and we start with some good and surprising news we scored a rare victory in congress this past week now our only defeating the hostile bed to ban medical services for transgender people in the military but the entitled g b t forces in the house are not giving up and i suppose it's also a victory to say the republican effort to slash medicated repeal obamacare is has been stalled by grassroots activists from picture the text of attorney general jeff sessions speech to the anti elves hate group alliance defending freedom is cause for alarm we're asked to wake we didn't have the text now we do and actor has come out as transgender a college football player as gay turning to international news small to celebrate marriage equality seoul south korea  biggest pride celebration yet and it was in the rain bad news a leading gay activist in honduras has been beaten in his own home but they're not going to they have their pride celebration in a different it was revived i had never seen it i loved it all right we start with a tramp administration and congress vicky hartzler a right wing republican congresswoman from more and you know the right wing has succeeded in convincing the department of defense to delay a little let a new transgender recruits into the military but all nuns who are there are already out allowed to be open right so vicky hartzler who would like to get rid of them too but couldn't get enough support for that idea instead submitted this proposal to bar the military from paying for any medical care for transgender troops hormone surgery whatever and we were scared of this because of course we don't think the congress like war and stand good people congressman steve king said with this opening this up to who actually worked the phones with congress something that luckily trump has not figured out how to do yet and succeeded in sending this proposal down to defeat so we were kind of amazed because we figured once they allowed it on the floor they meant to pass that i think speaker ryan meant to pass it but it was defeated by a vote of two hundred and fourteen to two hundred and nine it was close but that required the votes of every democrat and twenty four dollars republicans and that's an enormously encouraging thing as small victory a bit stall the chaos we're going through well given how divided the congress has become and how hard it is to get people to cross the aisle as they say  really is astonishing and i think we had the vote on last week's show we had just gotten the news on that but the fact that the defense secretary worked so hard to get this defeated is really the new information fact is that he denied the opportunity for two pro l g b to amendments you have to be voted on in this thing so liar liar pants on fire so representatives hartzler and steve king of iowa have a new proposal they have introduced a bill to for bid the government from inter party in rules against sex discrimination to include sexual orientation discrimination or gender identity of discrimination might just be gender identity in this case but but i don't think they can get away with that but well courts have ruled it's the civil rights of it when t seventeen well well there's a lot of debate in the l g b t community about how much to work on this because people say oh this doesn't stand a chance and if we start talking about it that's all we're going to elevate and really our strategy should be to stay quiet and just let it go away and wait for the courts to protect us i mean i'm worried that a lot of the things that we want to well it's over the last thirty years are going to be taken away out of the regime i do want to mention before we move on one other amendment that was killed during this whole parade of amendments that there was one to call climate change a direct threat to national security they dollars non climate deniers among the republicans i look i think it's encouraging that we are so far so far all fingers crossed beating back that he's horrible health care proposals you be affordable care act those go away in the health care field well as long as religious people have the right not to operate on you when you come into the emergency room and we'll get to that more later i guess the other the the other enormous story of course everybody's been talking about it is that the the g o p medicaid slashing bill was stopped and they weren't able to bring it forward are they on any level that required again for republicans to stand up to it for different reasons of course some of them wanted to make it worse so i wouldn't exhale because the house defeated their bill originally and then passed it something still can happen and the other thing is you're talking about yeah we're beating back legislation and it is being done through grassroots effort across the country especially all those people in wheelchairs down across the country in the halls of the offices of these people going to town hall meetings locally people getting arrested in the halls of congress it's a beautiful beautiful but of course everybody has heard the president say he wants  obamacare to fail and he can order essentially h h s to do whatever they could to make it fail while they are already and they're considering things like not in foreseen provisions of the affordable care act and letting it go down to ruin although it's in a lot better shape than they would like you think by by just not enforcing it and not providing funding not providing things that are mandated in it because they don't want to and just sabotaging and and ruining it and burning it down that way it's in no it is what's happening across the government the the environmental protection agency under scott pearl it is is rescinding all the protective laws and bringing back dangerous pollution in water d and air and everywhere and