by Catherine Hanssens

For those who believe that the bad old days of HIV-related discrimination are over, Friday's Justice Department announcement of two settlements involving claims that health care providers refused to serve people with HIV in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) should serve as a reality check.

by Beirne Roose-Snyder and Catherine Hanssens

On the eve of this year's World AIDS Day, which had a theme of "Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV Infections. Zero Discrimination and Zero AIDS Deaths," we were contacted about the latest sad story of what people with HIV still have to deal with.

by Lauren Tetenbaum, JD/LMSW, Teen SENSE Consultant

In August of this year, the New York City government announced a mandate in which schools are required to teach a semester of comprehensive ("abstinence-plus") sexual health education in 6th or 7th grade and again in 9th or 10th grade.
 

by Jodi Jacobson, Editor-in-Chief, RH Reality Check
Originally published at RH Reality Check

An article in yesterday's New York Times by Pam Belluck suggesting that injectable contraceptive use might double the risk of HIV transmission among women and their partners sent a wave of anxiety through the global public health community.

by Beirne Roose-Snyder, CHLP Staff Attorney

Last Friday, Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced H.R. 3053, the REPEAL HIV Discrimination Act, which calls for review of all federal and state laws, policies, and regulations regarding the criminal prosecution of individuals for HIV-related offenses. Why is federal legislation an important piece of the decriminalization puzzle when most criminal law is made at the state level?

by René Bennett-Carlson, Managing Attorney

CHLP's René Bennett-Carlson discusses our exciting new partnership with the Hetrick Martin Institute (HMI).
 

By Hannah Slater, CHLP Intern and Heather Heldman, CHLP Program Associate

Recognizing that people are sexual, regardless of disability, is crucial to ensuring equal access to comprehensive sexual health care.

By Kathie Hiers, CEO of AIDS Alabama and the President of the National AIDS Housing Coalition

This week the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) finally unveiled its recommendations for the use of Ryan White funding for housing. While the ability to use Ryan White funds for housing is welcome, for it to be meaningful one thing becomes painfully clear: we need more federal dollars to be invested in Ryan White.

By Heather J. Heldman, MPH, CHLP Volunteer

The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA), a federal law passed in 1988, prohibits transplants using organs from HIV-positive donors. However, as organ transplant technology and health outcomes for people living with HIV/AIDS have improved over the past two decades, the number of HIV-positive people in the United States seeking organ transplants has also increased significantly. In response to these changes, many doctors, patients, and public health policy makers are now pushing for a reevaluation of the parts of NOTA that govern organ transplants involving people who are HIV-positive.

By Wesley Ware, LGBTQ Youth Project Director/ BreakOUT! for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana

Our guest blogger, Wesley Ware, is the LGBTQ Youth Project Director for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. His post chronicles the issues facing LGBTQ youth in New Orleans and addresses the stigma and discrimination and HIV-risk that is perpetuated by a criminal justice system that should be protecting these marginalized youth but instead prosecutes them.

By: Julie Turkewitz, Housing Works

The U.S. Agency for International Development, while publicly denouncing laws that specifically criminalize HIV, has in fact financed their recent rapid dissemination across the African continent.

By: Beirne Roose-Snyder, CHLP Staff Attorney

On Friday, February 18th, the House of Representatives voted to end all funding of Title X family planning clinics including Planned Parenthood.  On the same day they voted to continue funding NASCAR.  Women's health should not be a political sport, and there will be serious consequences if this should become law.

By: Beirne Roose-Snyder, CHLP Staff Attorney

In October 2010, a porn actor, now identified as Derrick Burts, tested positive for HIV. The news cycle responded as it often does- with alarm and hand-wringing, and with some discussion of "AIDS activists" who are lobbying California to make condoms mandatory in porn. But the reaction to a porn actor testing positive for HIV raises bigger questions about HIV prevention, testing, sexual health and about the porn industry itself. What is the relationship between HIV and the adult film industry? Who regulates the industry and how? And should this singular HIV positive test result be the catalyst for major change?

By Peggy Lee, CHLP Program Associate

In this cycling media attention on school administrators that do nothing about threats to LGBTQ youth, and queer teens killing themselves or being killed, what is the status of young LGBTQ teens who are in alternative settings, specifically the spaces often invisibilized to us and the media?

By Beirne Roose-Snyder, Staff Attorney; Peggy Lee, Program Associate; and Catherine Hanssens, Executive Director 

Last week, CHLP launched the Positive Justice Project (PJP) to combat HIV-related stigma and discrimination against people with HIV by the criminal justice system. More than 40 individuals from legal, government, grant-making and community service and media organizations enlisted in this first coordinated national campaign to end a particularly vicious form of government-sponsored discrimination against people with HIV.

By Megan McLemore, J.D.,L.L.M.
Senior Researcher, Human Rights Watch
(originally posted at Salon.com)

With headlines like "Obama Administration Promoting the Transmission of AIDS" and "The Justice Department Wants You to Get AIDS and Die," there has been more heat than light in some of the responses to the news that the U.S. Department of Justice may sue the South Carolina Department of Corrections over its segregation of HIV-positive prisoners.  Why is the notion that HIV-positive prisoners should have the same housing and work release options as convicted murderers so controversial?  And why is the notion that HIV is a mark of extreme dangerousness and death still so widely accepted?

By Joanna Cuevas Ingram, CHLP Summer 2010 Legal Intern, U.C.- Davis School of Law, Class of 2012

CHLP hosted the very first U.S.-based electronic forum for HIV-positive women and their advocates last month, and learned a lot in the process.One thing we learned: the E-forum is a promising tool for getting more voices of people living with HIV into the mix that influences what advocates and government officials prioritize on their behalf.

By Catherine Hanssens
Executive Director, CHLP

Comprehensive reviews of the newly-released National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) are still to come, although certain themes have emerged in the first reactions of national AIDS organizations. We consider what the NHAS has to say on several issues: criminalization of HIV, stepped-up enforcement of existing civil rights laws, expanded access to legal services to help with enforcement, and prisoners' rights. Not only are these issues a central part of fighting HIV in the US, at least one has the added benefit of costing little or nothing to address.
 

By Julie Turkewitz
Staff Writer, Housing Works

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's decision to use a state law allowing civil commitment of dangerous sex-offenders to keep Nushawn Williams in prison  — despite Williams' having served his full 12-year-term — has set off alarm bells for AIDS advocates and civil rights experts.

by Joseph Sonnabend, M.D.

One of the first physicians on the front lines of AIDS clinical care comments on the meaning and importance of informed consent in the push for earlier use of antiretroviral therapies, and laments the absence of activists who fought to safeguard it.