Alabama

State officials say the license plate slipped past its three-member review panel.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Alabama’s only openly gay lawmaker plans to name her bill to prohibit anti-LGBT workplace discrimination after Apple CEO Tim Cook. Rep. Patricia Todd (D-Birmingham) said she will introduce “The Tim Cook Economic Development Act” when the legislative session gets underway in March 2015, in the hope that Alabama …

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — An Alabama man is mentally incompetent to stand trial on charges of threatening President Barack Obama’s life, and prison officials should determine whether he was also incapacitated at the time of the alleged offense, a federal judge ruled.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Apple CEO Tim Cook is challenging his home state of Alabama to do more to ensure the rights of people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Cook says educational equality is also a key civil rights issue. He says Apple is giving $100 million for technology for 114 schools in 29 states to help.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — An Alabama appeals court says a judge can’t order child visitation following the split-up of a same-sex couple. The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals ruled Friday that a Jefferson County judge was wrong to order child visitation for a woman who split up with her partner of 16 years.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Army officials discriminated against a transgender employee who underwent a sex change while working at an Alabama installation, restricting her from the women’s restroom and using her male name despite her preference to be referred to as a woman, a federal investigation found.

LOS ANGELES – Ten states’ strict voter ID laws may create substantial barriers to voting and possible disenfranchisement for more than 24,000 transgender voters this November. According to a new study entitled, “The Potential Impact of Voter Identification Laws on Transgender Voters in the 2014 General Election,” authored by the Williams Institute’s …

WASHINGTON — The Human Rights Campaign has announced the hiring of two more state leaders as part of its Project One America campaign to promote LGBT equality in three deeply conservative southern states. Rob Hill, a former clergyman, will lead the HRC’s efforts in Mississippi, and Ashley Jackson, co-founder of the Mississippi Safe Schools …

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A Little Rock native who has worked for several nonprofits will be the first Arkansas director for the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights group. The Washington-based Human Rights Campaign announced Monday it had hired Kendra Johnson as its state director as part of its $8.5 million Project One America campaign to promote LGBT equality…

MOBILE, Ala. — Two women challenging Alabama’s ban on recognizing same-sex marriages are asking a judge to decide the case without holding a trial. Attorneys for Cari Searcy and Kimberly McKeand of Mobile filed the request in federal court in Mobile. They have one of three federal lawsuits challenging Alabama’s ban.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — An Alabama appeals court on Friday ruled that the state’s ban on consensual oral and anal sex, aimed at criminalizing homosexual conduct, is unconstitutional. The appeals courts said that a portion of Alabama’s sexual misconduct statute — which reads in part, “consent is no defense to a prosecution” — was unconstitutional.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Alabama on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a same-sex couple from Birmingham who married in Massachusetts but their marriage is not recognized in their home state.

JACKSON, Miss. — The national LGBT advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign, plans to seek anti-discrimination state laws to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people in Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A Southern heritage group is defending Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriage. The Alabama-based League of the South is planning a protest for Friday morning in Montgomery outside the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is trying to overturn the ban.

MOBILE, Ala. — Two Alabama women filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to force the state to recognize their out-of-state marriage so they can both be legal parents to their 8-year-old son.

For many, it’s difficult to understand Foster Noone’s sexual identity. The 17-year-old uses the labels of bisexual, trans and gender neutral all at once. A photography exhibition that opened at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on Wednesday night seeks to put a face on such young people while exploring the difficult dynamics of family acceptance of their identities in the Deep South.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The nation’s largest LGBT advocacy organization is launching a three-year, $8.5 million campaign to promote LGBT equality and push for new legal protections in three Southern states dominated by conservative politics and religion and known for resistance to change: Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — An Alabama woman is charged with murder for allegedly shooting her son’s long term partner in the back at a truck stop in McCalla, Ala., on Monday evening.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The mother of an accident victim is now involved in a federal lawsuit filed by his same-sex partner, who is trying to overturn Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriage.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — An Alabama lawmaker has accused her colleagues of using deception to pass a resolution urging an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.