A Stitch in Haste

To review: The House has delayed a vote on the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (H.R. 2015) given evidence that the bill, which would extend anti-discrimination protection to sexual minorities, could not pass if it included the transgendered as a protected group. The initial response by Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank was to strip transgendered protection from the bill, but a broad chorus of opposition from gay rights groups (about 90 of them) caught the House leaders by surprise.

With that, let's clean out the aggregator:

--The Human Rights Campaign, after much delay, issued a split-the-baby press release sorta kinda opposing the no-T version of ENDA:

Therefore, we are not able to support, nor will we encourage Members of Congress to vote against, the newly introduced sexual orientation only bill.

Don't worry, I had to re-read it a few times too. Bottom line: "We don't like it, but we won't hate you if you vote for it." Real backbone there.

As is often the case with such "compromise" positions, no one was pleased — most comprehensive example here. HRC's only transgendered director has resigned in protest.

Meanwhile, some gay bloggers (finally) picked up on what I noted from the beginning: A warning from Lambda Legal that the revised ENDA does far more than simply "delete the T" —

In addition to the missing vital protections for transgender people on the job, this new bill also leaves out a key element to protect any employee, including lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who may not conform to their employer's idea of how a man or woman should look and act. This is a huge loophole through which employers sued for sexual orientation discrimination can claim that their conduct was actually based on gender expression, a type of discrimination that the new bill does not prohibit.

This version of ENDA states without qualification that refusal by employers to extend health insurance benefits to the domestic partners of their employees that are provided only to married couples cannot be considered sexual orientation discrimination. The old version at least provided that states and local governments could require that employees be provided domestic partner health insurance when such benefits are provided to spouses.

In the previous version of ENDA the religious exemptions had some limitations. The new version has a blanket exemption under which, for example, hospitals or universities run by faith-based groups can fire or refuse to hire people they think might be gay, lesbian or bisexual.

The second point is highly relevant given the increasingly popular maneuver by some employers to insist that state laws requiring equal treatment for same-sex couples are summarily pre-empted by federal ERISA (one example here). The third point is regrettable as well: a hospital or school, even a religiously sponsored hospital or school, is simply not a church and should not enjoy the legal exemptions that a church might reasonably deserve.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder why there is such urgency over the ENDA bills in the first place, given that any bill one way or the other would of course be vetoed by our current bigot-pandering president. Why not just wait until after the election, when Congress will be even more Democratic than it is now, and the bill then sent to the next (Democratic) president might actually be signed?

Stay tuned...