The What, When and Who of 2013
The Year in Review 2013
MARCH
First, the bad news, during this month of mostly local news. In Annapolis, the state Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee managed to kill a bill to make antidiscrimination legislation inclusive of gender identity and expression a statewide law. ”The three Democratic senators who voted against the bill should be embarrassed,” Sharon Brackett, board chair of Gender Rights Maryland, told Metro Weekly at the time. Meanwhile, Universal Gear went public with surveillance video following a March 23 robbery — its third since December 2012 — at the popular 14th Street retailer.
But the community rallied and made the best of March nonetheless. The Capital Area Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, aka The Chamber, threw a successful 5th Annual Mega-Networking and Social Event at Town Danceboutique March 13. The DC Center, the city’s LGBT community center, launched an ongoing Monday coffee hour for LGBT seniors, sponsored by Alpha People’s Drugs; while more than 100 members of the local transgender community and allies rallied in Columbia Heights Plaza for equal health care treatment for transgender people.
Over at the Supreme Court, March closed out with the justices hearing the arguments on the two cases — United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry — focused, respectively, on the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. It was during the DOMA arguments, March 27, that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered her famous characterization of marriage inequality as creating ”skim milk marriage.”
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