet unborn, we have got to guard this moment,’ ” she said. “‘This is our watch.’ ”

She added: “‘When we are dancing with the angels, the question will be asked,’ he said, ‘In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?’ ”

Cummings’ body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, where he was praised by lawmakers from both parties. He was the first African American lawmaker to receive that honor.

Bill Clinton pointed to Cummings’ bipartisan friendships as proof of his commitment to a free and diverse society.

“No matter how hard he fought or how passionately he argued, he tried to treat everyone the way he wanted to be treated,” the former president said. “The way he thought Americans should be treated. You can’t run a free society if you have to hate everybody you disagree with.”

In addition to the Clintons, other prominent politicians who spoke at his funeral were former President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a presidential candidate.

“Elijah wrote his funeral program and decided who he wanted to do what,” Bishop Walter Scott Thomas, the pastor, said after Warren and Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, read from the Bible. “Some of you may be wondering why you are not doing anything, so I wanted to give you clarity.”

The funeral was held at New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, where Cummings could usually be seen seated in the front row Sundays.

“I love this man,” Bill Clinton said, gesturing toward the coffin. “I loved every minute I ever spent with him, every conversation I ever had with him. I loved his booming voice. But we should hear him now at the quiet times of night, when we get worried, and we get discouraged, and we don’t know if we can believe anymore.”

Again referring to the story of the prophet Elijah, Bill Clinton said Americans should remember Cummings as “a still, small voice that keeps us going, keeps us grateful, keeps us happy and keeps us moving.”

Cummings was raised in Baltimore by parents who were former sharecroppers in South Carolina. He graduated from Howard University in Washington, earned a law degree at the University of Maryland and was first elected to Congress in 1996.

Cummings used his power as the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform to mount muscular investigations of the Trump administration. In the past year, Cummings issued subpoenas for Trump’s financial records (the president sued him in response) and summoned the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to testify about hush money payments to women who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.

In an interview with The New York Times in May, Cummings urged the president to commit his life to public service.

“I want to send a message that we have one life to live, Mr. President,” he replied. “This is no dress rehearsal. And that the American people simply want to live their lives without fear of their leaders. And we, as leaders, have a duty and a responsibility to keep our promise to them when we ran for office and won — and that is to make their lives better. While we’re all on this Earth, that’s my message.”

Cummings was revered in his district and widely respected on Capitol Hill for his integrity and moral vision, which Hillary Clinton alluded to in her remarks. She called him “a fierce champion for truth, justice and kindness in every part of his life.”

At Cummings Funeral, Bill and Hillary Clinton Urge Defense of Democracy

Speaking at the funeral of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, offered a forceful defense of democracy and compared the late congressman, a leader in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, to the prophet Elijah.

<h1>A former student at Louisiana State University was convicted Wednesday of negligent homicide for his role in the hazing death of an 18-year-old fraternity pledge who became extremely intoxicated during an initiation ritual in 2017.</h1>

The conviction of Matthew Naquin, 21, of Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas, is the latest example of the hard line increasingly taken by prosecutors when fraternity activities turn deadly, whether from alcohol abuse or from physical violence.

Prosecutors argued that Naquin was the ringleader of a hazing event called “Bible study” that required the Phi Delta Theta pledges to chug alcohol if they gave the wrong answer to trivia questions or failed to correctly recite the Greek alphabet. His lawyer said many fraternity members took part in the ritual and argued that Naquin had been unfairly singled out.

Maxwell Gruver, 18, of Roswell, Georgia, died Sept. 14, 2017, the day after the fraternity event, prosecutors said. He had a blood alcohol content of 0.496 percent, more than six times the legal limit for driving, and had aspirated vomit into his lungs.

Naquin faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced Oct. 16, said his lawyer, John McLindon. Naquin faces a separate charge of obstruction of justice for allegedly deleting information from his phone, he said.

Hillar Moore III, the East Baton Rouge district attorney, said Wednesday that Naquin “stood out” among the fraternity members who tormented pledges during the activity, which required them to stand in a dark hallway facing a wall while a strobe light flashed and loud music played.

“Everyone kept saying he was the one who led everything, who made people drink more, who asked questions,” Moore said. “This is grain alcohol — this is 180-proof or 190-proof alcohol. It is what they put tissue samples in to study them in a lab, when you have to wear a hood.”

Naquin was one of 10 students arrested after Gruver died, but he was the only one charged with negligent homicide. He was expelled from LSU in the month after the death.

McLindon said his client was considering an appeal.

