Katherine Franke

Co-written with Rabbi Rebecca Alpert

Last week we were scheduled to speak at the Constitution Center as part of the Equality Forum's 2012 LGBT Summit. Instead we, a rabbi and a law professor, withdrew our appearances at the event, disturbed that the Equality Forum, a major mainstream gay-rights...

PFLAG, Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a national organization that "promotes the health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, their families and friends," has unfortunately gotten snared in a "pinkwashing" event by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Jay Huckaby,...

Rainbow flags and corsages were waving high in front of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village last night. There's much to celebrate about the 9th Circuit's ruling issued yesterday confirming the lower court finding that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. As I noted yesterday and Nan Hunter...

It's funny, when I was writing my dissertation many years ago, my adviser said to me: "Katherine, you're really a libertarian when it comes to gender, aren't you?" At the time I resisted the moniker, but is "libertarian" worse than "liberationist"? Who, on the 4th of July of all days,...

This just in: Judge James Ware, acting very quickly after oral argument yesterday, has just issued a thoughtful opinion denying the ludicrous and offensive motion made by the Perry defendants that the trial opinion in the case be thrown out on account of the purported bias of the trial judge,...

Last Friday Heath and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued new regulations instructing states that they could "offer same-sex couples many of the same financial and asset protections available to opposite-sex couples when a partner is entering a nursing home or care facility." The new rules relate to states' ability...

Last Thursday, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Iwo Jima with the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, and signed an agreement to bring NROTC (Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps) back to Columbia after an almost 40 year ban. President Bollinger's formalization of an...

Alright -- it's time for an "offensive nomenclature call-out" moment. Someone has to declare these terms no longer usable by the media, by pundits, or really, by anyone, so here's the list:

Love Child -- used by the NY Daily News, the Huffington Post, and the...

The new Egyptian Interior Minister, Major-General Mansour al-Issawi, announced last week that Egyptian women who have a child with a Palestinian man can confer their Egyptian citizenship to their child. This is a significant shift in Egyptian citizenship law with implications from both a gender and a Palestinian...

When Paul Clement left King & Spalding last week and joined up with the Bancroft firm, he took his big new client with him, the House of Representatives, who had hired him to defend against repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. According to the new...

Big day in Big Law and Gay Law -- not only did King & Spalding end their firm representation of the "Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the House of Representatives" (BLAGHOR??) in defending the (indefensible) Defense of Marriage Act, but Paul Clement, the King & Spalding partner who dragged the...

Metro Weekly has the story, but this is outrageous. Paul Clement, partner at King and Spalding, signed the firm up to represent the House of Representatives in defending the Defense of Marriage Act. The agreement between the firm and the government contains a provision that prohibits...

The Delaware governor, Jack Markell, is prepared to sign into law a new Civil Union bill, making Delaware the 8th state to pass a law that creates a civil status functionally equivalent to marriage (at least on a state level until DOMA is repealed). These laws have come to be...

Harvard University announced last week that it would reinstate its on-campus ROTC program, after barring the military training program from campus for 41 years. On March 4th, Columbia University's Senate will begin deliberations on whether Columbia should follow suit. (Columbia students who wish to enroll in...

The governor of Illinois signed a bill into law legalizing civil unions in early February, and the governor of Hawaii will sign into law a similar provision today. These events have gained much media attention, but most of the coverage has described the new laws as offering same-sex...

Egyptian officials announced on Saturday that the state's emergency laws might be lifted in six months. We'll see. Since 1967, Egypt has spent all but five months under a declared "state of emergency" by which the regime has rationalized the outlawing of demonstrations, the use of indefinite detentions...