Press Release - GAYLAW Announces Awardees for 16th Annual Awards Celebration

November 14, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lawyers of Washington (GAYLAW) is pleased to announce the awardees and speakers for its 16th Annual Awards Celebration to be held at the Woman’s National Democratic Club on Friday, December 5, 2008, at 6:00 p.m.  Featured speakers include the Honorable Luis A. Aguilar, a Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Dan Furmansky, Executive Director of Equality Maryland.

We are honoring the coalition of Equality Maryland, Lambda Legal, Arnold & Porter LLP, and Jonathan S. Shurberg, who will be jointly awarded the Distinguished Service Award for their successful defense of a local Montgomery County, Maryland, ordinance protecting transgender people. The measure, passed by the Montgomery County Council in November 2007, had been set to take effect in February 2008, but it was blocked when some religious and conservative groups launched a petition effort to suspend the ordinance and put it to a referendum. On behalf of several individual plaintiffs, the Distinguished Service Award recipients challenged the petition on several procedural grounds, including the number of signatures necessary to place the matter on the November 2008 ballot. Maryland’s Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, ruled in favor of plaintiffs, holding that the petition failed to meet procedural requirements needed to put the ordinance to a referendum and that the ordinance would remain in effect.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been selected as a recipient of this year’s GAYLAW Distinguished in Diversity Award . Commissioner Aguilar will accept the award on behalf of the SEC. The SEC is the first public-sector institution to receive the GAYLAW Distinguished in Diversity Award. The award recognizes the SEC’s commitment to diversity in the workplace and acknowledges the SEC as a model employer of members of the GLBT community as evidenced by, among other things, the agency’s early participation in the Lavender Law Conference; the employment of numerous members of the GLBT community throughout its staff; the commitment by the SEC to support federal benefits to domestic partners to the fullest extent possible under the law; the SEC’s outreach to the GLBT community, as witnessed by the presence of the EEO and Human Resources representatives at GAYLAW’s recent Job Talk program; and the recent establishment of a GLBT Committee.

PricewaterhouseCoopers will receive the private sector Distinguished in Diversity Award. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) actively supports gay professionals through its Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Networking Circle and community involvement. In 2006, they were the recipient of Out & Equal's Significant Achievement Award for advancing workplace equality for GLBT employees, and scored 100% on HRC’s 2007 Corporate Equality Index. In 2008, Diversity Inc. named PwC #4 on its annual Top 50 Companies for Diversity. PwC’s commitment to the GLBT legal professional community includes its active participation in numerous GAYLAW events.

Please contact Mr. Jeremy Brumbelow at Jeremy.Brumbelow@gaylaw.org or Kristin Muenzen at Kristin.Muenzen@gaylaw.org for more information about this Press Release or go to http://www.gaylaw.org for event sponsorships and individual tickets.

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Founded in 1990, GAYLAW--the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Attorneys of Washington--is a non-partisan, voluntary bar association serving gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender lawyers, law students, and legal professionals in the Nation’s capital and surrounding areas.