“It was a hazing event, but there were probably 10 other active members up there that night and at least five of them were handing out alcohol,” he said. “Matthew didn’t do anything differently from those boys, but he got picked out because he is very loud.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/us/lsu-fraternity-hazing-death.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Ex-LSU student convicted in fraternity hazing death of freshman

The conviction of Matthew Naquin, 21, of Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas, is the latest example of the hard line increasingly taken by prosecutors when fraternity activities turn deadly, whether from alcohol abuse or from physical violence.

News media in Huntington, West Virginia, and Palm Beach, Florida, two states he called home, reported that Cline, who would have turned 61 on Friday, was killed in a crash in which six others also died. Those reports cited unnamed family friends.

Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia said on Twitter on Thursday night that Cline had died, although he did not mention the cause of death. He referred to Cline as a West Virginia “superstar” and “a very close friend.”

“Chris Cline built an empire and on every occasion was always there to give,” Justice wrote. “What a wonderful, loving, and giving man.”

Delvin Major, the chief investigator of air accidents at the Bahamian Air Accident Investigation Department, said in an interview Thursday night that seven people were killed in a helicopter crash. But he said investigators had not determined the identity of the victims.

“The sex and the identity of the persons we cannot confirm at this time because their bodies have not been identified,” Major said. “The bodies were recovered and taken to Grand Bahama where the identification can take place.”

Major said a team had been dispatched from Nassau to Grand Bahama and would begin identifying the victims Friday. The Associated Press reported that the Royal Bahamas Police Force said the four men and three women who died were American.

The helicopter crashed in the ocean near the island of Grand Cay, Major said, and investigators were alerted around 5 p.m.

Cline was a well-known philanthropist and Republican donor who began working in the coal industry in West Virginia in 1980 at the age of 22. He rapidly rose through the industry ranks, founding an energy development group, the Cline Group, in 1990.

In 2006, he founded Foresight Energy to develop and operate mines in Illinois, according to a biography on the firm’s website.

In 2015, he donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting the presidential campaign of former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, according to Bloomberg News. He later donated to a super PAC that supported the campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida.

Cline also donated to Marshall University in Huntington, which he attended. Jerome Gilbert, the university president, referred to him as a “son of Marshall” on Twitter Thursday night.

“Chris’s generosity to our research and athletics programs has made a mark on Marshall University,” he wrote. “I am praying for his family.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/us/chris-cline-dead.html" id="db3ff7c6-a6e2-398b-a436-1f52e3003410">The New York Times</a>.

Coal mining entrepreneur is killed in helicopter crash, reports say

Chris Cline, a billionaire entrepreneur, philanthropist and political donor once called the “King of Coal,” died Thursday in what news reports said was a helicopter crash in the Bahamas.

The state Assembly voted unanimously Thursday to approve the measure, which the state Senate approved in April. It now heads to the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, to be signed into law.

The bill would update the definition of race used in existing law to be “inclusive of traits historically associated with race, including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles.”

“In a society in which hair has historically been one of many determining factors of a person’s race, and whether they were a second-class citizen, hair today remains a proxy for race,” the bill says. “Therefore, hair discrimination targeting hairstyles associated with race is racial discrimination.”

The measure, known as the Crown Act — an acronym for “Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair” — was introduced by state Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles. Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

“This is a fundamental issue of personal dignity and personal rights,” Mitchell said in an interview Friday. “This bill has truly struck a deeply personal chord with people because there is something so deeply personally offensive when you are told that your hair, in its natural state, is not acceptable in the workplace.”

Mitchell said the bill seeks to ban employers and schools from enforcing grooming policies that claim to be race neutral but in reality have a disproportionate impact on people of color.

She said she had been stopped on the street or had received letters from black people, many of them parents, who had shared stories of themselves or their children being singled out by bosses or by teachers because of the texture or style of their hair.

“I have heard from parents whose children have been sent home from school because they were told their hair was unruly,” Mitchell said. “Or even more comically from my perspective, that their hair was a distraction to other children. Other children are distracted, so you have to leave.”

The bill points to the history of anti-black racism in the United States and the role it has played in shaping Eurocentric beauty standards and ideas of what constitutes a professional appearance.

“Professionalism was, and still is, closely linked to European features and mannerisms, which entails that those who do not naturally fall into Eurocentric norms must alter their appearances, sometimes drastically and permanently, in order to be deemed professional,” the bill says.

The bill also highlights what it calls a shortcoming of anti-discrimination law: Federal courts have ruled that the law protects African Americans when they are discriminated against for wearing their hair in Afros, but not when they wear it in other natural hairstyles, or in braids, twists or locks.

