As an openly gay United States Representative, one would expect Barney Frank to come out in support of a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
Unfortunately, he has not.
In fact, it’s been quite the opposite: Frank said he’ll support an act excluding our trans allies. While people may have been surprised, the politico issued a press release yesterday reminding people that he’s played this game before…
Via Edge Boston:
[This] reminds me that there is a very specific prior example where many of us – including gay and lesbian people – specifically agreed to exclude us from an equality measure. The measure is the Equal Rights Amendment. There were efforts in the seventies – by that time of course gay and lesbian issues had come to the forefront – to explicitly include in equal rights amendments language that protected people against discrimination based on sexual orientation. That is, the amendments – federal and various state versions – prohibited discrimination based on sex, and people sought to add sexual orientation. I and others opposed that because we knew at the time that it would defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.
…
It was ratified to protect women against discrimination based on their gender with the explicit approval of gays and lesbians that we be left out, because we thought that protecting people against a very significant form of discrimination was worth doing, even though it didn’t protect everybody.
That passage, of course, was over three decades ago. A lot’s changed in those years. Franks politics, however, are not one of them.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Gregg
Saying that Frank does not “support” a fully inclusive ENDA, as you have done here, is misleading. He does support it and would love it to pass. Unfortunately, it cannot pass right now. So he is pragmatically pushing for a stripped down ENDA.
adamblast
Sorry to be so harsh, but misleading is a polite term for Queerty’s input in all this ENDA stuff. More accurate: obtuse, insulting, ignorant.
Gregg
True, adamblast. I can’t disagree with you.
Mr. B
Oh, the poor, poor middle-class gay white male. So disenfranchised–how dare those evil trans people fuck everything up for you? After all, it is about YOU YOU YOU, isn’t it, and they’re trying to make it about THEM THEM THEM. Shameful.
Because, you know, there are no gender-nonconforming people among the LGB population who could be affected by what’s being left out of ENDA.
If you really think the pared-down ENDA would help the majority of the LGB population (since you clearly don’t care about the Ts, because what on earth do you have in common with them), you really have been missing the big picture since day one. Just like your hero Barney Frank.
Lena Dahlstrom
Actually ERA _was never ratified_ because only 30 states voted to approve it and 38 states were needed. So besides the other points raised, excluding gays and lesbians wasn’t exactly a winning strategy….
Matt
Lena — I’m not sure that exclusion of gays and lesbians from ERA can be blamed for its failure to add the additional 8 states. More likely it passed as far as it did in part due to the exclusion (sadly, the general public’s tolerance levels seem to progress in with evolutionary slowness, rather than the zippy-quick intelligently-designed speed we might prefer in this case). So though an inclusive ERA, like an inclusive ENDA, would have made a powerful statement about human rights, it would ultimately be an even-more-losing one. I’ve lost my patience with Moral Victories since Gore lost; it’s probably time to suck up an actual victory or too.
hisurfer
Thanks Lena – I was close to wondering if I woke up in an alternate universe this morning.
I should also point out that “gender expression” isn’t the same as “transgender.” Flamers and butchies are not T (poor things don’t even get their own letter) but would also be excluded from the bill.
The bill which, we can’t remind you all enough, Bush has promised to veto.
Bill Perdue
Franks admission of his long, long record of selling us out on ERA and other questions is not exactly winning him any points.
His perspective rests on the faulty idea that Democrats, Republicans or the courts will grant us first class citizenship if we just wait long enough.
That viewpoint ignores the reality of politics. Democrats and Republicans cooperated in a bipartisan effort to give us DOMA, DADT and now, while we watch in outrage, they’re gutting ENDA. They’re tossing transsexuals under the bus and eviscerating ENDA even though they know that Bush will veto it.
Frank and Pelosi aren’t ‘worried about having enough Republican votes’ to pass ENDA; they’re pandering to Republicans and their fellow Democrats want to weaken ENDA for all of us because they’re in bed with businesses that benefit from paying us less.
These are the folks who jointly bust unions, cut social spending but ALWAYS approve war spending. Both Democrats and Republicans support Bush’s oil piracy, the partition of Iraq and the theft of Iraqi petro assets. Their bipartisan war has murdered nearly 700,000 Iraqis and 3828 GI’s have been killed and 27753 wounded as of October 17th. They voted to extend the war into Iran and applauded the Israeli bombing attack on Syria.
They oppose ending the harsh treatment of immigrant workers, they’re drifting towards accommodation with anti choice groups, and they jointly passed and toughened the anti constitutional Paytriot Act.
Two of the shrewdest comments ever made about the ‘bipartisan’ twin parties of bigotry came from our own Gore Vidal and ‘Deepthroat’.
Vidal said “We have no political parties. We’ve never had much of them — I mean the Democrats, the Republicans. We have one party — we have the party of essentially corporate America. It has two right wings, one called Democratic, one called Republican” (March 12th, 2003 on SBS Australia).
Deepthroat’s counsel, given to reporters tracing corrupt practices by Nixon applies equally to all policy makers of the Republican and Democratic Party and is legendary for being simplicity itself: “Follow the Money.â€
Mr. B
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Thank you, Hisurfer. That’s been my point all along. Too many LBG people are knee-jerkily blaming trans people for the rift, when they’re not the whole picture at all.