Holder goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee Jan. 15. For conservative Republicans, he is the liberal face of nominees to come as Obama remakes the federal judiciary, and possibly the Supreme Court.

Republicans also want to show they still have some clout in the Senate – enough votes to stop a nomination with a filibuster.

Holder is expected to eventually win the AG job, but not without a fight.

The Human Rights Campaign and other human and civil rights groups have begun a campaign to ensure Holder gets through the nomination process. HRC President Joe Solmonese joined leaders from the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Women’s Law Center on Capitol Hill to show their support for Holder.

Holder has a strong LGBT rights record.

After graduating from Columbia Law School, Holder joined the Department of Justice’s Attorney General’s Honors Program. 

In 1988, he was nominated for and confirmed as Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.  In 1993, President Clinton nominated Holder for United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, and he was confirmed later that year.  

In this role, he worked vigorously to reduce crime and increase neighborhood safety.  Notably, he emphasized hate crimes enforcement to ensure that bias-motivated crimes would receive adequate resources, attention, and punishment. Hate crimes continued to be a priority for Holder after his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to Deputy Attorney General.  

In a 1999 appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Holder called for LGBT inclusion in federal hate crime law, noting that currently the law “provides no coverage whatsoever for violent hate crimes committed because of bias based on the victim’s sexual orientation, gender or disability, and these crimes pose a serious problem for our nation.”

The Matthew Shepard Hate Crime Act was named for the 21-year-old college student who was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming in October 1998. It would add sexual orientation to the list of categories covered under federal hate crime law.

The bill will be reintroduced in the next session of Congress and President-elect Obama has said that if it passes, he will sign it.

Meanwhile, a grassroots movement has begun to have Fred P. Hochberg nominated to be the next Secretary of Commerce. The openly gay Hochberg is dean of the New School for Management in New York.

The Obama transition team is scrambling to find a replacement for Bill Richardson who withdrew his name from the nomination.

“Hochberg is the most qualified candidate for the job,” the Boston-based Equal Rep said in a statement. Equal Rep works to get LGBT candidates placed in office.

From 1998 through 2000, Hochberg served as deputy, then acting administrator, of the Small Business Administration, an agency elevated to cabinet rank by President Bill Clinton, with more than 4,000 employees and 100 offices across the country. 

At the SBA, he directed the delivery of a comprehensive set of financial and business development programs for entrepreneurs, with particular outreach to women and minorities. He also served on President Clinton’s Management Council.

From 1994 to 1998, Hochberg worked as founder and president of Heyday Company, a private investment firm managing real estate, stock market investments, and venture capital projects. Prior to that, he was president and chief operating officer of the Lillian Vernon Corporation, where he led the transformation of a small family mail order company into a publicly traded direct marketing corporation, one of the great success stories of American entrepreneurship.

“It was devastating to learn that gay Americans wouldn’t have a seat at the table within Barack Obama’s Cabinet administration. They are the only minority group to have never been appointed in the history of the United States.” said Paul Sousa, Equal Rep founder. “Hochberg is supremely qualified and this opening is the perfect opportunity for our President-elect to show gay Americans they have not been forgotten and he is truly committed to equal representation.”

Latino groups want the Obama transition team to pick another Hispanic to replace Richardson – who had been the new administration’s most prominent Latino official.Women’s groups have said they want another female in the Cabinet.

(Washington) Gay rights groups are voicing their opposition to the choice of Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at President-elect Barrack Obama’s inauguration.

Warren is the outspoken evangelical pastor of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. – one of the state’s largest megachurches.

He was a major supporter of Proposition 8, the measure that amended the California constitution to ban same-sex marriage in the state.

“There is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population,” he said during the Prop 8 campaign  “This is not a political issue – it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.”

When LGBT activists demonstrated at Saddleback following the passage of Prop 8, Warren accused gays of attempting to take away his constitutional right to practice religion.

During the presidential election campaign, Warren hosted a presidential forum with Obama and Sen. John McCain.  Warren did not endorse either presidential candidate.

People For the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert said Warren should never have been selected to deliver Obama’s invocation because of his support for Prop 8.

