Democrat Maura Healey is the projected winner of Massachusetts’ gubernatorial race, defeating Republican Geoff Diehl and making historical past as the primary out lesbian to be elected governor, NBC Information projected.
Healey is the state’s legal professional normal, and Diehl is a former state consultant who co-chaired former President Donald Trump’s 2016 marketing campaign in Massachusetts.
Healey’s win was a long-awaited victory for LGBTQ advocates who’ve been making an attempt to elect a lesbian to the best workplace in state authorities for many years.
Annise Parker, the president and CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which helps queer candidates get elected to public workplace, mentioned Healey’s historic win will assist ship a message that “LGBTQ folks have a spot in American society and might turn out to be revered public leaders.”
“We’re assured that underneath Maura’s management, Massachusetts will attain new heights as one of the vital inclusive states within the nation,” Parker mentioned in a press release.
Healey will observe two different out LGBTQ Democrats who’ve been elected to steer their states: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, who’s bisexual, grew to become the primary brazenly LGBTQ particular person to be elected governor in 2015, and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis grew to become the primary brazenly homosexual man to be elected governor in 2018. (Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey was not out when he was elected to workplace in 2001; he got here out as homosexual in his 2004 resignation speech.)
One different LGBTQ Democrat, out lesbian Tina Kotek, may be a part of Healey in her history-making feat. Kotek is in a aggressive three-way gubernatorial race in Oregon.
Healey is not any stranger to shattering glass ceilings for LGBTQ People.
In 2009, Healey led the nation’s first profitable problem to the Protection of Marriage Act, a 1996 regulation that prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages. And in 2014, she broke limitations once more, changing into the nation’s first out lesbian to be elected state legal professional normal.
Her marketing campaign web site says Healey, who was born in Maryland, was born “over” Massachusetts — her longtime Massachusetts household positioned soil from the state beneath her supply mattress earlier than her beginning. Healey grew up because the oldest of 5 siblings in an outdated farmhouse in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.
She planted her seeds within the state when she attended Harvard School, the place she captained the ladies’s basketball staff. After having performed skilled basketball in Austria for a number of years, she returned to Massachusetts to attend Northeastern College Faculty of Legislation.
A number of years after she graduated, Healey started her life in public service working for the workplace she would someday lead, the Massachusetts legal professional normal’s workplace. Throughout that point, she had the chance to work with somebody she described in a earlier interview as certainly one of her lesbian position fashions: lawyer and civil rights advocate Mary Bonauto, who’s finest identified for having argued on behalf of same-sex {couples} within the 2015 Supreme Court docket case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage throughout the U.S.
In a earlier interview, Healey mentioned that if she had been elected she would use her bully pulpit to struggle again towards the historic variety of anti-LGBTQ payments circulating in state legislatures and the seemingly pervasive threats of violence the neighborhood has been subjected to this yr.
This summer season, at the very least two of these threats had been directed on the LGBTQ neighborhood in Boston. An inexpensive housing undertaking for LGBTQ seniors was vandalized with homophobic and threatening graffiti in July, and in August, Boston’s Youngsters’s Hospital made nationwide headlines when it acquired a bomb menace for offering gender-affirming care to transgender youths.
“What we’re seeing is absolutely unhappy, and it’s unacceptable. And sadly, it’s a mirrored image of the hate and imaginative and prescient that’s on the market and tearing this nation aside,” Healey mentioned in a earlier interview. “In Massachusetts, we’re going to face as much as threats and intimidation — I’ve carried out that as legal professional normal, and I’ll try this as governor.”
She added, “My message to the LGBTQ neighborhood right here is that I need folks to know that they’re valued and liked, and we’ll work exhausting to guard their rights.”
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