Washington Blade - October 22, 2004
Joe Crea & Lou Chibbaro Jr.

Twenty-one AIDS activists were arrested on Monday at the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., after they chained and cuffed themselves inside and outside the facility, protesting the Bush administration's domestic and global AIDS policies. According to the group's organizers, 14 protestors made it inside the campaign headquarters where they chained themselves to desks and each other while seven more chained themselves in a link blocking the front entrance. About 150 protesters held signs outside the headquarters. The 21 protesters who chained themselves were charged with trespassing and were arraigned in an Arlington City Court the same day and later released. They await a court appearance on Friday, Oct. 22. The protest was organized by ACT-UP and Housing Works, the nation's largest community based AIDS group. Michael Kink, legislative counsel for Housing Works, said the protest was a coalition of domestic and global AIDS activists. Activists said they were motivated by Vice President Dick Cheney's admission during the vice presidential debate that he was unaware of AIDS statistics referencing black women. Despite Sen. John Edwards' similar response in that same debate, Kink said the groups have no intention to protest the Kerry-Edwards headquarters.

D.C. Log Cabin group briefed on military policy challenge

Log Cabin Republicans' attorney C. Martin Meekins said a team of seasoned lawyers from his Los Angeles law firm, White & Case, plan to wage an all-out effort to overturn the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on gays in the military through a lawsuit the firm filed last week on behalf of the national Log Cabin group. Meekins discussed the lawsuit at an Oct. 18 meeting of the D.C. chapter of Log Cabin Republicans. He said he and his fellow attorneys are confident that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have transformed the legal landscape used by the government in the past to defeat lawsuits challenging the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. In Romer vs. Evans, the court overturned a Colorado ballot initiative banning gay civil rights laws in the state. In Lawrence vs. Texas, decided last year, the justices overturned state laws banning sodomy between consenting adults. Meekins said the Supreme Court recently issued yet another ruling in a case involving a U.S. citizen charged as an enemy combatant that further undermined the military's defense of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The court ruled in that case that the judiciary's longstanding deference to the military on national security grounds can, on occasion, be set aside when constitutional rights are at stake. The government has argued the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, among other things, is crucial to "unit cohesion" for military troops and thus is needed to maintain national security. The Log Cabin suit charges that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy violates the constitutional right to privacy; freedom of speech under the First Amendment; and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. "We think we can win," Meekins said. The national gay group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network says it plans to file its own lawsuit against the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy later this year. Meekins said he expects the two groups to cooperate with each other on their respective lawsuits.

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