“[T]his decision further elevates someone who has in recent weeks actively promoted legalized discrimination and denigrated the lives and relationships of millions of Americans,” said Kolbert in a statement.

Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese, in a letter to Obama, called for the invitation to Warren be rescinded.

“We have been moved by your calls to religious leaders to own up to the homophobia and racism that has stood in the way of combating HIV and AIDS in this country.  And that you have publicly called on religious leaders to open their hearts to their LGBT family members, neighbors and friends,” Solmonese said in the letter to the President-elect.

“But in this case, we feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.  Only when Rev. Warren and others support basic legislative protections for LGBT Americans can we believe their claim that they are not four-square against our rights and dignity. In that light, we urge you to reconsider this announcement.”

During the election campaign, Obama drew the ire of gay groups for choosing gospel singer Donnie McClurkin to appear at rallies targeting evangelical Christians.

McClurkin is an ardent supporter of the so-called ex-gay movement and has called homosexuality a choice that can be cured.

When opposition to McClurkin surfaced, Obama distanced himself from the singer’s views, but did not remove him from campaign appearances.

Obama has appointed one openly gay person to his administration. He selected Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles, to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

On the issues, Obama supports repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the ban on gays serving openly in the military; passage of the Mathew Shepard hate crime bill; and an inclusionary ENDA. He opposes same-sex marriage, but believes gay and lesbian couples should have many of the rights of marriage and supports repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

(Chicago, Illinois) President-elect Barack Obama Tuesday tapped Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan to become secretary of education.

Duncan advised Obama on education issues during the campaign and has run the country’s third-biggest school district for the past seven years.

As CEO of Chicago Public Schools, the 44-year-old has focused on improving struggling schools and closing those that fail – a policy that has sometimes put him at odds with parents and the teachers union.

Obama highlighted Duncan’s approach by choosing a Duncan turnaround story, Dodge Renaissance Academy, as the backdrop for Obama’s formal announcement Tuesday. Duncan closed the perennial test score cellar-dweller 2002 and then reopened it with new staff, an overhauled curriculum and more teacher training. Within years, test scores at the school soared.

Duncan is seen as gay-positive.

This fall he supported an LGBT high school for Chicago. Called the Social Justice High School: Pride Campus, the plan was put on hold last month following opposition from conservatives and concerns by some members of the LGBT community.

The plan is being reworked and is expected to be taken up next year.

Under the original plan, the school was to open in 2010 and eventually serve 600 students, about half of whom were expected to identify as gay. 

Its mission statement said it would serve “the underserved population of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning youth and their allies.”

That has been replaced by one that offers protections for students regardless of “orientation,” but doesn’t mention sexuality. Instead, the Solidarity school aimed to address “citywide concerns over violence, bullying and harassment.”

As opposition to the original plan mounted and concerns were raised by some gay activists that the school would segregate gay young people, Duncan stepped back.

“If we’re going to have a separate high school, let’s put the bullies in the high school, not the (gay) kids,” Rick Garcia, political director for the gay rights group Equality Illinois said last month.

In announcing Duncan’s nomination, Obama called him “the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners.” 

“He’s not beholden to any one ideology, and he’s worked tirelessly to improve teacher quality,” Obama said.

But some Chicago teachers said they were disappointed with Obama’s pick.

“I don’t believe Mr. Duncan’s model is a model for America,” said Deborah Lynch, a teacher at Gage Park High School and a president of the Chicago Teachers Union from 2001-2004.

Lynch criticized Duncan’s strong advocacy for charter schools, which tens of thousands of Chicago students now attend. She accused him of dismantling of the public school system on which so many poor children depend.

Duncan majored in sociology at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1987.

After graduating, Duncan played professional basketball for four years in Australia, where he also worked with children who were wards of the state.

Duncan ran an education nonprofit on Chicago’s South Side before working in Chicago Public Schools under former chief Paul Vallas, now the schools chief in New Orleans.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, Duncan is expected to be less polarizing than Bush secretary Margaret Spellings.

Spellings has promoted abstinence-only education in the nation’s schools, despite concerns that it ignores gay sex issues.

The federal government spends about $176 million annually on abstinence-until-marriage education.

