| No Images? Click here   By Samantha Storey and Nick BaumannLambda Legal, the impact litigation group that has played a key role in nearly every Supreme Court case advancing LGBTQ rights, is mired in chaos.The 45-year-old organization has lost about half its staff since 2016, when a new CEO, Rachel Tiven, initiated an acrimonious shakeup, deep cuts to employee benefits and a messy fight over Lambda’s tactics, priorities and limitations. On Aug. 3, after more than 60 employees, former employees, funders and former board members took the extraordinary step of signing a letter of no confidence, Tiven announced her resignation.There could hardly be a worse time for the premier legal advocate for LGBTQ rights to find itself in chaos. But at the heart of Lambda’s internal battles are the same questions facing the entire left: Does an unprecedented moment like this one call for big swings or extreme caution? Are the most obvious battles also the most strategic? Where do your most vulnerable constituents figure in? And what should employees of progressive organizations be expected to sacrifice to advance the cause?Molly Redden, a HuffPost political reporter, dove deep to find out what's been happening behind the scenes. Here's how she got the story.Talk about the seed of the story. What led you to write it?I cover working conditions in politics: who finds it easy to break into and move up in the political world, and who faces a tougher path? Whether that's because of an abusive boss, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, lousy compensation — the list goes on — the point of every story is to investigate who has access to political power, who doesn't, and why.Someone tipped me off about fights inside Lambda Legal and they seemed incredibly relevant. People of color say they have a hard time moving up the ranks, and there are ways in which management discriminates against transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming workers. Neither group necessarily sees the needs of their communities reflected in Lambda's work. And then a whole other group thinks the organization grew complacent and stale under its old leadership. Lambda was instrumental to winning marriage equality, but it didn't have a plan for what came next, they say.What was most challenging in your reporting?Some of the divisions at Lambda are so wide, it's as though the different sides aren't even living through the same events. In fact, so many people are upset about so many different things that it isn't even fair to say there are "sides" — there's just hurt and fury. Documentation and corroboration helped us solve the first problem, but because people weren't cleanly divided into "camps" it took a lot of revisions before I felt like I'd conveyed what they heck is going on with enough clarity.And it was personally difficult. Whether or not they still worked there, everybody I spoke to loves Lambda and what it stands for with all their hearts. Their decision to talk to me came with a lot of hardship. I've never had so many sources cry in a single story, or say they feared for their jobs. That was a weight I carried around with me.Most surprising?I guess it's "surprising" when progressive groups act hypocritically, but I've stopped being surprised.The clearest example of hypocrisy in this story is the fact that Lambda Legal's employee health care policy doesn't cover some transition-related therapies — that is, health care for employees going through a gender transition. If you were, say, the state of Alaska and that was your health care plan, Lambda would sue you. In fact, it did!I understand that smaller employers are somewhat at the mercy of insurance companies. I understand that Lambda is trying. Last month (after HuffPost started asking questions) it set up a reimbursement fund to cover those procedures until it can get its insurance carrier to cooperate. But Lambda's employees have been calling out its hypocrisy for years. And the entire point of its mission is to ensure LGBTQ people are treated equally.I mean, come on.Anything else you want to add?I didn't walk away from my reporting with a clear idea of how these questions are going to resolve themselves. Just that the stakes are incredibly high. The Trump administration has launched an all-out assault on LGBTQ rights. There are only so many places that fight the big battles for LGBTQ rights, and Lambda is the most important of them all. If, amid all the turmoil, people feel like they can't work at Lambda, there's not necessarily somewhere else they can go. One person said the following to me about a former colleague who quit and went into private practice: "That career will never be reestablished for the benefit of our community, and that is a tragedy." |
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