Welcome to The Morning Pride, ThinkProgress LGBT’s daily round-up of the latest in LGBT policy, politics, and some culture too! Here’s what we’re reading this morning, but please let us know what stories you’re following as well. Follow us all day on Twitter at @TPEquality.
– Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has finally stopped blocking the nomination of Darrin Gayles, who would be the nation’s first black openly gay man to serve as a federal judge.
– The conservatives group fighting California’s law protecting transgender students have filed suit against the Secretary of State and various county officials, demanding their referendum still qualify for the ballot.
– A Maryland House Committee has advanced a bill that would protect transgender people from discrimination.
– Massachusetts State Rep. Carl Sciortino (D) has accepted a new role as Executive Director of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, making him the first openly HIV-positive person to fill the position.
– Pride Week celebrations at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges have been disrupted by homophobic chalkings on campus.
– The Human Rights Campaign has released a new report on Scott Lively’s past of advocating against LGBT equality.
– The mother of a transgender child in Saskatchewan is asking the government to no longer put gender markers on birth certificates.
– Ethiopia is set to pass a bill that would make homosexuality a non-pardonable criminal offense.
– A Philadelphia student named Hunter McKee’s monologue, “One Hundred Sleepless Nights,” was a winner at this year’s Young Voices Monologue Festival. The 15-year-old described his experience coming out as transgender:
You feel so hopeless and helpless and you just want to rip yourself apart and take away all of the things that you’ve been cursed with. Wide hips, tits, the voice of a prepubescent 12 year old, vagina, a face that just screams feminine, and the list goes on. But there’s nothing you can do about it.