A study mandated by Congress last year found that students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex within a few years as those who did not.

The study, by Mathematica Policy Research, also found that students who attended the abstinence classes reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes, and they first had sex at about the same age as their control group counterparts – 14 years and nine months.

A report a year earlier by the Society of Adolescent Medicine found that abstinence-only education was “unlikely to meet the health needs” of gay students because abstinence-only programs focus heavily on no sex until marriage and ignore homosexuality. This could lead to increased risk of infection among these youngsters, the investigators said.

Sixteen states have declined to take part in the federal program.

In 2005, on her second day on the job, Spellings issued a scathing attack on an episode of the PBS children’s series “Postcards from Buster” for featuring a same-sex couple.

In a letter to  Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of PBS, Spellings issued a veiled threat of funding cuts if the network did not pull the show. 

“Congress’ and the Department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television,” Spellings said in the letter. 

She also suggested that PBS to consider refunding the money it spent on the episode.

The episode was dropped by the network.

With many of his top White House and Cabinet posts filled, Obama now is focusing on fleshing out his natural resources and environment team, and could formally introduce his choices for interior secretary, energy secretary and environmental protection agency chief within weeks if not days.

Two transition officials disclosed Sutley’s selection on the condition of anonymity because Obama had not yet made the announcement.

Sutley supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary and was a member of her Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender steering committee.

The deputy mayor for energy and environment in Los Angeles and the mayor’s representative on the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Sutley has a long record of working on environmental and natural resources policy.

She previously served on the California State Water Resources Control Board, which is responsible for protecting water quality and resources throughout the state, and was the energy adviser to former Gov. Gray Davis. During President Bill Clinton’s administration, Sutley was an EPA official, including being a special assistant to the EPA administrator in Washington.

Obama has chosen much of his Cabinet, with the most prominent positions – treasury, justice, state and defense – already filled, and he is now turning to other posts. He is expected to officially name former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle as his secretary of health and human services as early as this week.

Officials close to Obama’s transition say former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Lisa Jackson and Mary Nichols, who heads the California Air Resources Board, are in the running for the EPA administrator post. Both women worked at the EPA under Clinton EPA chief Carol Browner, who is leading the energy and environmental policy team for Obama’s transition.

Browner, who ran the agency for 8 years, is expected to be named to a new position in the Obama White House overseeing energy, environment and climate matters. But officials say there was still some discussion over whether Browner would share her duties with Sutley or another adviser on energy and environmental matters.

The position of interior secretary is still in flux.

Support for John Berry, the director of the National Zoo and a former assistant secretary at the department, was growing, officials said. Gay and lesbian advocacy groups backing Berry, who is gay, were expected to meet with the transition team in Washington on Wednesday.

But officials said Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva and California Rep. Mike Thompson were still in the running to lead the agency, depending on how other positions shake out.

According to the Washington Times, Obama’s team is saying that even ASKING for a repeal of the ban on open gays in the military may not happen until 2010. First, he wants to build consensus.

Fair enough.

But it seems to me that consensus is already built – or at least as much as it’s going to be. Earlier this week, 104 retired generals and admirals called for DADT’s repeal.

A former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke out against DADT in 2007. So did a former Secretary of Defense. 143 members of the House have co-sponsored a bill to overturn the policy; a bill approved by the House Committee on Armed Services.

We know the US military needs more soldiers to fight the two wars we are engaged in – last year alone, 627 servicemembers were dismissed under the DADT. The military needs servicemembers and gays want to serve.

You know what else? DADT is expensive. In February 2006, a University of California Blue Ribbon Commission concluded that so far, it has cost the government (meaning, us, the taxpayers) $363 million.

Don’t Ask is a failed policy. The only people who don’t think so are homophobes.

I understand what Obama is trying to do here. He’s trying to avoid a Clintonesque debacle like the one that gave us DADT in the first place.

But of everything we’re fighting for, DADT seems like it’s the least controversial and would make the most sense. If this isn’t even being looked at until 2010, then when is he going to start making good on his campaign promise of federal civil unions? When (if) he’s re-elected?