A proposal to ban discrimination on the basis of hair in the workplace, housing and public schools was introduced in the New Jersey Legislature this week. That measure was in part a response to an episode in December when a black high school wrestler was forced to cut his dreadlocks ringside or else forfeit a match.

In February, the New York City Commission on Human Rights issued new guidelines that banned discrimination on the basis of hair or hairstyle at work, at school or in public accommodations.

Mitchell, who has worn her hair in a natural style for 20 years, said she recently found a picture of herself and her mother at her 1982 high school graduation. In the photo her hair was styled naturally.

“Thirty years ago when I was in high school in Riverside, a pretty conservative, predominantly white school, there was never a question as to whether or not my hair was appropriate,” she said. “Here we are years later and black girls are being sent home for their hair being a violation of school dress code. I am not sure how that happened, but now it hopefully won’t anymore.”

California Poised to Become First State to Ban Discrimination Based on Natural Hair

California is poised to become the first state to ban racial discrimination against people based on their natural hairstyle.

California poised to become first state to ban discrimination based on natural hair

<h1>Beth Chapman, who starred alongside her husband in the reality show “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and a series of spinoffs that chronicled their lives in the world of bounty hunting, died on Wednesday at 51.</h1>

The cause was complications from cancer, according to a statement from WGN America, which was working on a new spinoff at the time of Chapman’s death.

Chapman and her husband, Duane Chapman, known as Dog, rose to prominence with the 2004 premiere of “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” which followed the couple’s unusual family business: tracking down and detaining people in Hawaii and Colorado who had violated the terms of their release from custody.

The show lasted for eight seasons and was followed by a three-season spinoff and a two-hour special on her battle with cancer, which kept Beth Chapman and her family on TV and in the public eye for well over a decade.

“It’s 5:32 in Hawaii, this is the time she would wake up to go hike Koko Head mountain,” Duane Chapman wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning. “Only today, she hiked the stairway to heaven. We all love you, Beth. See you on the other side.”

Beth Chapman was diagnosed with Stage 2 throat cancer in September 2017, according to an interview she gave The Honolulu Star-Advertiser in January. The cancer returned last November, which led to emergency surgery and what she described as a nationwide search for experimental treatments that sometimes took her far from her home in Hawaii.

“Even though the outlook is grim, I just don’t want to live it like that, you know?” she told The Star-Advertiser in a video interview.

“I don’t want to be that person who lets their children watch them die at their bedside,” she added. “It’s just really out of my character. So for the last four days I have been chasing bad guys on the Big Island and I didn’t even notice that I was sick.”

“Dog the Bounty Hunter” was a game changer for A&amp;E;, which previously had been largely known for more high-minded but low-rated arts programming.

The show quickly turned the Chapman family into symbols of the network and a prototype of sorts for reality shows about rough-around-the-edges family businesses, like “Duck Dynasty.” That show premiered on A&amp;E; in 2012, the same year the network canceled “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”

But the show’s cancellation did not end the Chapman family’s career as reality stars. “Dog and Beth: On the Hunt,” a spinoff of the A&amp;E; show, had three seasons on CMT. It followed the family as they traveled the country working with bail bondsmen in different cities.

Beth Chapman also addressed her experiences living with cancer in a two-hour special on A&amp;E; in November 2017, “Dog and Beth: Fight of Their Lives.”

Chapman was born Alice Elizabeth Smith in Denver on Oct. 29, 1967. Her father was Garry Smith, who played baseball for the Kansas City Athletics, a major league team that moved to Oakland, California, in 1968.

She was 18 when she first met Duane Chapman. The two dated for 16 years before they married, in 2006, according to a family spokeswoman, Gillian Sheldon.

In addition to her husband, Chapman is survived by 10 children and stepchildren, “countless” grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, Sheldon said.

The family was at work on a second spinoff, “Dog’s Most Wanted,” for WGN America that was in production at the time of Chapman’s death. The network said this year that the show would debut in 2020.

A spokeswoman for WGN America said on Wednesday that the network did not yet know how her death would affect the show.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/arts/beth-chapman-dead.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Beth Chapman, star of 'Dog the Bounty Hunter,' dies at 51

The cause was complications from cancer, according to a statement from WGN America, which was working on a new spinoff at the time of Chapman’s death.