they're just undermining everything literally and and this is happening in every department across the government and just another small example this week the census bureau had been asked by actual from the  departments of the government housing and urban development the department of justice the e p a and the center for medicare and medicaid to to include l g b t questions on the census departments asked the census bureau for it and the census bureau said now we don't need that data you know the people who are asking course there are a lot of embedded homosexuals and the government and of course you haven't told the secretary is there ask if we could bring back joe mccarthy and root them out because he of course had his own net well anyway now i'm sure well if it's up to jeff sessions perhaps that will happen well so we told you about the good we told you about this last week that he gave the speech to alliance to fred big freedom which is this right wing legal group then all these freedom of information request came in and said what did you say because it was a closed door speech with no reporters allowed to be present and they weren't ever internally releasing the tax cut but a buddy they did release it or somebody from the right wing groups put it up because they're so proud of it federalist society yes you know of course when he was hiding it stephen called bear said come on a closed door speech it's two thousand and seventeen it's ok to come out let your hate flag fly you're here you fear you're where you're used to it as good so anyway we saw the transcript of the speech and it was all has repeatedly said things about wanting a theocratic society wanting the rule of biblical law not secular law and he said in this speech that morality requires religion you cannot be a moral person unless you have a religious foundation to that at the action of mine that i don't think he means is law will do we'll get to more of that later and but they are planning an upcoming guidance on this for the for the nation well this is traverse executive order to put a sign in part of that and sessions is following through in telling the a t f that yes we're about to release the guidelines trump mandated on how to apply federal religious freedom restoration act principles to all their work right the phrases use it is the right to exercise your faith of the public square everybody has a right to believe what they want to believe but not everybody has a right to you know take over the public square act of the civil realm on their religious beliefs otherwise we're in a lot of trouble because there are a lot of things in the bible the i do not want enforced in the public square and saying practice that in the public square is code for our public accommodation his businesses government offices whatever to be able to claim a religious freedom exemption for any kind of behavior they want right which is why also the florist in washington state baron else gottesman refused to supply flowers and got into a fight with a same sex couple who are getting married about supplying flowers for their wedding and who has lost court cases all all the way up the line now has asked to be added to the supreme court case hearing the masterpiece bakery case the shop case the story that she has constructed is i have dealt with this customer before i like my selling flowers all the time i was willing to sell them flowers for this event i just wasn't willing to sign a contract that said i had to go to the sun the wedding contract would you go to the church you arrange the flowers you're part of the service you stay throughout the service it you know in terms of debating this publicly it makes  tougher to argue i don't think being me even being at the church to supervise the freshness of the flowers is necessary being part of the service i think that's just performing a d not the supreme court but two courts of appeals or district court so federal courts these are two guys who support reinstatement of the sodomy laws have consistently condemned same sex circuit and schiff is nominated to the u s court of federal claims bad news shift even opposes anti bullying policies but then again so did mike bloomberg our mayor so where is all this coming from i think it's time to show the oval office pictures of our president meeting with twenty five religious leaders who laid hands on him to pray with him as his domestic policy adviser all of these all i know jews know no muslims that's for sure this and this is the look at the you know i mean it was in the way in the white house that we in the white house they might have used another room yeah but we're going to be saved because caitlin jenner has had a big meeting with nikki haley the u n ambassador yes caitlin says she's been trying to talk to the president and to others in the administration had a long meeting with nikki haley i mean you know i give kate let a little more leeway than you do i think her heart's in the right place but  if she if she only had a brain and i'm just going to say it and her heart but everything she doesn't listen to anybody there are lots of people who've tried to school or and yet these issues you know comes away saying oh you know she says you  know she said on the view you know we have our problems here at ours shoes you're better if you look on the international basis they chop my head off in some countries well that's true but i mean what are the  problems here caitlin you need to address that and this is a hell of a way to conduct foreign policy for and nikki haley who they had never met before apparently and then and they're also not telling us what they discussed well which leads m credit i think there's been some confusion around this meeting that i feel compelled to let play let's let's let's put people on track what we're talking