Our guest blogger is Andrew Cray, a research associate for LGBT Progress at the Center for American Progress

We recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), marking the end of the discriminatory policy that prohibited gay men and women from serving openly in the military. While the Pentagon has made progress in inclusion for gay active duty service members, major steps have been made elsewhere in ensuring the well-being of gay and transgender people who have served in the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs has been hard at work to ensure that gay and transgender veterans have access to the health care and coverage they have earned.

The VA has been removing barriers to health care access for gay and transgender veterans through inclusive hospital visitation policies, a policy directive to ensure respectful treatment of transgender patients, and a nondiscrimination policy prohibiting unfair treatment on the basis of sexual orientation. These protections reflect the VA’s commitment to inclusivity, and ensuring that all veterans receive the benefits and health care they have earned – regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The VA is also taking steps to make sure patients see the implementation of these policies in their local VA health care facilities. The Veterans Health Administration has been providing clinical competency training to physicians to ensure that transgender veterans receive high quality, comprehensive health care. This is particularly important given the lack of attention to transgender health issues in medical schools and the widespread discrimination and abuse that transgender patients face in health care settings. To ensure that respect and equality are reflected in programs Department-wide, the VA is also developing broad trainings on gay and transgender cultural competency, as well as an inclusive language guide for VA staff and medical providers. The Department is taking the additional step of calling on its health facilities to hold themselves accountable for implementing these programs by encouraging participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Healthcare Equality Index.

While there is still work to be done to ensure that gay and transgender veterans receive equal access to the benefits and privileges they have earned, the Department of Veterans Affairs has responded to the community’s call for fair treatment. This emphasis on serving all veterans with respect and dignity should continue to guide the VA’s policies to care for all who have served their country.

The outing of University of Texas-Austin students to their parents as a consequence of a little-known Facebook privacy glitch has reignited longstanding concerns over the social network’s treatment of its LGBT users’ private information. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the two students — Bobbi Duncan and Taylor McCormick — had placed highly restrictive privacy controls on the information , but were unintentionally outed by the head of their LGBT choir when they joined its Facebook group to get access to the rehearsal schedule:

The president of the chorus, a student organization at the University of Texas campus here, had added Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick to the choir’s Facebook group. The president didn’t know the software would automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were now members of the chorus.

The two students were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook’s privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents.

The consequences for Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick were dire — the former’s father “left vitriolic messages on her phone, demanding she renounce same-sex relationships, she says, and threatening to sever family ties,” causing her to spiral into a depression (she’s thankfully improved since). The latter’s dad “didn’t talk to his son for three weeks.”

The Journal notes that Facebook is making an admirable effort to make its privacy policies clearer to LGBT users, but this isn’t the first time the company’s opaque rules have outed LGBT individuals. In 2009, Library of Congress employee Peter TerVeer was outed to his supervisor as a consequence of a Facebook policy change; he was met with a systematic pattern of discrimination that cost him his job and ultimately his home. A glitch in Facebook’s advertising programming had previously sent confidential information on users’ sexual orientation to third-party advertisers.

Former Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) died Sunday, from complications of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. The Democrat-turned Republican-turned Democrat was the longest serving U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history.

While some of his earlier votes were not supportive of the LGBT community — including supporting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, a 2004 marriage inequality constitutional amendment, and confirmation of anti-LGBT Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — by the end of his his career he had become a strong and consistent ally for LGBT equality.

Specter’s Human Rights Campaign score steadily increased over his final Senate term, from 67 percent in the 109th Congress, to 70 percent in the 110th, all they way to 96 percent in the 111th Congress. In his final two years in the Senate, he co-sponsored the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal. He also called for repeal of DOMA, dubbing it “a relic of a more tradition-bound time and culture,” and “one step among several designed to fully integrate and protect the rights of gays and lesbians in American society.”

In February, then-former Sen. Specter announced that he could not support his former Senate colleague Rick Santorum (R-PA) in his presidential campaign. His stated reason: “with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America.”

LGBT leaders across the political spectrum remembered Specter as a moderate whose support for LGBT issues grew over time. Like the nation as a whole, Specter evolved toward supporting inclusion and equality.

In June, the Oregon Supreme Court ordered the release of 20,000 pages of files kept by Boy Scouts of America on “ineligible volunteers.” Portions of those documents were released online last week. But included, among those leaders accused or convicted of molesting Scouts, were files on several suspected gay Scout leaders who were never accused of any inappropriate behavior.

KING 5, a Seattle television station, reports that of 50 cases it reviewed from the files, 48 involved allegations of molestation, but two did not. Among those:

One file is about a scoutmaster form Ellensburg who was outsted from Scouting in 1974 after the organization had collected evidence he was gay. A memorandum from a Scout Executive in Yakima to the organization’s Registration and Subscription Executive at BSA headquarters in Texas explains they’d “become aware of a suspected moral problem” with (the Scout leader). The Yakima executive recieved information that the man had previously been discharged as a Scouting camp counselor “on suspicion of homosexuality.” The Scouts continued to build their case in the file by obtaining “proof” of their suspicion. The record is a four page letter handwritten by the scoutmaster where he confides to a friend, “Yes, I am gay (homosexual)”. It’s unclear from the file how BSA obtained the letter. The following month BSA leaders in Texas completed their file with a lifetime ban on the scoutmaster. Their “Confidential Record Sheet” lists one reason for the move: “homosexuality”.

Boy Scouts of America has long banned gay and lesbian Scouts and scout leaders — the organization stubbornly clings to its policy of discrimination despite mounting pressures for greater inclusion. In July, the organization claimed excluding LGBT people is “absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts.”

By itself, the policy of discrimination has seriously harmed LGBT youth and families. But by lumping LGBT people in the same category as child molesters is even more dangerous. Drawing a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia is the same weak argument John Briggs was making 40 years ago in an attempt to ban gay teachers in California. It’s unfounded slander against the entire gay community. Psychologists have affirmed for years that “there is no inherent connection between an adult’s sexual orientation and her or his propensity for endangering others.”

Mix It Up Day, a national school day where students are encouraged to sit with kids at lunch that they don’t usually, seems like an innocuous way to try to reduce bullying by introducing kids to new classmates. But leave it to Bryan Fischer, the public face of the anti-gay American Family Association, to find a secret gay plan in the works.

Fischer, whose organization has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which sponsors Mix It Up Day), told the New York Times that the anti-bullying effort was, like all anti-bullying legislation, “just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda:”

No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.

Even setting aside that Mix It Up literature doesn’t explicitly mention LGBT students or that Fischer’s proposed solution of keeping students at home will only result in kids not learning, Fischer’s analysis of the situation is hopelessly contradictory. Bullying is, by definition, an attempt to mark LGBT students as “not normal” and hence exclude them from mainstream school life. Saying that students should be free to marginalize their peers whenever they exhibit behavior deemed to be “homosexual” is demanding license for bullying, full-stop. That’s why rules proposed by organizations like Fischer’s ostensibly aimed to protect religious students read like codes legalizing bullying.

Fischer has a long history of demonizing LGBT youth and families: he has called adoption by LGBT parents “a form of sexual abuse” and has urged the creation of an “Underground Railroad” to kidnap children away from LGBT households.