Guides: LGBTQIA Resources Workshop: Government

Government & The LGBTQIAA Community

Here you will find information about how the Government and the LGBTQIAA community interacted with each other in the past and in the future nationally and internationally.

You can navigate both the primary and secondary databases to find certain laws that impact LGBTQIAA individuals in a certain community, locale, nation, or other descriptor.

On the far right you will see a list of some well known and some not so well known laws that impacted or currently impact the lives of LGBTQIAA individuals.

Primary Government Databases

HeinOnline
Legal research database containing fulltext documents (PDF) organized into collections including: Legal Classics, Law Journal Library, U.S. Supreme Court Library, U.S. Federal Legislative History Library, Treaties and Agreements Library, Subject Compilations of State Laws, and the United Nations Law Collection.
Proquest Congressional Hearings Retrospective 1824-1979
Digital access to the fulltext of over 150 years of U.S. Congressional hearings. Searchable by committee name, geographical location, topic, witness name or affiliation, and more. Includes abstracts, indexing, and searchable PDFs for both published and unpublished hearings.
LexisNexis Legal Research

Secondary Government Databases

BOPCRIS
Indexing for selections among British parliamentary papers.
EUR-Lex
REQUIRES FREE REGISTRATION. Fulltext European Union / European Community legislation, case law, and preparatory documents. Includes treaties between EU member states, international agreements, secondary legislation, and supplementary legislation, decisions of Community law courts and opinions of the Court of Justice of the EC and opinions of the Advocates-General, and parliamentary questions.
NATLEX
Abstracts of national labour, social security and related human rights legislation from more than 170 countries. Topics include: freedom of association, collective bargaining, elimination of child labour and forced labour, equal opportunity, employment policy, employment and work conditions, occupational safety, social security, and migrant workers.
PARLIT
Bibliographic citations for books and articles on the role, structure and working methods of national parliaments, and on electoral systems, constitutional law, history and political science.

Pivotal Laws

Defense of Marriage Act - DOMA

Defense of Marriage Act was a bill passed on September 21st, 1996 by the Clinton Administration. It defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted under the laws of other states. Section three of the law barred same-sex married couples from being recognized as "spouses", which made them ineligible for receiving not only federal marriage benefits, but medical benefits among others.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

The Equality Act

Proposition 8

HB2