about this is a meeting during the campaign in june i believe when the president had wrapped up  it sounded like only one russian but it turns out to be you know about twenty well here's what i want people to understand because they keep throwing out this adoption thing and casting scorn on it but it's a real thing yes the russians have an agenda their agenda is get rid of the magnitsky act that imposed sanctions on russia over the ukraine i believe right now over the kill lawyer magnitsky that's right and the guy he was working for the american went to congress after magnitsky was killed by putin and said you have to impose sanctions on russia because they murdered magnitsky which makes me understand why trump and trump jr go along with the russians because they don't want to die well putin freaked out about the magnitsky act and he wants nothing so much as to have that disappear that's one of his top and what it is but the medical treatment and he said no the end of this so the russian putin nights scheme and plot and say all right we're going to try to get trump to lift the sanctions and  screw the magnitsky act how are we going to get a meeting with them we're going to get a meeting with them by saying we have the info on hillary we're going to slip you the info on hillary so they go to the they get the meeting done says old great i love this  they go to the meeting all of them all the nefarious characters were in your learning more about every day and they say well you know we have a little info but not really a lot of info of the trump people say this is a burger this is a nothing burger and they say well you know why really what you should be interested in is not just hillary but this poor situation with adoption and you know the president loves the beautiful children and that's why he bomb syria because he really cares about the children and we really would like to be able to open up adoption again for us parents and and dunces really and how do  know the actual issue but really they're sitting there and say we don't care about adoption that's why questioners just look at it as phone or man afore they leave the meeting because they don't care about adoption and the russians have tried to get in their good graces by talking about this but really they don't care and so they try to talk about the magnitsky act and these people don't know what's going to go by that most of the beatings between the trump crime family and the russians is about business about their business deals and  all those things that are about i think that's what the president i think there's a lot of that talk going there around but i think this particular meeting was the russians trying to get rid of the magnitsky act trying to do it by claiming they had hillary  trying to do it by saying will lift the adoption ban and getting nowhere because these bozos don't know anything about any of that and you don't think that that there were there are something is going to come out about other meetings that gerrard had with the russian hackers who because he was in contrary a posse and was in control of the online stuff for the campaign and they fed into the russian effort to i think you're right it's a new i think there were tons of meetings about that absolutely i'm just trying to  trying to put it into perspective the fact that there really was an adoption issue that the russians tried to talk to they use both those about but the bozos don't care about adoption they should care about it but they don't and so they walked out of the meeting and s certainly would affect us but i have to say what was the point of having a war crimes office if you weren't going to prosecute george bush george w bush and donald rumsfeld for the illegal wars haven't they had a leaning at cetera yann those if that's not a war crime if those weren't war crimes i mean look at what has happened to the world as a result of what we let them do oh yeah we did go out and protest for a little while but not enough that's look what's happened in the middle east tell look at look at the pictures of misery in syria and in iraq army and i guess they want to start a war with iran to now yes you know again the national security adviser has talked trump into research to find the nuclear deal but then he went around them and just imposed other sanctions because he's an idiot and talking about what agencies can do to us in the absence of congressional action because of who is in charge at h h s now it's the woman valerie huber who was head of the national abstinence education association she they have just got it two hundred and fourteen million dollars from teen pregnancy programs across the country and saying that obama was not interested enough  stuff i guess we should talk about texas because they just started their thirty day session which was called mainly by the lieutenant governor but by the governor us pensively there's a great long piece in the new yorker and i just finished reading that really lays it all out all the players all d the personalities all the issues really really great comprehensive piece about again how the texas legislature we're well it's got it's got an extremely horrible and that but this but the lieutenant governor dan patrick was a far right winger wants this anti transgender legislation passed and the only line of resistance is the house speaker a guy named joe straus who was more business oriented and he's been warned by i b m and all these other companies that say we're not putting up with this they hope that i've got to put up with it well you could always do a north carolina compromise and come back well stress has done a great job of oil in the right activist ashley smith there on the right got herself a little selfie with the governor supposedly without him knowing that she was trans anyone