“HAWAII FOR GAY RIGHTS,” National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Washin

“HAWAII FOR GAY RIGHTS,” National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1979. Photo © Joel Rinne & Earl Colvin. On May 5, 1973, forty-three years ago today, the American Psychological Association (APA) held its annual meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. After years of protesting, lobbying, and organizing efforts by the LGBT community–spearheaded largely by Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings–the Honolulu meeting saw the APA host a panel on the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness; in addition, Kameny, among others, met officially with the APA’s Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics to discuss the proposal. In December 1973, the APA removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders, marking an enormous step forward for the gay liberation movement. Twenty years later, on May 5, 1993, the Hawaii State Supreme Court held, in Baehr v. Lewin, that the denial of same-sex marriage licenses constituted discrimination based on sex that could only be justified if it satisfied the requirements of the analytical framework known as strict scrutiny. After remanding the case back to the trial court so that the lower court could determine if the denial passed constitutional muster, the state legislature enacted a statute defining marriage as between a man and a woman and enumerating the State’s justifications for the definition; the trial court was not swayed, and it ruled in favor of allowing same-sex marriages. In November 1998, however, before the State Supreme Court issued a final ruling on the matter, Hawaii voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that allowed the state “to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples”; this, according to the State Supreme Court, ended the matter. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #joelrinne #earlcolvin (at Washington, District of Columbia) -- source link

More pics about