<h1>Organizers of LGBT Pride festivities in Toronto voted this year to bar the police indefinitely from their parade. In Minneapolis, the police decided not to march, citing community opposition to their presence. And Vancouver Pride organizers in British Columbia said officers could march alongside city employees such as librarians and park workers, but only if they left their uniforms at home.</h1>

Uniformed police officers were barred from marching in Sacramento and St. Louis until organizers in both cities reversed their decisions after criticism from law enforcement groups and others. And LGBT activists in New York plan to shun official Pride events this weekend in favor of an alternative march that will exclude police officers and corporate sponsors.

“This is where the movement is heading, and it is happening nationwide,” said Sayer Johnson, executive director of the Metro Trans Umbrella Group, the nonprofit that will serve as grand marshal of St. Louis’ Grand Pride Parade on Sunday. “Whether or not people want to pay attention to it, this is where we are going.”

Mayor Lyda Krewson of St. Louis said in a statement that officers belonged at the Pride parade because “exclusion of the Police Department, or of anyone, is not in the spirit of our city.”

But the spirit of Pride is another question, LGBT activists say. They have long debated what place, if any, uniformed police officers should have at Pride marches, which began as a commemoration of a 1969 anti-police riot outside the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan.

Those debates have crossed into the mainstream since 2016 — the year President Donald Trump was elected and the Black Lives Matter movement dominated headlines. They have boiled over into the churn of social media and the muted boardrooms of big-city Pride organizations.

The result has been protests at Pride events in cities such as Toronto, Washington and New York. In 2017, a dozen activists were arrested during a sit-in outside the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, which stopped the march. It was an embarrassing spectacle for an event commemorating a police raid on that very spot.

Regardless of whether organizers invite police officers to participate, they are obligated to provide security for public events like marches. For decades, activists frustrated by the presence of police officers, politicians and corporate sponsors at Pride marches have organized their own events. The oldest may be the Dyke March, a protest started in 1993 by the Lesbian Avengers in Washington. Dyke Marches are now held annually in cities around the world.

“The police don’t have a place in Pride for me, personally, and I would say they are not doing a good job of maintaining peace in our community,” said Alex Tereshonkova, a Dyke March organizer. “Their priority is to keep the traffic moving, not the safety of 20,000 dykes in the street.”

But a poll conducted this month by Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News found that 79% of LGBT Americans welcomed police participation in Pride events, including parades. Only 8% said they opposed including the police, and 13% said they did not have strong feelings either way.

The poll found strong support among nonwhite LGBT people for police participation: 77% said they supported including police officers in Pride events, compared with 8% who opposed doing so and 15% who said they did not have strong feelings on the matter.

Activists who want to keep the police out of Pride events draw a straight line from the Stonewall raid to present-day police misconduct that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. When James P. O’Neill, the New York City police commissioner, apologized this month for the 1969 raid, some activists rejected it as an empty gesture.

“He framed it as Stonewall was this thing the NYPD did 50 years ago and it is something that would never happen today,” said Colin P. Ashley, an organizer with the Reclaim Pride Coalition in New York. “This isn’t just historical, it is continual.”

Ashley, whose group is organizing a Queer Liberation March on Sunday that will include no police officers or corporate sponsors, pointed to police shootings like the 2016 killing of Philando Castile in Minnesota or the unexplained death of Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman, at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York this month as proof that the past is not really past.

“For us, Stonewall is connected to a larger system of structural violence that includes mass incarceration,” Ashley said. “These institutions haven’t really figured out how to deal with trans and queer people at all, or with people of color, and so they end up disproportionately harming them.”

Caught in the middle of this debate are LGBT law enforcement officers, some of whom have spent years working to improve the relationship between gay and transgender people and the police.

“I respect activists and by definition I think I am an activist,” said Brian Downey, a detective with the New York Police Department and the president of the New York chapter of the Gay Officers Action League, a nationwide organization of LGBT law enforcement employees. “But change in an institution like this is a marathon; it is not a sprint.”

For gay officers, the prospect of being excluded from Pride events can feel like an attack from their own community. It may feel as though they are being blamed for the misdeeds of overwhelmingly heterosexual agencies that can still be challenging places for LGBT people to work.

“I understand optics,” said Downey, who is white. “I understand that we’re not everybody’s favorite people. I respect that. I understand that there are people that have experienced things that I haven’t experienced in my life. I am very aware of it. And I try to maintain the maximum level of sensitivity to that.”

But Johnson said barring uniformed officers did not mean barring people who work for the Police Department. He said the presence of police uniforms or weapons was both symbolic and a practical concern for people who often live in fear of law enforcement.

