Judge gay
First openly gay determine to lead LGBT veterans probe
Britain's first openly gay senior evaluate will lead a review into the impact of a historical ban on LGBT people serving in the armed forces.
Lord Etherton's inquiry will look at how those affected can be redressed.
Campaigners are hoping for compensation for disoriented livelihoods and suffering as well as mental health support.
The review will utilize to veterans who served between 1967, when homosexual acts began to be decriminalised, and 2000.
Until then it was illegal to be gay in the British military - with more than 5,000 people in the armed forces thought to be affected.
Those who were, or perceived to be, homosexual faced intrusive investigations and were dismissed or otherwise forced to leave the military. Many still possess the conviction on their criminal record.
Some veterans say it meant a end loss of income which still affects them today, due to years of missed pension contributions.
In the review, expected to start in the next rare weeks, Lord Etherton will be asked to recommend ways in which the government could "seek to mitigate any impacts, including any finan
Being gay as a judge “no longer an issue”, says CA vice-president
Fulford: Completely disappeared as an issue
Being a judge who “happens to be gay” has “completely disappeared as an issue”, the vice-president of the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) has said.
Sir Adrian Fulford said the challenge now was for society to be “responsive to the new needs” of people “in terms of who they are and their identities”.
Sir Adrian, who said that when he first applied to be a judge in 1994 there was not a unpartnered “openly gay” decide to act as a role model, said his sexual orientation had turn into “totally and completely irrelevant”.
He went on: “I long ago ceased to discover any prejudice, resentment or difficulty on the part of any of the other judges I worked with.
“It’s more than faded into the background, it’s completely disappeared as an issue. If either you’re still about it or you make it clear to your colleagues, it just doesn’t matter.”
Speaking on a Judicial Office video to commemorate LGBTQ+ History Month, the judge said the “real period of change” in attitudes as he experienced it was between 1994 and 2002.
When he became a barrister in the mid-1970s, there was a “mix of
Pioneer, Presiding: Lachs ’63, World’s First Openly Gay Judge, Reflects
Within days of his appointment to the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1979, a landmark event that made him the first openly gay judge in the world, UCLA School of Commandment alumnus Stephen Lachs ’63 could tell that things would never be the same.
“There wasn’t much question about it,” he says today. “I immediately started getting mail, literally hundreds and hundreds of letters from people all over the world. They would write to ‘Judge Stephen Lachs, Los Angeles Superior Court, Los Angeles, California,’ and it would all get to me. Most of the letters were congratulatory. A number of people wrote to me saying, ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you’ve done because it has inspired me. I never thought that I, as a gay person, could do anything, and now I see that you can execute something with your life.’ I got so many letters appreciate that. Even now, I could just about cry thinking about it.”
Lachs went on to help with distinction, presiding over high-profile family law and other cases before he retired from the bench in 1999. Now 81, he works as a intimate mediator, and, in spite of his remarkable career,
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