attempt to embarrass any one of the people that was announced to oppose it is dallas this  president meanwhile though also in texas a transsexual woman who's a an engineer is suing the phillips sixty six company because they rescinded a have philip sixty six has a diversity policy i'm not sure that's legally enforceable but under the civil rights act of nine hundred and sixty four the prohibition against sex discrimination because people have been winning suits for gender identity and to that law we'll see whether she can carry that off in texas and i was kind of surprised to see the new york city commission on human rights say you would expect it to be fairly liberal but they don't generally go after religious groups and they have gone to rooms based on their birth gender right rather than what who they are so so that's a sign of progress yes by the way related to all these issues in ohio to ohio in an interview recently that he was asked whether he would perform in a same sex marriage and he said sure and then the proverbial you know what hit the fan and he was verbal assaulted all over the place and he retracted never mind oh i didn't mean that i didn't realize it would upset people that woman who's been sewing planet fitness out there in michigan over you know being upset by a transgendered person woman in the locker room room is appealing her decision to the state's highest court as she's been losing in berkeley california the national center for lesbian rights in working with a lesbian client is suing a therapist i put that in quote marks who took seventy thousand dollars from her over eight years continually harassing her to change conversion therapy attempt this is this is an interesting case because she's not a minor i mean when we pass these laws against conversion therapy it's about people under eight hundred and eighteen dollars and under under eighteen so it will be interesting to see little girl says i'm not gay but my moms are but here's the big thing is this was their st pride celebration and they had a one thousand people in the town with a population of fewer than twenty one thousand people in western maryland very very nice savannah georgia has opened in l g b t community center providing various services congratulations to them and congratulations to scott france he's on he's a kansas state tackle he has come out there's a picture of him how how did he i'm out there having some session with the players where the whoever was running the sessions what their coach said i want you to reveal the show queen sugar on the oprah winfrey network own but there's a new character there trans com and the actor who plays the cop brian michael smith has just come out as trans himself great and he on the show he treated very positively and supportively by his old high school friend who discovers this about him and i don't know if any of you are members of the whole chunk nation in wisconsin but you can get same sex marriage now it is the parent who brown the st tried to do so out of about five hundred and sixty six dollars in the country they have their own laws around marriage and things like that so we are making progress there interesting case from orlando florida where a cop who was involved in in the aftermath of the massacre at the pulse nightclub and who suffers from post traumatic stress has won a lifetime disability pension that the city opposed to give him a chance to get better hasn't that enough there be hasn't tried hard enough or whatever he's thirty seven i mean he had to deal with i mean you know as did others but i mean you know removing the forty nine bodies from the place and all that kind of stuff you know so he is going to go he is going to get is disability ability pension and senator elizabeth warren of massachusetts has introduced something called the refund of quality act to give tax refunds to same sex married couples who are married under some particular circumstances that particular time that i don't entirely understand it but she's trying to equalize benefits international news sure start out with the celebration in malta we've been telling you they have to go through a lot of readings there they are celebrating we may we made history is joining fourteen other european countries of legalizing same sex marriage it was almost unanimous there was one dissent the interesting thing is   taipei city employees are getting some early marriage and paternity leave benefits the country has been ordered to legalize same sex marriage within the next two years but in anticipation of that they're starting to make some changes and give some benefits this is the st local government there to do so of course it's a big one taipei but in singapore authorities have arbitrarily voided  marriage of a couple when the husband transitioned and is has proclaimed female d gender so now it's two women who are worried and singapore acknowledges transgender people and is ok with that but is not ok with a same sex marriage so if she had transitioned and married a man that would have been ok but since she was already married to a woman well this is not this is sort of press a because i can't think of a time in the united states where someone has transitioned who was married to and and then they voided the marriage sure the tried to avoid the marriage well there was a time in texas when different counties had different rules about that and if you were married in one county it was ok and if you were married another county it wasn't him to just talk to people who were trying to put us into all these different boxes you see on  stop so the people got along all they wanted to do was be there are a married couple they want to apply for subsidized housing and then you give them all this kind of trouble well tell it to the government of israel where the government is