Leaving those things at home could be “an opportunity for the police to say, ‘We see you, we value you, we know we have hurt you and we are sorry,’” he said.

The decision to once again allow officers to march in the St. Louis parade came after pressure from the police union and the city government, Johnson said.

Organizers in Sacramento used the brief ban on police uniforms to get the department to agree to hire a liaison officer, create a community advisory committee, hold community forums and devise an officer training program — all dedicated to LGBT issues.

“Do I wish the Police Department had been interested in having these discussions months or years ago? Absolutely,” David Heitstuman, the executive director of the Sacramento LGBT Community Center, said. “But the circumstances were that they were unhappy they couldn’t participate in uniform.”

Gay Officers Action League members have marched in Pride parades across the country since the group was founded in 1982, and Downey said several hundred planned to march in New York on Sunday.

The group sued the Police Department in 1996 for the right to fully participate in the New York parade. James Fallarino, a spokesman for NYC Pride, called the court victory “a point in our history that has significance.”

“We have always treated the New York City Pride March as a free speech event, which means any group is welcome to register and participate in the march,” Fallarino said. “We don’t limit people in how they dress or express themselves and that means, for some folks, wearing your work uniform.”

Members of the gay officers group have trained officers and advised the department on how to approach LGBT people. They have instituted patrol-guide revisions and policy recommendations aimed at addressing the concerns of transgender officers and civilians, Downey said.

They have also participated in community celebrations across the country, including raising money for victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida and serving food at Youth Pride Fest in New York, an event primarily attended by young LGBT people of color.

Being part of the parade is another way to build a bridge, but it may be one that not everybody wants to cross.

“I am at a point where I think they understand what I do and I understand what they do,” Downey said of LGBT activists skeptical of the police. “I can’t stress it enough that I respect what they are doing. Whether they respect what I am doing remains to be seen.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/pride-parade-police-cops.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Pride, Welcoming to All. But What About Police?

Mayor Lyda Krewson of St. Louis said in a statement that officers belonged at the Pride parade because “exclusion of the Police Department, or of anyone, is not in the spirit of our city.”

Pride, welcoming to all, but what about police?

<h1>Boston on Wednesday approved a public event application and parade route for a Straight Pride Parade, whose organizers plan to celebrate what they view as America’s “oppressed majority” — heterosexuals.</h1>

A city official said the application was a major step toward an official parade permit, which also requires the consent of the Boston Police Department. But the police said there appeared to be no major hurdle for the event.

The parade organizers — a group called Super Happy Fun America, whose slogan is “it’s great to be straight” — celebrated Wednesday at a news conference, where they denied that their event was anti-gay or intended to mock LGBT Pride.

“I agree it is unusual to have something like this, but a lot of things seem unpopular at first but then they become mainstream,” John Hugo, the president of Super Happy Fun America, said at the news conference. “We don’t hate anyone. We just want to have our own celebration just like everybody else has a right to. All people from all communities are welcome as long as they show respect.”

The parade will begin at Copley Square, march past Boston Public Garden and Boston Common and then end in front of City Hall, according to the route approved Wednesday. It is scheduled for Aug. 31.

The prospect of a Straight Pride Parade on the streets of one of America’s most liberal cities was greeted with a mix of outrage and mockery by many when it was announced earlier this month. Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston has said he will not attend the parade. He rejected a request from its organizers to fly a straight pride flag from City Hall.

“Applications to host a public event are granted based on operational feasibility, not based on values or endorsements of beliefs,” the city said in a statement Wednesday. “The city of Boston cannot deny a permit based on an organization’s values."

A sense that the whole enterprise may be an effort to troll the left has hung over the parade. That was heightened earlier this month when Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay right-wing polemicist who has been barred from Twitter and Facebook and is known for mocking liberals, was named its grand marshal.

The parade organizers — who did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday — have at times seemed to revel in the opportunity to mock the language of liberal online outrage.

When the parade was condemned by all five co-hosts of “The View,” the organizers fired back with a statement calling their comments “an act of literal violence that has endangered the lives of heterosexuals everywhere.”

“Heterosexuals have languished in the shadows for decades, but we’re not taking it lying down,” the statement said. “Until an 'S' is added, LGBTQ pride will continue to be a system of oppression designed to systematically erase straight people from existence.”

Besides Hugo, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for the state’s 5th Congressional District seat last fall, the organizers include Mark Sahady, who has been involved with a group called Resist Marxism that was founded by Kyle Chapman, an alt-right figure who has engaged in violence at street protests.

Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor known for his uninhibited denunciations of things like feminism and political correctness, was permanently barred from Facebook last month as part of its crackdown on extremism.

He was permanently barred from Twitter in 2016 for his role in a campaign of racist harassment against actress Leslie Jones. In 2017, he resigned from Breitbart after a conservative group, the Reagan Battalion, posted video online that appeared to show him defending sexual relationships between adult men and boys as young as 13.

Earlier this month, Yiannopoulos asked the parade organizers in a video interview posted to YouTube if “socialist allies of the Straight Pride movement” would be allowed at the parade.

“We don’t allow anybody who espouses hateful views in our parade,” Hugo said. “We want everybody to feel welcome.”

Yiannopoulos responded: “Well, you’re wandering into dangerous territory here — that may be an inversion of the leftist stuff. Which is perhaps, of course, the humorous point of a lot of this.”

“I get the joke of this, but I also get the seriousness of it,” he continued. “I agree with the ideological motivation behind all of this, obviously.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/straight-pride-parade-boston.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Boston approves application for straight pride parade

A city official said the application was a major step toward an official parade permit, which also requires the consent of the Boston Police Department. But the police said there appeared to be no major hurdle for the event.

The school that fired its teacher, Cathedral High School, was the third Catholic high school in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis to receive such an order in the last year, a lawyer for the teacher said. The school said in a letter to the community that it fired the teacher, whom it did not name, after “direct guidance” from Archbishop Charles C. Thompson.

The school said it had been engaged in almost two years of “earnest discussion and extensive dialogue” with the archdiocese about the school’s “continued Catholic identity.” The teacher’s lawyer, Kathleen A. DeLaney, said his employment contract was renewed at least twice during that time.

“It is Archbishop Thompson’s responsibility to oversee faith and morals as related to Catholic identity within the Archdiocese of Indianapolis,” the school said in its letter. “Archbishop Thompson made it clear that Cathedral’s continued employment of a teacher in a public, same-sex marriage would result in our forfeiting our Catholic identity due to our employment of an individual living in contradiction to Catholic teaching on marriage.”

Cathedral High School announced its decision just days after another high school in Indianapolis, Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School, defied the archbishop and refused to fire a teacher in a same-sex marriage.

Last year, two teachers at another school in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Roncalli High School, lost their jobs because they were in same-sex marriages, said DeLaney, who also represents one of those teachers.

There are 11 Catholic high schools in the archdiocese, according to its website.

Brebeuf is within the geographic territory of the archdiocese but, unlike other schools, is not financially dependent on it. Brebeuf is sponsored and run by the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order with a liberal reputation whose members focus on education and intellectual pursuits.

“This is a pattern now where the archbishop is targeting members of the LGBT community who are in valid same-sex marriages,” DeLaney said. She declined to name the teacher who was fired from Cathedral High School.

A statement from the archdiocese said its approach to teachers in same-sex marriages was “not about sexual orientation,” but rather its belief that Catholic school employees “are ministers of the faith” who must “abide by all Church teachings, including the nature of marriage.”

“If and when a minister of the faith is publicly not doing so, the Church calls us to help the individual strive to live a life in accordance with Catholic teaching,” the statement said.

Over the years, the archdiocese has “walked with individuals and schools” on other issues that went against the teachings of the church, it said.

When an individual has not “chosen this accompaniment,” the archdiocese said, “it is very difficult to part ways, but we readily honor the person’s dignity and decision.”

Some called that explanation into question.

“There are many church doctrines and many teachers, trustees and administrators who don’t comply with all of them,” DeLaney said. “So far, they are only enforcing church doctrine against members of the LGBT community and their marital status and that is blatantly discrimination, in my opinion.”

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at America Magazine, said the “categories of people you would need to fire” would amount to “a huge list,” including faculty members who used birth control, skipped Sunday Mass or did not give to the poor.

“Why are those virtues any less important than the church’s teaching on same-sex marriage?” Martin said. “It is completely discriminatory.”

Thompson issued a decree last week that cut ties between the archdiocese and Brebeuf, which may be insulated from that blow because it is run by the Jesuits. DeLaney said her client was fired shortly after Cathedral High School learned that he filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission earlier this month. She said his contract had been renewed for the upcoming academic year just weeks earlier.

A Catholic high school in Indianapolis said it fired a teacher in a same-sex marriage on Sunday to protect its “Catholic identity” after it received an order to do so from the archbishop. The move came one week after the archdiocese cut ties with another school in Indianapolis that had refused a similar command.

Liam Stack

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