The Pragmatism of a Red State LGBTQ Lobbyist
“I know people evolve. I've seen people evolve.”
In 2018, Andrew Schneider, the leader of West Virginia’s statewide LGBTQ rights organization, was honored by then-Governor Jim Justice for his “extraordinary service to the citizens of West Virginia in the battle for absolute equality and civil rights for all.”
Less than six years later, Schneider said that the legislative session that ended earlier this month was “the most challenging session for LGBTQ+ rights that I’ve ever seen.”
This week on Death, Sex & Money, I went home to West Virginia — where I grew up — to report on this political transformation there. In less than a dozen years, West Virginia’s legislature flipped from Democratically controlled to the most Republican in the country.
During that time, Andrew has been the only full-time lobbyist at the state capitol working on LGBTQ issues as head of Fairness West Virginia. His approach? Winning people over through listening rather than confrontation, a strategy he developed in college when he purposely chose a conservative campus to practice changing minds.
"I quickly realized that if I sat back and let someone talk to me and did not jump in and judge, they would trust me and we could actually have a meaningful conversation where ultimately I could inject my views," Andrew said.
For a time, Andrew had some impressive success. In 2016, then-Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael tearfully implored his colleagues “to value human dignity and the goodness in people.”
But Andrew tells it’s gotten tougher. He’s been threatened with arrest. Some lawmakers don’t want to talk over bills with him in public. He hears rumors of other lawmakers calling him slurs behind his back.
We talk about how he stays in the work, and what he’s learned in these last few years about the best ways to play defense.
Tribeca Festival + Death, Sex & Money
I’m heading back to Tribeca Fest this June. Tickets just went on sale for my live interview with Allison Williams.
Our guest is Allison Williams. Star of Girls, Get Out, M3GAN, and a popular podcast about a murder at the turn of the 19th century.
She makes such interesting, unexpected career choices, and I can’t wait to talk with her all about it.
Get your tickets here. It’s your excuse to plan a New York City excursion in June — We all need one of those. The rest of the Tribeca lineup this year also rocks. Get in on it.
Life coaching versus mental health care: a listener's email
We heard in our last Death, Sex & Money episode about the high stakes of mental health examinations in aviation, and the workarounds some are pursuing in the place of traditional mental health treatment. One person I interviewed was a therapist named Kora, who advertises her counseling services for people in aviation as “life coaching.”
That prompted another mental health provider to reach out:
Kudos on a great episode, bringing visibility to this particular issue of government overreach— not allowing trained medical professionals to exercise their clinical judgment and to do the work they are experts in doing to support pilots and prospective pilots….
However- as one of those medical professionals- I was concerned by the report on pilots turning to life coaches for treatment. Life coaching, as you may know, is an unregulated industry. I went to grad school for 6 years, obtained over 3,000 hours of supervised experience, and passed multiple tests to become a licensed psychologist. I must be re-credentialed every 2 years and am subject to regulation by the Board of Psychology and the Code of Ethics of the APA. I’m trained to diagnose and treat psychiatric disorders in an evidence based manner. I have networks of other professional colleagues who I can consult with and collaborate with and refer to. Life coaches do not have any of these credentials or requirements— they do not need to answer to anybody, really. Your example of not keeping records is a good one. We are legally and ethically required to do so, to document how we are helping and whether what we are doing meets a standard of care. Would you feel weird if your MD never wrote down anything about what you discussed when you saw him/her? Would that protect either the MD or the patient to have the session time be a black box?
It is so sad that the government would rather have people get 1) no help or 2) help from someone who went to a weekend workshop and got a life coach credential than from a highly trained and specialized professional. And, pilots should be careful about who they seek help from.—Pascale
Recommended Reading and Listening
I joined Chelsea Devantez’s celebrity memoir podcast Glamourous Trash. Together, we unpacked Lucinda Williams’ Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You. Now, I have been a serious Lucinda listener for a very long time. I’ve interviewed her. And Chelsea’s smart, close reading of the memoir revealed things I’d never considered before. I highly recommend her show. Listen here.
Oh, California…. “The Californian Ideology is where the hippie communalists and the libertarian right meet: both distrust government, desire to be ‘free’ from the man, over estimate self-sufficiency, and ignore a fundamental human dependence we have on each other,” writes sociologist Kara Van Cleaf in a post called, “Hey Mama, Your Californian Ideology is Showing.” She linked to this 1994 paper about “the California Ideology” which is a good reminder that none of this is particularly new.
This New York profile of Alex Soros, son of George Soros, made me wish I had a political science seminar to join to unpack it all. 39-year-old Alex is his father’s successor to lead the family philanthropy and political giving, making him, in writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s words, “the key megadonor poised to bankroll the liberal movement for years to come.” Among the wild quotes I would make sure we all highlighted in our pop-up seminar: “‘Roman is Alex,’ says a former OSF senior official, referring to Roman Roy, the sardonic failson in Succession. ‘Smart but fucking impossible and not particularly interested in the details.’”
After reading this, a nice tonic was this essay by James Kass, who is the director of KALW, the scrappy and cool public radio station in San Francisco. “What Expertise Do You Value?” he asks. “We value proximity to power, not proximity to community. We reward credentials, not lived experience….Expand your definition of expertise. Widen the circle. Listen harder. Invest deeper.
Not just in new ideas, but in the people who’ve been doing the work—quietly, persistently, and with brilliance—for decades.”
Another recommendation: the “Available now” filter in the Libby app. I have a zillion books on hold through my Berkeley Public Library account, and filtering for what I can borrow immediately has been a delightful way to mix up my reading. I just tore through Yellowface by
about publishing during peak Twitter, and the Vietnam War-era novel The Women by Kristen Hannah. Now I’m listening to Beartooth by Callen Wink, which The New York Times described as “a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount’s TV hit ‘Yellowstone'.” Searching for my next read in this way is a nice way to mix up my reading queue, and it feels like I’m winning one little battle in the war against algorithms having total control over my brain.
Until next week,
Anna
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So pleased to hear that Andrew is still there doing great work! He is among the folks I admire greatly for not giving in or giving up, despite the current political atmosphere in my beloved WV.