arguing against legalizing adoption by gay couples they say it provides extra difficulties for the child has had gone to court to ask for legalization and the government weighed in with its contrary opinion that up until now it says israeli individuals and same sex relationships were able to adopt children all only if no heterosexual couples were interested in the children actually that's something that mi imposed on massachusetts right before he ran for president to show how tough he was on the gays that was his sister soldier move moment before the was a sister soldier moment sad horrifying story out of germany a serbian gay couple who were refugees living in a refugee camp or set up of some kind in germany were attacked and beaten almost to death in the refugee camp they were that the deal now yes because they were getting bad publicity for caning gay men in public so turned happier well the crowds were very happy they showed up in droves but worldwide publicity was against it so they're going to keep doing it but behind closed doors now speaking of monsters there's a dear rob this is the leader of chechnya and of all things he was on real sport i watched it you can watch it it's available and so he's there you know about so the whole thing with the persecution of gay people and you have to hear this quote we don't know those kind of people here we don't have any gays if they're already take them to canada prays to god take them far from us so we don't have them at home to purify our blood if they're already here take them they are devils they are forests well they are not people  spokesman for the kremlin commented saying well there's nothing unusual about it that was really should our well and our secretary of state will not speak out about it you can get minor things out of the state department from the spokespeople oh  concerning blah blah blah blah we've asked for an investigation so well that's what putin said yeah i have to say that the real sports reporter who was conducting this interview was pretty good and he started the sensible reason for the president of chechnya to be on real sports the bryant gumbel and h b o show was because they have he's made a huge investment in mixed martial arts as the road to world domination for chechnya and so they were investigating all of that but then he sits down and he's interviewing the president need talks about that and then he asks about the beatings and killings of gay men and the president says now we see now we get why you're here here are these questions out k and then he launches into this stuff and it was pretty scary of course but the reporter stood his ground and kept asking questions and probing it but this guy this guy very very scary yeah i mean he's not ashamed of his bigotry like jeff sessions who has to you know make you fight to get the text of his speeches well and i'm sorry to report that the the international soccer federation is failing in its attempt to get the hutto chant by mexican fans and similar ones by others eradicated from the grants and it's a traditional value for them well you know soccer fans have been violent and crude for a long time and if they're not killing each other from england and other countries all over but the soccer federation had said oh yes we're going to deal with wedding in britain in wall saul one of them is from bangladesh i guess the guy on the right and they were married at the registry office they didn't have a religious ceremony not a lot i don't think you're allowed  he won a tremendous legal battle there to get an equal pension now they put a loop they put a loophole into the when they did same sex marriage they said if you paid into the pension fund before december  five when they did domestic civil partnerships you don't get that money so if you're gay and you get married this his partner was he's sixty five dollars his partner is only going to going to get a one thousand dollars a year but if you'd married a woman case the british may not have the same kind of protection now the european well there is a bill in parliament to adopt those laws under the european union that they have that have already given back since going to be killed it would be a smart and now they are no longer going to say ladies and gentlemen they are just going to say hello everyone which is kind of what they do when they do the weather on the b b c they say have and that they don't say ladies and gentlemen and this was fought for by a gay man who was convicted of not disclosing it's a very long complicated story well he and the contention is that he lied to his sex partner and others about whether he knew he was  lot of the testimony was about was from people who said i told him he was a chevy positive sentiment letters or i told him in person he had to have or not to be found out by having his blood test yeah and he says i avoided getting that  're you're meeting someone who's already with another guy and you're just fooling around with them and then he says oh don't worry i'm clean the charming yeah yeah exactly or practice safe sex in a way that doesn't and they're going to try to do with through the budget process what they have been able to do with the health bill that's true so we must remain vigilant and we must stay on board with this stuff you know i debate with my friends whether we want to impeach him or not and i'm very leery of putting mike pence in power because i think he'll have an easier time passing all this although we had a very bad week where he was the one out there getting agitated about the bill we have to do this and i so i watched him and i thought scared of traffic i watched that i watched the people were not responding to him he's not a good leader i mean m such a jerk over the gay stuff yeah yeah he failed so miserably on that that he lost any chance