Fenway Health Honors Maura Healey

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey talks with Emmy Winner Charlotte Robinson host of OUTTAKE VOICES™ about being this year’s recipient of the Dr. Susan M. Love Award presented by Fenway Health at their annual Women’s Dinner Party fundraising event on April 9th at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. Attorney General Healey is being honored for her crucial contributions to our LGBT community’s civil rights and for being an openly LGBT politician. Each year the Dr. Susan M. Love Award is given to honor and celebrate a woman or organization that has made a significant contribution to the field of women’s health. The Love Award is given in honor of its founding recipient Dr. Susan M. Love a pioneer in the fields of women’s health and breast cancer. Love helped found the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center in 1992 and currently heads up the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation which is dedicated to eradicating breast cancer. Since taking office Maura Healey has championed issues that affect the lives and health of some of Massachusetts most vulnerable residents, including LGBT rights, the heroin and prescription drug abuse epidemic, escalating health care costs, workers rights, criminal justice system reforms and college debt. We talked to Maura about her groundbreaking work, being honored by Fenway Health with the Dr. Susan M. Love Award and her spin on our LGBT issues.

When asked what her personal commitment is to LGBT civil rights Healey stated, “It’s deeply personal for me not just because I happen to be a lesbian but because I think that civil rights should be on everyone’s agenda. I think it’s so important that we respect one another, that we respect and celebrate difference and that we treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves. It’s as simple as that. Obviously my office continues to be involved in the fight for marriage equality. I was so happy that it turned out that the first brief with my name on it as a newly-elected attorney general was the brief that we filed with the Supreme Court in the marriage equality case and continues to be the work that we need to do. I’m working really hard and strongly supporting the Transgender Accommodations Bill pending right now in the Massachusetts legislation. We got a bill that would ban discrimination against transgender folks in places of public accommodation. Sadly there’s still a gap in our law and while the legislature in Massachusetts took important steps a few years ago to ban discrimination against transgender folks in the workplace, housing and in schools, they did not address places of public accommodation and that’s just not right. We need to fix that so the bill is pending now in the legislature. I’d love to see it get a vote as soon as possible and see it signed into law so that transgender people in Massachusetts and those visiting Massachusetts will have protections under the law.”

Maura Healey graduated from Harvard in 1992 and made history when she was sworn in as the nation’s first openly gay Attorney General on January 21st 2015. Prior to that Healey was the architect of the state’s successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which she argued and won twice in federal court before the Supreme Court finally struck DOMA down. Healey will be honored at the Women’s Dinner Party, an elegant attire fundraiser for Fenway Health that brings together more than 1,100 lesbian, transgender and bisexual women and their friends and allies for a night of dinner and dancing on April 9th. This year’s event is made possible thanks to the hard work of event co-chairs Lauren K. Matysiak, Kendra E. Moore, PhD, and Carol A. Roby as well as the support of their generous corporate sponsors.
For Info & Tix: womensdinnerparty.org
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