I’ve got a better idea. Why doesn’t Obama name a gay person – like Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, say – as Secretary of Defense? That would signal real change – and give gays and lesbians real hope.

One week after the former primary rivals met secretly to discuss the idea of Clinton becoming the nation’s top diplomat, an Obama adviser said Thursday that the two sides were moving quickly toward making it a reality, barring any unforeseen problems.

The senior adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity because the president-elect is not prepared to officially announce the nomination, said Obama believes Clinton would bring instant stature and credibility to U.S. diplomatic relations.

Obama is convinced the advantages of Clinton serving far outweighed potential downsides, the adviser said.

Transition aides said the two camps have worked out financial disclosure issues involving Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the complicated international funding of his foundation that operates in more than 40 countries. The aides said Obama and Hillary Clinton have had substantive conversations about the secretary of state job.

Clinton has been mulling the post for several days, but the comments from the transition aides suggested that Obama’s team does not feel she is inclined to turn it down. Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines would not comment, except to say that anything about Cabinet appointments is for Obama’s transition team to address.

Clinton would have to surrender her New York Senate seat, which she has held for eight years, to take the job.

The nomination would be a remarkable union between the former first lady who was an early favorite to win the presidency and the first-term senator who upset her in the primary and cruised to a general election victory. Such a high-profile seat in the Cabinet for Clinton also would be another achievement for the most accomplished former first lady in U.S. history, who has been the first presidential spouse to serve in the Senate and run for the White House herself.

Obama was picking other Cabinet posts as well. Obama has informally selected Washington lawyer Eric Holder as attorney general and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle as health secretary and is likely to choose Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to be secretary of homeland security, Democrats said.

Any of the plans could be sidetracked by unexpected glitches in the final vetting process, officials note.

“The Obama-Biden Transition Project does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other basis of discrimination prohibited by law,” the Transition team says on its official Web site.

Although the commitment pertains only to transition team workers, LGBT civil rights activists say they believe Obama will issue an Executive Order shortly after being sworn in to extend that throughout the administration.

“The inclusion of gender identity is a bold departure from the past – and it sends a clear message,” said Christopher E. Anders, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel.

“By including sexual orientation and gender identity in its non-discrimination policy, the Obama-Biden transition team makes clear that it will focus on the relevant qualities that actually predict an applicant’s success on the job – professional experience, character, skills and education.”

Although President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 11478, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, there are no explicit federal protections from gender identity bias in government hiring.

During the Bush administration, U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch refused to protect LGBT workers. The Office of the Special Counsel is supposed to protect whistleblowers and investigate complaints of discrimination by federal workers.

Bloch’s stonewalling of complaints of discrimination by LGBT federal workers dates to February 2004, when he ordered references to sexual orientation removed from the Office of the Special Counsel website.

A month after the references disappeared from the OSC website, Bloch said gay workers were no longer protected.

After intense pressure from Federal Globe – the LGBT organization for federal civil servants – and from Democrats on the Hill, the White House said it would honor the Executive Order signed by Clinton that assured LGBT workers of civil rights protections.

But with Bloch’s approval, several union contracts negotiated with various branches of the government removed the list of categories that are protected, replacing them with the more nebulous phrase “any class protected by law.”

Bloch said in May 2005 before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee that his interpretation of the Clinton executive order cannot be used to protect gay workers, because it does not specifically name LGBT workers.

“President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden, by explicitly rejecting the bigotry and intolerance of the past, are committing that gay, lesbian, and transgender professionals can serve in government without fear of discrimination,” said Anders.  “This is a critical next step in securing the basic rights of LGBT community.”

The ACLU and other rights groups are calling on Obama to make passage of a gender-identity inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act – known as ENDA – one of his priorities.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, passed the House in 2007, but without protections for the transgendered.

The legislation would make it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring, firing, promoting or paying an employee.

ENDA as originally introduced by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) included transpeople, but Frank removed those protections in committee, saying it would be impossible to pass.

More than a dozen LGBT groups immediately distanced themselves from the legislation. Frank and the Human Rights Campaign now say they will fight to ensure an inclusive ENDA is passed.

The bill expected to be reintroduced with gender identity protections in the next session of Congress.