of running for president himself he was the coke the others pick yeah and today yeah and then he couldn't run and of course we've always said they want to get him in there but he had a really bad week in terms of his performance he's he's not a not a very bright guy he's not but it's all relative and how does he look next to trump as a leader well i'm come around to your i've come around to your view which is that having trouble in there even though we're all nervous about his finger on the button when we are about world war three is but he is so he is such a disaster across the board and they're only multiplying that everywhere else and they're going to do more of that and so i'd like them all to disappear yesterday but if we're going to have to keep living with this for a while  least he is such a screw up and so easily discerned as a monster that i think that's probably the best i mean even though we're basically in despair we're due not to be performances in the rover but they had a great cast for this and it's all about the people malcontents mostly you know they are portrayed as who have taken shots at presidents over the years some successfully like john wilkes not like squeaky for home and sarah jane moore sarah jane moore played by victoria clarke correct absolutely stole the show completely hilarious you wouldn't have thought charles manson could speak her leader well i went in thinking this is going to be a little too too in the age of trump but it turned out i by the end of the show which i really liked not one hundred percent but ninety percent i at the end of the show i thought she did the president was a bad idea well look what happened with lincoln oh yeah clifton duncan and i think this guy's going to be a star he was terrific but i was glad to finally see it i had you know i've seen most sondheim shows over the years some i've liked some i haven't but i have never caught  i it was the missing in moment in my and the city center encores is going to have a bunch more shows that are doing the bubbly black girl shows are camilla and skin later this month and really rosie in august the music of bernhard herman who does all the alfred hitchcock scores yeah and well i guess speaking about british cock maybe we should segue to martin landau ok who died this week at the age of eighty nine and why are we talking about  because we all remember him from north by northwest which was his breakthrough role where he's the assistant to james mason they're the sort of the nefarious forces there against the the americans and he says i decided to play this guy is gay as in love with my boss now it's not in the script doesn't look like love in that picture artist layman who wrote the script said i didn't write it that way but i get it now look at the film i guess so but like ben h course mission impossible and you know these days i feel that where everywhere in virtually every t v show you know but not all of them but they time d walters character role yet one for the civilians yeah well she's sort of a hero bill and on this so they they lost one of their panelists they've been having guest panelist so janet mock has been sitting in recently and considers himself feminine and is seems to be transitioning and she's been struggling with this but she wants to be supportive and so she gets on air with janet mock and starts drilling her with questions none of nobody else knows this and then says i make some crack about real women as opposed to you janet mock and everybody freaks out and then she reveals she has this trans kid well this is all happening you know on durand or never been ashamed of having a gender nonconforming son who's ten years old and they posted a picture and there they are and the actor james woods is right wing trump supporters said this is sweet wait until the poor kids grows up realizes what you've done and stuffs both of you dismembered into a freezer in the garage which is about as hateful as you can get the whole world took him on that he tried to say come on i got more gay friends  remember liberace having a lot of gay friends i don't remember liberace being out quite frankly but but what he needs to read is what you need to read is sparkle boy this is the new book by liz layard newman who wrote heather has two mommies yeah and it's all you know about the ball now it's all about sparkle boy likes all of his older sisters think she's not that old she's a couple of years older just keeps wearing all her things and the adults in the thing are all very encouraging the sisters a little nervous about it but she comes around in the gave it away and it's a very short book but anyway sparkle boy just for james woods is reading lists like to send it to him o showed up at the tour de france this week yes rode along in a car next to the idea that our watches back assassins yeah well nonetheless gay games ten will take place next year in paris and there's an informational meeting about it this weekend on sunday july rd at the l g b t community center here in new york from four to six pm so if you have any interest in finding out about next year's gay games in paris and having helped organize the gay games for here in new york in one thousand nine hundred and four i can tell you it was a fantastic experience and everyone who does it loves it go to the center sunday four pm for that informational meeting and by the way i did see another play this week just for that for the heck of it that's atlantic theater two called pity in history about the english civil war the whole cromwell thing is not it it's just a small story of know average people involved in the war and i like that very much and that's running to log a six that atlanta theater to call pity in history you know the crime while people were like you know let's tear down all the statues let's you