HIV travel ban
I didn’t even know about the HIV travel ban until I started volunteering with Immigration Equality, which does great work on LGBT and HIV immigration issues. There’s been progress on lifiting it. The statuatory ban is gone, but there’s still a regulatory ban.
I also didn’t know about the Uniting American Families Act, which would allow American citizens to sponsor their same-sex partners for green cards. There are couples who move to South Africa because its immigration policies are more friendly to same-sex couples than U.S. policies. South Africa had that whole Apartheid thing going in my lifetime but seems to have surpassed the U.S. in at least some aspects of gay rights.
Immigration Equality has honored Andrew Sullivan at its annual Safe Haven Awards, which, incidentally are on Tuesday. If you’ll be in New York and have the money for this kind of thing, it’s a totally worthy cause to attend a party for.
And if you’re getting married, think about adding donations to your registry.
“Here we are, in the summer of 2009, with gay servicemembers still being fired for the fact of their orientation. Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options (unlike most non-Americans with HIV who have no options at all).— Andrew Sullivan, “The Fierce Urgency of Whenever”
