Three longstanding LGBT legal activists will be honored by the American Bar Association Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity with its 10th annual Stonewall Award during a ceremony on Feb. 12 at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Seattle.
Named after the New York City Stonewall Inn police raid and riot of June 28, 1969, which was a turning point in the gay rights movement, the award recognizes lawyers who have considerably advanced lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals in the legal profession and successfully championed LGBT legal causes.
The 2022 award recipients are:
• Jordan Blisk
• Shannon Minter
• Judge G. Helen Whitener
Blisk is the assistant director of chapters at the American Constitutional Society, a progressive legal organization, and executive director and board chair of the Colorado Name Change Project (CNCP). At CNCP, he leads programs that provide transgender Coloradans with legal and financial assistance with their name and gender marker corrections through attorney-led workshops across the state.
Having earned both the rank of senior airman in the U.S. Air Force and his undergraduate degree by the age of 20, three years later, Blisk became the first openly transgender graduate of the University of Colorado Law School, where he organized the first annual CU Law Name Change Clinic.
Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), was lead counsel for same-sex couples in the landmark California marriage equality case which held that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry and that laws that discriminate based on sexual orientation are inherently discriminatory and subject to the highest level of constitutional scrutiny.
Minter was also NCLR’s lead attorney in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding student group policies prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and rejecting the argument that such policies violated a student group’s rights to freedom of speech, religion and association. Minter received his law degree from Cornell Law School in New York.
Whitener was appointed to the Washington State Supreme Court in April 2020 and was elected to retain her position in November 2020. Prior to that, Whitener served as a judge on the Pierce County Superior Court and the Washington State Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals and as a pro-tem judge in Pierce County District Court and the City of Tacoma Municipal Court.
Before becoming a judge, Whitener litigated civil and criminal cases as first a prosecutor and defense attorney and later as a managing partner of the law firm of Whitener Rainey Writt PS in Tacoma.
––––––––––––––––––––
Subscribe to the Legal News!
http://legalnews.com/subscriptions
Full access to public notices, articles, columns, archives, statistics, calendar and more
Day Pass Only $4.95!
One-County $80/year
Three-County & Full Pass also available
––––––––––––––––––––
Subscribe to the Legal News!
http://legalnews.com/Home/Subscription
Full access to public notices, articles, columns, archives, statistics, calendar and more
Day Pass Only $4.95!
One-County $80/year
Three-County & Full Pass also available
